No end of a lesson | 22 March 2008

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, Gordon Brown is right to concede the need for a full-scale inquiry into the war. He is wrong, however, to postpone the investigation on the grounds that it might ‘divert attention from supporting Iraq’s development as a secure and stable country’. There have already been four limited inquiries into various aspects of the conflict and its aftermath. What is required is an independent and unsparing inquisition that examines the war in its totality and tries comprehensively to address public disquiet about this most divisive and controversial of interventions.

Self-evidently, the mere fact that the insurgency is still raging is a measure of failure. Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, spoke with admirable candour on the Andrew Marr Show last Sunday, admitting that ‘we were kind of preparing for the wrong sort of aftermath… what we hadn’t, in my view, really thought through was the long-term nature of this’.