Miranda Husain

The inquiry surely demonstrates Downing Street’s unwavering commitment to grassroots democracy, while silencing those who claim that Britons are, perhaps, still unready for democracy, given their spectacular re-election of the Blair Witch Project two years after the fall of the Saddam regime

So, here we have it. A decade in power and the legacy is still being reinforced, if not redefined.

And while he may not have been a chap of the officer-and-gentleman variety, he was certainly of the dove-among-hawks sort. Or at least that was the public façade. The subliminal undertone being that he had been thrust into a war of nerves. That if he did not deliver, the Americans would go ahead without him and the neo-con fundos would be free to fly over the cuckoo’s nest. So, he sexed up his banter with talk of ‘enlightened intervention’.

And, of course, he beseeched moral understanding. He had no option but to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Washington. Failure would result in his country being bombed back to the Stone Age, at least in terms of a shattered political alliance with the Texan cowboy. Thus he sent the army to fight the bogeyman in a land not under his government’s writ.

But, wait. Hold your horses. This cavalier is not that Pakistani hero combatant; you know, the one whose fate was to be typecast in the role of faithful mutt to the US war machine. Au contraire. The man in this particular question is the other lapdog. That most agreeable of pedigree chums: the British poodle.

Yes, folks. Nearly three years after hanging up the keys of power and seven long years on from his iconoclastic most excellent Iraq misadventure and Mr Tony Blair is back. By popular demand.

That today he no longer cares to rationalise his actions is of no matter. The state apparatus is designed to protect its own.

Consider. The Chilcot Inquiry, which kicked off last November, is Britain’s third probe into Operation Regime Change Iraq. And this time, the powers that be would have us believe that Britain’s former warmongering prime minister sits firmly in transparency’s hot seat. That this is democracy in motion and we are all wired for sound.

After all, just look how far the government has gone to underscore its outward willingness to ponder its chequered past — mid-2001-July 2009 in this case. So dedicated is it to learning from its mistakes that it has hesitated not in launching the investigation just months before the forthcoming general elections. Surely this demonstrates Downing Street’s unwavering commitment to grassroots democracy, while silencing those who claim that Britons are, perhaps, still unready for democracy, given their spectacular re-election of the Blair Witch Project two years after the fall of the Saddam regime.

Yet, it must be said that the devil lies not always in the detail. As this case proves, it sometimes rests in the bleedin’ obvious.

The Chilcot Inquiry, like the Hutton and Butler Inquiries before it, is a government-launched probe. Meaning that the very regime that waged the war, despite the absence of a second UN resolution on the use of force, is charged with dictating the state of play. And just in case there remains any doubt as to the insolent hubris of Blair and his cohorts — including the opposition Conservatives who had fully supported the military intervention — the inquiry’s findings will not be made public until after Election Day.

When viewed through this prism of blatant whitewashing, the severely limited scope of the probe should come as no surprise. As an inquiry, it lacks the additional and, some say, necessary dimension of putting Mr Blair on trial. It therefore renders immediately superfluous the question of either prosecution or acquittal from war crime charges. This likely explains why the Chilcot Inquiry has shamelessly failed to include a single judge or lawyer on its five-member panel.

But it does not explain some of the, frankly, outlandish responses from certain quarters of the British media. The Guardian’s Polly Tonybee actually goes as far as to welcome the inquiry’s limits: “Calling in judges to override the decisions of a democratically elected government backed by parliament is a dangerous road, leading to the demise of politics.” Yet this foolhardy desire to subjugate the rule of law to heads of state and cabinets leads us to a system of elective dictatorship, as succinctly termed by George Monbiot.

In fact, Blair’s Britain has long embraced the dark side of the moon. It began with the 1999 Nato-led ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo. Even the horrors of the 2005 London bombings proved insufficient to deter Downing Street. Just one year later and Britain was allowing US planes — transporting arms to the Israeli army during the Lebanon-Israeli war — to refuel in Scotland. And this is to say nothing of Britain’s involvement in CIA rendition programmes.

The problem of the frustratingly superficial Chilcot Inquiry is that it does not address any of this. It simply paves the way for the regime to carry on as before. No accountability required. What is needed is a truly enlightened intervention: a trial by international lawyers in an international court. It is the only way that Mr Blair will be forced to finish what he so recklessly started. And as for Ms Tonybee and her ilk, maybe they would do well to take a few supremacy-of-law pointers from Pakistan’s fledgling lawyers’ movement.

And, finally, a disclaimer of sorts: as a British national, I, for one, intend to vote in this year’s elections. I have, after all, heard it said that democracy is the best revenge.

The writer is a Lahore-based freelance journalist and is currently working on her first novel. She can be reached at humeiwei@hotmail.com