I never really saw the point of the Chilcot Inquiry and nothing that has happened in the years since it first sat has persuaded me I was wrong to think it liable to prove a waste of time, effort and money.
Dear old Peter Oborne pops up in today’s Telegraph to confirm the good sense of these suspicions. Chilcot, you see, is most unlikely to satisfy Tony Blair’s critics, far less provide the “smoking gun” proving that the Iraq War was a stitched-up, born-again conspiracy promoted by George W Bush and eagerly, even slavishly, supported by Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.
This is not an argument about truth. If Chilcot fails to deliver a report confirming the existence of this kind of plot then this will be taken as proof that plot really existed. Nothing will persuade the Blair-is-a-war-criminal crowd otherwise. If Chilcot produces a report damning Blair then that’s a Good Thing and an obvious statement of obvious truths; should he fail to do so then that’s evidence the conspiracy remains so vast and so heinous that the truth must still be suppressed, no matter the cost.
Which is why, as I say, the Chilcot Inquiry cannot satisfy the Blair-haters any more than the three previous inquiries into the war did so.
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