Locating political responsibility for war: the Iraq inquiries, 2003-2016

Abstract

ABSTRACT The three major UK inquiries around the 2003 Iraq war, chaired by Brian Hutton, Robin Butler and John Chilcot, respectively, were all established amidst widespread debate around where responsibility lay for apparent policy failings. The political response to those apparent failings, from both critics and defenders of the UK government’s approach, was to defer responsibility to a non-political body which would take on the role of truth-seeking. In the public discussion around each of the subsequent reports, and in the content of the reports themselves, the configuration and limits of the specific responsibility of public officials was a major if unpacked theme. The paper will explore critically the notions of political responsibility and ultimately accountability in the arguments around the Iraq inquiries. All three reports identified a distinct focus in their discussions of political responsibility – responsibility towards personnel (the Hutton inquiry), to the uses of intelligence (the Butler inquiry) and for decision-making about war (the Chilcot inquiry, and the first six volumes of the report). Nevertheless, all three reports stopped short of questioning political judgements, implicitly marking this off as a sphere beyond legitimate investigation for a supposedly non-political inquiry. In light of this self-imposed limitation, the paper looks to the relationships between trust and truth, and politicians and bureaucrats, in providing answers – but also at how those answers were themselves destabilized through the processes, findings and receptions of the inquiries.