In these days of Iranian Revolution, Iraq may seem like a distant bad memory, but it's exploded back onto the front pages of U.K. papers this week. After months of pressure, British Prime Minister, former Chancellor, and human pinata Gordon Brown announced he would cave in to years of pressure and finally hold a wide-ranging investigation into the Iraq war conducted by his predecessor, Tony Blair.
In case you haven't been following U.K. politics, Brown and the Labour party are facing a situation similar to what the Republicans faced here over the past couple years, except worse. Brown is pretty much the most hated Prime Minister of all time, and even members of his own party are trying to oust him - unsuccessfully, so far.
Brown tried to put the best face on things, billing the effort as part of a "new era of transparency," following the humiliating, ongoing "expenses" scandal which has pretty much destroyed out any remaining confidence in the government. Any pretense of transparency, however, was stamped out as he announced the inquiry would be held entirely in private, overseen by the man responsible for reviewing WMD evidence on Iraq before the war, and not be delivered until next spring, right after the election. Proving yet again that if you're going to do a whitewash, you might as well not fuck around.
However, this being Gordon Brown, his plan backfired massively. The Tories, members of the military, and rogue members of his own party pushed back hard. Former Prime Minister John Major even chimed in. Brown was immediately forced to backtrack, giving the man picked to oversee the investigation, Sir John Chilcot, "the option of allowing witnesses to take a legal oath and appear in private or public."
Now, The Guardian has gone live with a story that Tony Blair pressured Brown to make the investigation private.
Tony Blair urged Gordon Brown to hold the independent inquiry into the Iraq war in secret because he feared that he would be subjected to a "show trial" if it were opened to the public, the Observer can reveal.
The revelation that the former prime minister - who led Britain to war in March 2003 - had intervened will fuel the anger of MPs, peers, military leaders and former civil servants, who were appalled by Brown's decision last week to order the investigation to be conducted behind closed doors.
Blair, who resisted pressure for a full public inquiry while he was prime minister, appears to have taken a deliberate decision not to express his view in person to Brown because he feared it might leak out.
Blair is hoping to become the first "President of Europe," and the investigation could quickly become a major embarrassment.
Even beyond the political embarrassment of caving specifically to the guy most directly involved in the inquiry, Brown's hand may be forced as it looks like Parliament is planning a vote on Wednesday that will make the inquiry open to the public.
Brown knows he is cornered over the inquiry. Tories, Labour and Lib Dem MPs, even retired mandarins who have secrecy in their blood, say the inquiry should be held mostly in public. The Tories have put down a motion in the Commons for Wednesday demanding that it all be opened up. As the former cabinet secretary Lord Butler said in the Lords on Thursday, the danger for Brown is that if he doesn't give in completely – no weasly half concessions – parliament will vote to make him do so.
Bubbling under the surface of all this is a memo, whose existance was first reported in 2006, documenting a meeting between Bush and Blair during the run up to war (other Bush administration officials, including Condoleeza Rice were also present). In a kind of bizarre, dumbed-down version of LBJ's Gulf of Tonkin ruse, Bush allegedly proposed painting a U2 spyplane in U.N. colors and flying it over Iraqi airspace in the hope that Saddam shooting it down would give the U.S. the excuse they needed to invade. He also remarked that the date of the military invasion had been "penciled in," regardless of what developed at the UN.
Mr Bush said: "The US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would 'twist arms' and 'even threaten'. But he had to say that if ultimately we failed, military action would follow anyway." He added that he had a date, 10 March, pencilled in for the start of military action. The war actually began on 20 March.
While this information was all reported in 2006, existence of the memo was never officially verified. Reporting by the British press this week, however, indicates that the memo is indeed real, and may be made public as part of the upcoming investigation. Given the political dynamic in the U.K. right now, it will be interesting to see what else turns up.