Publish Chilcot and be damned,

How much gory detail do we need the Iraq war inquiry to publish?

Iraq was a grand folly, but the official report must still observe the boundary between privacy and disclosure

Simon Jenkins

Publish Chilcot and be damned, by all means, but which Chilcot? Whitehall's inability to untwist its knickers over Gordon Brown's inquiry into Tony Blair's war in Iraq has become farcical. The report was ready four years ago, yet David Cameron claims he cannot order publication as it is "independent". Yet he, or perhaps those murkily in his employ, are stalling it by demanding it be censored, which hardly spells independence.

This raises the question of whether we really need the gory detail of what Blair said to George Bush, the apparent bone of contention, over a decade ago. It may be true to history, but most people have lost all interest. Meanwhile, as Yossarian said in Catch-22, censorship can bring imagination and spice to banality. Who cares if Blair said one night at Camp David, "Oh George, we in Britain really want to back you", when we might read, in a redacted report, "Oh George, we in Britain really want to **** you."

I snoozed through Chilcot's public sessions all those years ago and decided they could be of interest only to PhD students – now students of ancient history. The intention was to make those involved render some sort of account for what was clearly a mistake. But they have long passed on. Their conviction is spent. They are lost in their memoir-age and the body politic has other fish to fry.

That Iraq was grand folly is now a truism. It was war declared on a foreign state on the basis of mendacious information. A cabal of rightwing American fanatics around Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld persuaded a once non-interventionist Bush to go to war. Drunk on the Afghan "mission accomplished", he agreed.

That a Labour Britain should go along with them was not so much outrageous as bizarre. Some diplomatic support was useful to America, but the sending of military assistance was trivial and insignificant. Blair, who had tried to curb US belligerence after 9/11, suddenly craved the approval of the macho hawks around Bush. "With you all the way, George," was the leitmotif of his dealings with Washington at the time.

There is no secret in any of this. My shelf groans with more than 40 books on the subject, with titles such as State of Denial; The War Within; Losing Iraq; Blair's Wars; Lies, Damned Lies and Iraq; End Game. Anyone seeking a blow-by-blow of the "cojones summits" at Camp David and Crawford need only plough through Bob Woodward'sPlan of Attack.

As far as Britain was concerned, Iraq was Blair's war. But he is now a tragi-comic figure, touring luxury hotels and touting for business from dictators, droning on that he is "glad I got rid of Saddam". He will never show the slightest remorse. Chilcot offered one moment of black theatre when Blair declared his innocence and fled sweating from the inquiry room protected by detectives from a cursing audience.

The real scandal of Britain-in-Iraq was the pusillanimity of Blair's cabinet, most of whom have since pretended they really opposed the war, claiming to have been browbeaten by Alastair Campbell's Mephistophelean warmongering. Only the foreign secretary, Robin Cook, resigned, while the Commons roared off to battle on a lie. An entire political class played lickspittle to American neoimperialism. At a cost of a trillion dollars, a quarter of a million Iraqis died, along with 179 British soldiers.

The war turned a nasty, stable dictatorship that killed people into a nasty, unstable one that killed far more. The lessons of Iraq are rehearsed over and over again, some learned, some not. Iraq did play a part in the Commons voting against Cameron's eagerness for war with Syria last August.

But it did not need Chilcot, censored or uncensored, to do that. The one glaring lesson was that politicians on warpaths should never, ever, be trusted to tell the truth or retain a sense of proportion. That lesson is probably never learned.

I have some sympathy for the alleged reason for Chilcot's delay: Blair's reluctance to have his private exchanges see the light of day, and Washington's similar reluctance, on pain of Britain never being trusted with a White House confidence again. There must be a degree of secrecy between those in high office, or at least an agreed lapse before records are disclosed. Otherwise no one will dare tell truth to power, and power will be ever more untrammelled.

In the 1990s secret dealings between London and the IRA were in the interests of peace. So too were the "walks in the woods" of nuclear disarmers in the 1980s. Washington's 1987 Iran-Contra scandal showed how checks on power collapse when "freedom of information" drives conspirators into secret back channels. That is the path to sofa government. If records are not secret, secrecy will not die, just records.

Defining the boundary between privacy and disclosure is becoming the greatest challenge of the electronic age, and remains elusive. Not a week passes without the boundary being tested – from a Google archive to a Prince of Wales gaffe, MPs expenses to aerospace bribes, eBay customers to Facebook victims, Julian Assange to Edward Snowden.

Modern government, fierce in defence of its own secrets, has become a grotesque thief of the secrets of others. Chilcot now has stumbled over this border. I am sure it has juicy bits we would all love to read. But a ship can be spoilt for a ha'porth of tar. We know what Chilcot says. Let us have the redacted report, and we can all enjoy writing in the blanks.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/22/how-much-detail-iraq-war-inquiry-publish