Well, duh.
By The Times (and, well, everybody else) reports that Gordon Brown has backed off his original stance of holding the inquiry into British involvement in the Iraq war in private. Now, it seems, he has opened the door for the possibility of maybe holding some of the hearings in public. No, really, in front of people, even the media.
I appreciate the need for certain military aspects of an inquiry to be held in private, for future operational security, to protect intelligence assets, and to create a context in which frank testimony is more likely. The political dimension surrounding the decision to enter the war, however, ought to be public, both for normative reasons as well as smart politics. Brown and Labour need to hold up every shard of transparency that they can lay their hands on at the moment — and they’re running out of time. Of course, Brown is politically tone deaf, hence the move for secrecy on this inquiry was predictable.
Equally predictable was the backbench and opposition outrage. However, it’s ironic that he appears to have backpedaled only once senior military officials have called for a public inquiry, or to quote Major General Tim Cross, in The Independent, “this inquiry should be in public as much as possible . . . ” Major General Cross was deeply involved with the planning of British operations in the run in to the war, and later served as Jay Garner’s deputy. But what would he know?
