ABSTRACT
The fall of Baghdad, the toppling of Saddam and his statuary, and the declared end of ‘major combat operations’ in Iraq permitted the resumption and intensification of hostilities on the home front. In Britain, three official inquiries were soon under way. Two of them were parliamentary. The Foreign Affairs Committee inquired into ‘The Decision to go to War in Iraq’, reporting in July 2003. The Intelligence and Security Committee inquired into ‘Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction-Intelligence and Assessments’, reporting in September 2003. The third and most consequential was quasijudicial, or rather post-judicial, for not only did Lord Hutton retire as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary (a Law Lord) before the publication of his report in January 2004, but the proceedings of his inquiry into ‘the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly’ contrived to render obsolete the proceedings of all previous judicial inquiries, whilst at the same time exposing and overshadowing the amateurish efforts of the muddling parliamentarians.1 After Hutton, in the wake of another preemptive announcement from Washington, there came a surprise fourth: an inquiry into ‘the gathering, evaluation and use of intelligence on WMD’, led by Lord Butler, patterned on a similar US Commission, and precipitated by the shocking declaration from the resigning head of the Iraq Survey Group that there appeared to be no WMD to survey-prompting one sardonic commentator to observe, ‘it’s like me holding an inquiry into why my fridge is empty’.2
