What’s the point of the Chilcot inquiry? It can’t change the past

The Chilcot Inquiry has been set up to consider “the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned.”

While the inquiry seems to have noble aims in changing British behaviour in comparable future situations, will it really do any good?

The disputed reasons for going to war, rumours of a 2002 secret deal between Blair and Bush, with Blair promising British support for a war in Iraq - all of these are to be examined. Blair has testified we would have gone to war on other arguments had Weapons of Mass Distructions not been purported to exist.

This shows that if a leader wants a war he will go about getting one, and this line of inquiry will only shed light on the flimsy nature of one excuse chosen out of the miasma of potential justifications that existed. What this does show is that it is easy for a politician, and a retired one at that, to be contrite when there no longer exists a threat to their position.

As to the strategy followed by the British in Iraq, the testimony given by military heads shows the invasion replete with amateur mistakes including a £1 billion cut in defence spending only nine months after the commencement of the invasion, leaving all but a garrision of 200 troops to protect Basra, a city of 1.3 million in 2006.

Surely these mistakes are not nuanced tactical miscalculations but a testament to either folly or hubris, a human element no amount of inquiry will excise from our natures?

It is not as if reports of under-spending, overconfidence and lazy planning have not appeared before; we’ve seen the UN foul-up in Rwanda 1994 and the US spooked out of Somalia in 1993 after a battle gone wrong. These failed not because of a misplaced strategy but because of a fundamental (and maybe wilful) ignorance of the situation at hand.

Every war and every country is different - running Iraq like Vietnam did not help this time, nor will the perpetrators of the next war who conduct themselves as they did in Iraq be likely to gain victory in similar ways to those in Iraq.

To quote Jack Straw quoting Soren Kierkegaard, “Life can only be understood backwards, it has to be lived forward.” Unfortunately precedent shows that while we can look backward on this time and point out some obvious mistakes the future remains a shifting ocean in an undiscovered country.