Truth won’t come today, but wisdom might come tomorrow

The chances of a true revelation are remote, but that isn't the point

BY the time this post appears, Tony Blair, Prime Minister during the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, will be 90 minutes into his six-hour evidence session before the Chilcot Inquiry. To anoraks, this promises to be a piece of political theatre par excellence. To an even smaller cohort of journalists, academics, lawyers and pundits, its every minute will be pored over for subtle inflections, body language and differences in tone. Those who expect the former PM to be skewered by a well-chosen question, goaded into deviation from previous statements, or coaxed into either confession or epiphany are, however, likely to be disappointed. This is a well travelled road for today’s witness.

Virtually everyone who has bothered to think about Iraq must surely now have arrived at their own conclusion about why Blair and his government did what they did. Some have long felt that military action was wrong, that the public were deceived, that the war was illegal and that what followed was an avoidable human catastrophe. Others remain supportive of the decision to go to war, and of the necessity of removing Saddam (though perhaps not of the subsequent attempts at reconstruction). Finally, a great many people have changed their mind, especially when the facts about the former dictator’s possession of WMD became clear. Whichever the case, the Chilcot Inquiry seems most unlikely to change anyone’s opinion further.

But we ignore this, believing that such an enterprise will get to a truth that has so far eluded us, and will settle the argument in the process. This is a forlorn hope. Absent some spectacular confession, or the discovery of conclusive documentary evidence, we are surely headed for yet another report whose premise, findings and conclusions will be further wrangled over in minute detail. Truth about something this big just does not come that neatly packaged.

And yet, inquiries into major life-and-death decisions do matter. They gather all the facts and all the testimonies in one place, systematically and on the same basis. They capture, as comprehensively as it is possible to do, the minds of those who took the decisions, and their reactions to what they did. For all the above reasons, this does not matter to nearly everyone tuning in today. The conclusions are important to them, so as to support their already-formed views and add grist to the mill. But to future scholars and decision-makers – and hence the people they teach and govern – this inquiry will be vital. The Chilcot Inquiry, like most others such inquiries, will pass into popular obscurity soon enough. But its work could, if only indirectly, guide the hand of some future occupant of No.10. Even Tony Blair would surely admit that some different actions could have improved some of the outcomes, saving some lives or averting more destruction.