I never doubted that Tony Blair thought he was doing the right thing. I said as much at the time. If there is one lesson from Chilcot, it is just how dangerous a powerful politician with convictions can be. The instinct to ask why you are right, not why you might be wrong, is understandable. That is why the checks and balances of good government are a pain. But they are necessary.
It is not acceptable to decide school meals policy without being clear what the evidence is, what the counter-evidence, who is taking the decision, and properly recording the reasons. When it comes to an invasion that, even in the best circumstances, was going to cost many lives, it cannot be justified. Yet that is the failure of process laid out in Chilcot’s summary.
I took no particular pleasure in re-reading (for the first time in 13 years) my resignation speech. It is true that my judgement that the war was pre-emptive, had too little international support, would worsen terrorism and make future international action more difficult were all proved right and were echoed in Chilcot. I still cannot be introduced to any audience without my resignation being mentioned, but I know there was a particular futility to resignation. None of us who did made any difference to the course of the war or the wider history. The question that has haunted ever since is: ‘Was there ever a moment when we could have made a difference?’
I was only a junior minister, but, before his death, I reviewed Robin Cook’s diaries, Point of Departure. What is striking, and confirmed by Chilcot, is that there never was a moment when the cabinet was given the collective opportunity to decide on war, or the conditions for war. That is what I find most unacceptable about the path to war. The power of conviction was used to defer collective decision-making until it was far too late – the day before the Commons vote. Meanwhile, other decisions were set in train that created their own war timetable.
Many good friends and ministerial colleagues shared my reservations but supported the war. They must speak for themselves, but I believe they too were let down by the failures in decision-making. Some of them confronted the difficult issue that I did not: if we all resigned our Labour government would have fallen. No one should ever have been put in that position.
My final thought is prompted by Blair’s response yesterday. The background to the Iraq war was the attacks of 9/11 and the pretext for getting rid of Saddam Hussein was to tackle terrorism. But his evil was unrelated to al-Qaida. By insisting still that the war had rational roots in that threat, rather than having created the conditions for Islamist terrorism to grow, he showed how few lessons have been learnt about the roots and dynamics of its growth that threatens us still.
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John Denham is a former cabinet minister. He tweets @JYDenham
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