As Basra slid towards hell, Blair looked the other way

There has always been a faction of the Labour party that wanted Tony Blair in the dock for the Iraq war — no matter how pointless it would be. This was the sole purpose of the Chilcot inquiry. Gordon Brown agreed to it simply to assuage his backbenchers, and the whole exercise was intended to be more a mischievous distraction than an inquisition. But almost by accident, the inquiry has exposed the real scandal of Iraq: the appalling mismanagement of the war and the defeat of the British army, which left the people of Basra to the death squads.

The WMD have become weapons of mass distraction. Mr Blair spent years answering questions about the case for war in Iraq, but he has answered far too few questions about the conduct of that war. No British journalist was based in the British-controlled south of Iraq, and so information about the situation there was sparse.