The World

By James Blitz, the FT’s defence and diplomatic editor

Britain’s official  inquiry into the Iraq war begins today, amid much speculation that it will be a “whitewash”. One of the main reasons for this is that Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry chairman, is the very model of a British civil servant and a man who looks unlikely to wield the knife when it comes to an inquiry of this sort. Besides, argue the critics, the other members of the inquiry team have all been selected by Downing Street, suggesting to some that they are not truly independent and likely to pull their punches.

I’m not so sure about this. Having covered the four previous inquiries into the Iraq war, I’d beware of making any prediction on the outcome of this one. One thing I do know: the media has misjudged what the eventual outcome of all the previous Iraq inquiries would be and I expect will do the same again this time.

Take the 2003-04 Hutton inquiry into the death of weapons scientist Dr David Kelly. There was a near universal assumption in the British media when the inquiry began in the autumn of 2003 that it would destroy Tony Blair. In fact, Hutton  did the exact opposite. His inquiry almost completely exonerated Blair over the handling of the Kelly affair but instead found heavily against the BBC over aspects of its reporting -  leading to the dismissal of the two leading figures in the BBC.

Exactly the opposite then happened with  Lord Butler’s inquiry into the way the Blair government had used intelligence on Iraq ahead of the invasion. The widespread media assumption when Butler began his work in February 2004 was his report would be a “whitewash” because he was a civil service mandarin. Actually, of all the Iraq inquiries, it was the one that Blair feared the most. Lord Butler, a former civil service chief, made tough criticisms of the way the Blair government presented the argument ahead of the war that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, saying he ignored  warnings that UK intelligence was imprecise and uncertain. Butler also made tough criticisms of Blair’s penchant for “sofa government”, criticising the way he failed to use the civil service system properly.

So I’m wary of predicting the outcome of Chilcot. Frankly, this inquiry  is so wide in its remit -covering the period from 2001-09 – that someone is bound to get hurt in the end. But who will it be ? If I had to make a guess, I’d say the most damning criticism in the end will be over the lack of planning by the UK for the war. All the other high-profile stuff – legality of the invasion, use of intelligence  – has been looked at in detail. But the story of how the Blair government blindly assumed in 2002 and early 2003 that Washington would manage the post-invasion aftermath has never been told in its full detail.