Abstract
By the time the Chilcot Report was published in July 2016, inquiries of one sort or another focusing on Iraq had been a semi-permanent feature of British politics for a quarter of a century. These stretched back to the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War and the House of Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee’s investigation of Britain’s role in producing a ‘supergun’ for Saddam Hussein’s regime, and included Sir Richard Scott’s 1992–96 investigation into the export of defence and dual-use goods to Iraq.1 The question of intelligence failure in relation to the 2003 invasion of Iraq had itself been either the context for or subject of four previous inquiries by the time the Chilcot inquiry was established. The Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) quickly published a report into The Decision to Go to War in Iraq in July 2003,2 but without access to intelligence assessments. The parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) produced its report on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction Intelligence and Assessments in September 2003.3 This was followed by the report of a judicial inquiry conducted by a former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, Lord Hutton, to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, a Ministry of Defence biological weapons expert who committed suicide after giving evidence to the FAC inquiry.4 After this report in January 2004, the Blair Government felt obliged to concede a further inquiry into the WMD question, to be conducted by a team of privy counsellors led by former Cabinet Secretary Lord Butler and including former Northern Ireland Permanent Secretary Sir John Chilcot among its members.
Highlights
By the time the Chilcot Report was published in July 2016, inquiries of one sort or another focusing on Iraq had been a semi-permanent feature of British politics for a quarter of a century
The parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) produced its report on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction Intelligence and Assessments in September 2003.3 This was followed by the report of a judicial inquiry conducted by a former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, Lord Hutton, to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, a Ministry of Defence biological weapons expert who committed suicide after giving evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) inquiry.[4]
The resulting report (‘Butler Report’) provided the most detailed analysis of intelligence on Iraq’s WMD of any of these inquiries, and included extracts from Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) assessments on Iraq.[5]. These were presented alongside extracts from Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government, the September 2002 dossier that, in light of growing public debate and concern, the Blair government produced to make the case for war in Iraq, and alongside the Foreword to this published in Tony Blair’s name. This enabled the Butler Report to demonstrate two things: first, that the dossier production process impacted on intelligence, both on what was collected and how it was treated; second, that the claims made in the Foreword to the dossier were in advance of anything that could be supported by the intelligence base
Summary
My argument here is that the Chilcot Report’s contribution is twofold. First, it is to be found in the unprecedented detail contained in the Report and provided in oral evidence sessions and written submissions which were published on the Inquiry’s website. Rather than diagnose failure rooted in ‘shared mindset’ as being a symptom of politicization, post mortem inquiries have been more likely to take the safer route of diagnosing ‘Groupthink’ which, because it arises out of a group dynamic, precludes the need to identify individual responsibility Another approach to intelligence failure involves focusing on structural explanations for failure and locating failure in the nature of intelligence organisations and processes, for example in inadequate sharing, challenging, or review of intelligence.[15] bureaucratic politics provides a useful approach to understanding aspects of intelligence behaviour in organisational terms.[16]. This article goes on to consider how the Chilcot Report contributes to our understanding of each of these phases in turn
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