Britain Begins Hearings in Iraq War Inquiry

Britain Begins Hearings in Iraq War Inquiry
By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: November 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/world/europe/25britain.html?ref=global-home


LONDON — After years of delay and dispute, a British inquiry began hearings Tuesday into the Iraq war, a conflict that stirred deep opposition here as former Prime Minister Tony Blair broke ranks with major European allies to join the United States as its leading ally in the 2003 invasion.

“We want to establish a clear understanding of the various core elements of the U.K.’s involvement in Iraq, and how these developed over time,” the head of the inquiry, Sir John Chilcot, formerly the highest-ranking civil servant in the Northern Ireland Office, said in an opening statement. “What we are committed to, and what the British general public can expect from us, is a guarantee to be thorough, impartial, objective and fair.”

“No one is on trial here,” Sir John said. “We cannot determine guilt or innocence.”

“But I make a commitment that, once we get to our final report, we will not shy away from making criticisms where they are warranted.”

Britain’s military role in the war stretched from the deployment in 2003 of around 45,000 military personnel, the second largest contingent after America’s, to the final withdrawal of British troops last July. The conflict claimed the lives of 179 British military personnel members.

Mr. Blair’s support for the war and his close ties to President George W. Bush had far-reaching political and diplomatic repercussions. The conflict led to charges that Mr. Blair and his supporters had misled the public into believing that Saddam Hussein controlled an armory of unconventional weapons. No such weapons were found after the invasion.

The unpopularity of the war — and its impact on Mr. Blair’s once glittery image among British voters — contributed to his ouster by Prime Minister Gordon Brown two years ago.

The inquiry is expected to last at least 18 months, beginning with testimony from some of the most powerful figures involved in Britain’s decision to join the invasion, including Mr. Blair. It is not clear when Mr. Blair will testify.

Critics have said that Mr. Brown’s choice of a government insider to head the inquiry has doomed it to becoming a “whitewash.”

The hearings opened Tuesday with testimony from high-ranking officials who said that, as early as 2001, some figures in Washington had been talking of “regime change” to depose Saddam Hussein, although they said that was not British policy at the time.

Indeed, as the war approached, Mr. Blair publicly defined British aims as disarming the Iraqi regime of unconventional weapons. Weeks before the invasion, however, he spoke of “the moral case for removing Saddam.” In March 2003, the White House said it was seeking “disarmament and regime change.”

Sir Peter Ricketts, head of a senior intelligence panel in 2001, said that, at the time, the policy of “containment” of Mr. Hussein was failing on three fronts — sanctions, including an arms embargo; efforts to secure the return of United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq; and the imposition of “no fly” zones patrolled by allied aircraft in the north and south of the country.

Sir William Patey, who was head of the Middle East Department at the British Foreign Office, said that in February 2001, after the Bush administration took office, British diplomats heard American officials talking about deposing Mr. Hussein’s government. “We were aware of these drum beats from Washington and internally we discussed it,” he said. “Our policy was to stay away from that.”

“We didn’t think Saddam Hussein was a good thing, and it would be great if he went, but we didn’t have an explicit policy for trying to get rid of him,” Sir William said.

Some of the most explosive revelations are expected to come from the inquiry’s power to summon, and to publish where it chooses, official documents like those disclosed Monday by The Daily Telegraph, based on confidential interviews with British officers returning from Iraq in the first year after the invasion.

Partial transcripts of the interviews in the paper suggested that strains between the allies, though known to some degree at the time, were more severe than previously acknowledged.

The Telegraph’s report revealed that British officers’ refusal to carry out American orders resulted in a formal State Department rebuke in 2004 to Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Sir David Manning.

The newspaper quoted the British commander in southern Iraq at the time, Maj. Gen. Andrew Stewart, as saying he spent “a significant amount of my time ‘consenting and evading’ U.S. orders” to take military action against a powerful Shiite militia in the south, and engaging in negotiation instead.

The Chilcot inquiry follows two earlier, narrower investigations of the war, the last completed only 16 months after American and British forces invaded Iraq in March 2003. Those inquiries were widely judged in Britain to have given the Blair government too easy a passage on the war.

The first inquiry, in 2003, looked into the death of David Kelly, a British weapons expert who committed suicide after the Blair government identified him as the source for a BBC report that accused the government of inflating intelligence reports on Saddam Hussein’s supposed stockpile of chemical and biological weapons in the prelude to the war. The inquiry, by Lord Hutton, a senior judge, found Mr. Blair and his officials blameless.

A second inquiry, by Lord Butler, a former cabinet secretary, investigated the Blair government’s uses of intelligence in justifying British involvement in the war. The inquiry found that that “more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear,” and that the government’s judgments had stretched available intelligence “to the outer limits.”

John F. Burns reported from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting from Washington.