The Iraq Inquiry (also referred to as the Chilcot Inquiry after its chairman, Sir John Chilcot) was a British public inquiry into the nation's role in the Iraq War. The inquiry was announced in 2009 by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and published in 2016 with a public statement by Chilcot.
On 6 July 2016, Sir John Chilcot announced the report's publication, more than seven years after the inquiry was announced. Usually referred to as the Chilcot report by the news media, the document stated that at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein did not pose an urgent threat to British interests, that intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction was presented with unwarranted certainty, that peaceful alternatives to war had not been exhausted, that the United Kingdom and the United States had undermined the authority of the United Nations Security Council, that the process of identifying the legal basis was "far from satisfactory", and that a war was unnecessary. The report was made available under an Open Government Licence.
Build-up
It was initially established by Prime Minister Gordon Brown that the Iraq Inquiry would be held in camera, excluding the public and press. However, the decision was later deferred to Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry chairman, who said that it was "essential to hold as much of the proceedings of the inquiry as possible in public". In July 2009, when the inquiry commenced, it was announced that the committee would be able to request any British document and call any British citizen to give evidence. In the week before the inquiry began hearing witnesses, a series of documents including military reports were leaked to a newspaper which appeared to show poor post-war planning and lack of provisions.
History
The inquiry was pursued by a committee of Privy Counsellors with broad terms of reference to consider Britain's involvement in Iraq between 2001 and 2009. It covered the run-up to the conflict, the subsequent military action and its aftermath to establish how decisions were made, to determine what happened and to identify lessons to ensure that, in a similar situation in future, the British government is equipped to respond in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country. The open sessions of the inquiry commenced on 24 November 2009 and concluded on 2 February 2011.
In 2012, the government vetoed the release to the inquiry of documents detailing minutes of Cabinet meetings in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Concurrently, the Foreign Office successfully appealed against a judge's ruling and blocked the disclosure of extracts of a conversation between George W. Bush and Tony Blair days before the invasion. The government stated that revealing this conversation would present a "significant danger" to British–American relations. The million-word report of the inquiry was due to be released to the public by 2014, but difficult negotiations were continuing with the United States over the publication of documents.
The Lord-in-waiting Lord Wallace of Saltaire said on behalf of the government that it would be "inappropriate" to publish the report in the months leading up to the next general election in 2015. In August, it transpired that the Report would in any event be further delayed, possibly into 2016, due to the legal requirement of "Maxwellisation", allowing any person who is to be criticised a fair opportunity to comment on a draft prior to finalisation and publication. Chilcot wrote a letter to David Cameron in October 2015, stating that the text of the report could be complete by April 2016, and proposing a release date in June or July 2016.
Committee members
The committee of inquiry, the members of which were chosen by Gordon Brown, comprised:
- Sir John Chilcot (chairman), a career diplomat and senior civil servant who was previously a member of the Butler Review;
- Sir Lawrence Freedman, a military historian, and Professor of War Studies at King's College London. His memo outlining five tests for military intervention was used by Tony Blair in drafting his Chicago foreign policy speech;
- Sir Martin Gilbert (died 3 February 2015), a historian who supported the invasion of Iraq and claimed in 2004 that George W. Bush and Blair may one day "join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill";
- Sir Roderic Lyne, former Ambassador to Russia and to the United Nations in Geneva, previously served as private secretary to Prime Minister John Major; and
- Baroness Prashar, a crossbencher, member of the UK Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights, and the chairwoman of the Judicial Appointments Commission.
The committee also received secretarial support during proceedings from Margaret Aldred.
Advisors to the committee
- General Sir Roger Wheeler, former Chief of the General Staff and Commander in Chief Land Forces.
- Dame Rosalyn Higgins, former President of the International Court of Justice.
Proceedings
When the inquiry was announced on 15 June 2009 by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, it was initially announced that proceedings would take place in private, a decision which was subsequently reversed after receiving criticism in the media and the House of Commons.
The inquiry commenced in July 2009, with public hearings commencing on 24 November 2009 with Peter Ricketts, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee at the time of the invasion of Iraq, as the first witness. Opening the proceedings, Sir John Chilcot announced that the inquiry was not seeking to apportion blame but that it would "get to the heart of what happened" and would not "shy away" from making criticism where it was justified. The commission resumed its hearings in January 2011 with the former prime minister, Tony Blair as its prime witness.
