To give the Chilcot inquiry contemporary relevance, it should extend its brief to cover British military interventions, both small and large scale, conducted subsequent to Iraq but along very much the same lines. Otherwise, the traditional British court of inquiry, so brazenly designed to get the establishment off the hook, will become one more colourful relic of Britain’s past, like Beefeaters or clog dancing.
The agreement of Sir John Chilcot and Sir Jeremy Heywood to censor the #Bush-#Blair papers comes just as President Obama was spelling out to cadets at West Point his thoughts about America’s role in the world. His speech, at least, had the advantage of looking with attempted realism at contemporary events, such as the civil war in Syria, which David Cameron and William Hague were so willing to join in lock-step with the US last year – until blocked by Parliament which had been soured by past disasters.
Obama has considered seriously how the world is changing, most especially in Syria, where he said that “as the Syrian civil war spills across borders, the capacity of battle-hardened extremist groups to come after us only increases”. He noted that a new strategy was needed because “today’s principal threat no longer comes from a centralized al-Qa’ida leadership. Instead it comes from decentralised al-Qa’ida affiliates.”
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Obama sees the problem, but his prescription of what to do is only going to exacerbate it. He will avoid direct US military action, but will outsource support for the rebels – now too toxic for the US to arm directly – to countries such as Turkey, across whose 510-mile-long border with Syria extreme jihadis pass without hindrance. The situation is not without precedent: after the overthrow in Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge, the murderers of more than a million of their own people, by the Vietnamese army in 1979, the US, China and Britain backed Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, and recognised his government as Cambodia’s true representative at the UN. It was subsequently revealed that the British covertly gave military training to armed groups associated with the Khmer Rouge.
The jihadi insurgent movements in Syria are the Islamic version of the Khmer Rouge who, like their Cambodian predecessors, dominate the rebel-held enclaves. Moreover, #Isis has seized much of western Iraq right up to the western outskirts of Baghdad. Iraqi security forces are capturing sophisticated weapons from Isis originally supplied by US and British allies to supposed moderate rebels in Syria.
The potential for disaster in Syria in 2014 is, in many ways, greater than in Iraq in 2003. In this growing crisis, the Chilcot inquiry comic opera is playing a small but ignoble role.
