Inquiring into the Iraq war: Lessons to learn | The Economist

http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13884222
WHEN Gordon Brown told Parliament on June 15th that he was setting up an inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq war, the prime minister barely mentioned the four preceding inquiries on the same topic. Two committees of MPs and two government-appointed panels of experts had examined aspects of the decision to invade Iraq alongside American forces—and none had satisfied critics of that decision. Instead, Mr Brown found in the 1983 inquiry by Lord Franks into the outbreak of the Falklands war what he called the “best precedent” for an investigation of the origins and conduct of the Iraq war, and the subsequent occupation of that country.

What Mr Brown meant was that this latest inquiry would, like Franks’s during the cold war, be held in private. That would protect national security and ensure that evidence would be “full and candid”. A public inquiry, he said, would mean delay and “lawyers, lawyers and lawyers”. The inquiry under Lord Saville into the “Bloody Sunday” incident—the killing by British forces of civil-rights protesters in Northern Ireland in 1972—is a cautionary tale. It has run for eight years and cost well over £150m ($246m), with no end in sight.

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