THE IRAQ INQUIRY

Having watched live nearly all of Peter Goldsmith's, Tony Blair's and Claire Short's testimony to the Iraq Inquiry, I feel that a number of things are gradually becoming clearer. One surprising feature was that the Attorney General's performance - dry. legalistic, pedantic - was by far the most interesting. Riveting even. Tony Blair is still overly concerned about the judgement of history, and waffled on far too often about 2010 and the threat from Iran; while Claire Short used her acerbic tongue to try to score revenge points against the man she clearly believes betrayed both the country and her personally.

1. The legal basis for the U.K.'s participation in the war hung by an incredibly slender thread. As late as February 2003, when the AG went to Washington, his view - which endorsed that of the Foreign Office's legal advisers - was that a second UN resolution was necessary. The Americans persuaded him to change his mind; but the key part of that process was their assertion that in private conversations with the French, the French had supposedly agreed with the American interpretation of the first resolution. Needless to say, the AG never asked the French for their version of the conversations, or indeed whether the conversations really had taken place. That despite the fact that France's official explanation of its voting for the first resolution specifically said that it did not believe that the first resolution had given a mandate for military action.

2. The Cabinet finally got the AG's legal advice at the beginning of March, just before the war started, and when the troops were already out in Kuwait awaiting the off. To put it mildly, that was cutting it pretty fine. Yet in presenting that advice the AG never alluded to his earlier view, and exactly how he had come to change his mind. That strikes me, as it struck Claire Short, as being "economical with the truth".

3. Tony Blair really was driven by an "if the US go, then we'll go with you" attitude. He dressed his policy up in different clothes, and was careful not to present it - publicly - as such. But the chance for glory was, in his eyes, one too good to miss.

4. The post-invasion planning was hopeless. None of the key players gave much of a thought to what would happen afterwards; and those who did were ignored or marginalised. The decision by the U.K. to allow itself in UN Resolution 1483 to be designated an Occupying Power, thereby taking joint and several responsibility with the Americans for everything that happened everywhere in Iraq post-invasion, was ludicrous, given the derisory resources available to DFID for reconstruction.

5. Parts of the U.K. establishment still suffer from a Great Power, "punch above our weight" mentality. Nearly a century after it ceased to be true, we have still not really accepted that we are a medium-sized country on the edge of a continent declining in relative importance. If the debacle in Iraq hastens that acceptance process, then one good thing will have come out of what otherwise appears to have been a sorry mess.

Walter Blotscher