29 October Protocol
On 29 October 2009, HM Government published a Protocol in agreement with the Iraq Inquiry on the treatment of sensitive written and electronic information. Evidence which will not be made available to the public includes anything likely to:
- a) cause harm or damage to the public interest, guided by the normal and established principles under which the balance of public interest is determined on grounds of public interest immunity in proceedings in England and Wales, including, but not limited to,
- i) national security, defence interests or international relations;
- ii) the economic interests of the United Kingdom or of any part of the United Kingdom;
- b) endanger the life of an individual or otherwise risk serious harm to an individual;
- c) make public commercially sensitive information;
- d) breach the principle of legal professional privilege (LPP);
- e) prejudice, in the case of legal advice (following any voluntary waiver of LPP) rather than material facts, the position of HMG in relation to ongoing legal proceedings;
- f) breach the rules of law which would apply in proceedings in England and Wales under the provisions of Section 17 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000;
- g) breach the rules of law applicable to the disclosure of information by the Security Service, SIS or GCHQ, the third party rule governing non-disclosure of intelligence material or other commitments or understandings governing the release of sensitive information;
- h) breach the Data Protection Act 1998; or
- i) prejudice the course or outcome of any ongoing statutory or criminal inquiry into matters relating to the information proposed for release.
Witnesses
The inquiry heard evidence from a variety of witnesses, such as politicians, including several cabinet ministers at the time of the invasion; senior civil servants, including lawyers and intelligence chiefs; diplomats, mostly composed of British ambassadors to Iraq and the United States; and high-ranking military officers including former Chiefs of the General Staff and Chiefs of the Defence Staff as well as senior operational commanders.
The inquiry heard mostly from civil servants, intelligence and security officials, diplomats and military officers from the first public hearings up until it recessed for Christmas. Key witnesses included Sir Christopher Meyer, former ambassador to the United States; Admiral Lord Boyce, former Chief of the Defence Staff; Sir John Scarlett, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service; Major-General Tim Cross, the most senior British officer on the ground in the aftermath of the invasion; and Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge, overall commander of British forces in the invasion.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was publicly questioned by the enquiry on 29 January 2010, and again on 21 January 2011. On both of these occasions protests took place outside the conference centre. Because of widespread public interest in Blair's evidence, public access to the hearings had to be allocated by lottery. Special dispensations to attend were allocated to those whose close family were casualties of the war, some of whom shouted angry accusations at Blair during his second appearance.
From the inquiry's resumption in January 2010, it heard predominantly from politicians and former government officials, including Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's director of communications and on 2 February 2010, then-Secretary of State for International Development Clare Short, when she repeatedly criticised Blair, Attorney General Peter Goldsmith and others in the UK Government for what she maintained was deceiving her and other MPs in an attempt to obtain consent for the invasion of Iraq.
Gordon Brown had to retract his claim that spending on defence rose every year during the Iraq war, as this was found not to have been the case.
Following a recess to avoid influencing the general election, the inquiry resumed public hearings on 29 June 2010. The first witness was Douglas Brand, chief police adviser to the Iraqi Interior Ministry from 2003 to 2005.
The final witness in the public hearings, heard on 2 February 2011, was Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary from 2001 to 2006.
Publication
The Inquiry's final report was published on 6 July 2016. Comprising 2.6 million words in 12 volumes, plus an executive summary, a physical copy was priced at £767. Bereaved families received a free copy. It was also published online.
The report was made available under the Open Government Licence v3.0, although this excluded material supplied by third parties.
Findings
The report – described by BBC News as "damning", by The Guardian as a "crushing verdict", and by The Telegraph as "scathing" – was broadly critical of the actions of the British government and military in making the case for the war, in tactics and in planning for the aftermath of the Iraq War. Richard Norton-Taylor of The Guardian wrote that the report "could hardly be more damning" of Tony Blair and "was an unprecedented, devastating indictment of how a prime minister was allowed to make decisions by discarding all pretence at cabinet government, subverting the intelligence agencies, and making exaggerated claims about threats to Britain's national security".
Case for war was deficient
The report found that in the run-up to the war, peaceful diplomatic options to avoid instability and WMD proliferation had not been exhausted, and that the war was therefore "not a last resort". Intervention might have become necessary later, but at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein did not pose an immediate threat and the majority of the UN Security Council supported the continuation of UN weapons inspections and monitoring.
The report does not question Blair's personal belief that there was a case for war, only the way he presented the evidence that he had. The report cleared the Prime Minister's Office of influencing the Iraq Dossier (the "Dodgy Dossier"), which contained the claim that Iraq possessed the ability to launch WMD within 45 minutes, and instead laid the blame for the weaknesses in its evidence on the Joint Intelligence Committee.
More specifically, the report blamed Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI6) head Richard Dearlove who presented so-called "hot" intelligence about alleged weapons of mass destruction provided by an Iraqi with "phenomenal access" to high levels in the Iraqi government directly to Blair, without first confirming its accuracy. The investigators found that references to this intelligence in government reports were over-certain and did not adequately stress uncertainties and nuance. The informant was later found to have been lying. The Chilcot report states that "personal intervention [by Dearlove] and its urgency gave added weight to a report that had not been properly evaluated and would have coloured the perception of ministers and senior officials". The day after the report was published, Blair conceded that he should have challenged such intelligence reports before relying on them to justify military action in Iraq.