Comment: An open letter to John Chilcot
Amid rumours that John Chilcot is facing pressure to water down the findings of his inquiry into the Iraq war, Richard Heller writes to him encouraging him to stand firm.
Rt Hon Sir John Chilcot GCB
Chairman of the inquiry into the Iraq War
Eleven Remembrance Sundays have passed since the Iraq war, but its victims still await any measured, independent and authoritative conclusion on whether their sacrifices were necessary. Your inquiry, which should have provided this, has been delayed by the Cabinet secretary's refusal (supported by the government) to allow the public release of conversations between Tony Blair and George Bush, which it regards as essential evidence to support its conclusions.
I suggest a simple remedy for this impasse: publish your conclusions without publishing the detailed evidence. Make a bare reference to it, say that you have studied it in full and then state the conclusions which your inquiry has drawn from it. If those conclusions were critical of Tony Blair (as media reports have suggested) he might complain that this procedure was unfair to them. It is worth anticipating such a complaint.
Tony Blair, and any other others criticised, would be given a sight of your conclusions in draft and the specific evidence on which you relied, and have the opportunity to challenge them. At worst, he and they would face additional public criticism and loss of reputation. Contrast their position with that of the people deprived of liberties, detained or deported on the basis of secret evidence which they could not see or challenge – under legislation introduced by Tony Blair's government. Ministers and public servants who sanction the use of secret evidence against others are ill qualified to protest if, for once, it is used against them.
Further delay is now inevitable to allow those criticised the chance to object, and then for the inquiry to deliberate on those objections. Is there any reason why you should not publish their objections alongside your criticisms? That procedure would inform the public and give them a chance to decide who is right.
Apart from potential victims of criticism, I have heard persistent rumours that your inquiry is being pressured from other sources to water down its conclusions. Again, you have a simple remedy, although it may take strong nerves. Make clear in private that you will not publish any report at all if you do not have complete freedom to reach your collective judgment.
I hope especially that you and your team will resist any pressure to deflect analysis away from individuals and into the safer, abstract territory of process and systems. People make decisions, not processes or systems, and in any event, people decide what processes and systems are used to reach decisions and follow them through. Good people can make a bad system work, and bad or weak people can make terrible decisions even though they operate in a model system or process. As Sir Martin Gilbert would confirm to you, Winston Churchill's decision-making system in the Second World War was irregular and often capricious. It would be condemned fiercely (and expensively) by any contemporary management consultant. His system sometimes produced giant errors. But Churchill was still a genius, he inspired talented and dedicated men and women to make his system work and he did win the war.
Everything done before and during the Iraq war and occupation was done on the orders of people and your inquiry cannot escape a judgment on whether those people could or should have acted differently.
Since the Iraq war, immense attention has been focused (not least by the man himself) into whether Tony Blair acted in good faith in presenting the case for British involvement. I hope that your inquiry will not spend too much time on this. It is more important to determine whether or not he made good decisions about Iraq.
Many bad decisions are made in good faith by people who sincerely believed that they were doing the right thing. The surgeon who put his knife in the wrong place, and the air traffic controller who gave the wrong instructions to a pilot may have acted in perfect good faith but they can still be convicted of manslaughter if they fell below the standards of competence and diligence expected in their profession. I hope that your inquiry will apply that kind of test about the decision-makers on Iraq.
For that, of course, it will need to make some judgments about the war itself and the occupation. Was the war necessary and lawful? Even if it was, was it necessary for our country to take part in it and in the subsequent occupation? Did that occupation meet the legal standards required of conquering powers and the goals which were set by our country and the United States in their claims to be liberating the people of Iraq? Did our country derive any benefits from taking part in the war and occupation and how did these balance the sacrifices entailed, particularly those sustained by our forces and their families?
Your inquiry is totally free to conclude that the war and occupation were necessary and a success for our country and the Iraqis, and that all those concerned deserve public thanks for their efforts. However, if it concludes differently it will need to assess why bad decisions were made. Were there people in power who tried to resist them, and why did they fail? On this point, it would be very valuable for your inquiry to assess whether anyone involved in the decision-making process has received any recognition or reward for forming the right view on Iraq, or whether anyone has suffered any penalty for forming the wrong view or colluding with it. This would go some way to addressing an issue of wide public concern, which also emerged forcibly over the banking crash.
A huge weight of public expectation lies on your inquiry and each day of delay widens the fear of public disappointment. It will never satisfy partisans within the Iraq debate, but the wider public simply wants assurance that the Iraq war has at last been held up to the light. I therefore hope that the inquiry will be published at the earliest opportunity and that it will say exactly and only what your members want it to say.
Richard Heller
Richard Heller was formerly political adviser to Denis Healey and Gerald Kaufman. He has been a professional speechwriter for over thirty years and is the author of standard manual High Impact Speeches (published by Prentice Hall Business).
The opinions in politics.co.uk's Comment and Analysis section are those of the author and are no reflection of the views of the website or its owners.
