179 British service personnel and close to one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2009. Millions of Iraqis were made homeless. Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime came to an end but the war was met with severe criticism for having been badly planned and executed. With British soldiers still engaged in Afghanistan and continued public scepticism over the handling of the Iraq war, William Hague repeatedly pushed for an urgent inquiry into the Gulf campaign so that lessons may be implemented now and in the future.
The path for an inquiry was finally cleared when, in the summer of 2009, the last of the active British troops withdrew from Southern Iraq and handed over military command to US forces. The Iraq Inquiry - under the chairmanship of Sir John Chilcot - was officially launched on 30th July 2009. Its remit was to consider the UK's involvement in Iraq from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009 (including the run-up to the conflict, the military offensive and its aftermath) and how decisions were made and actions taken so as to “establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned ”.
The Inquiry has not had the smoothest of starts. Parliament was to have no say in its remit. Gordon Brown had to perform an almost immediate U-turn on whether evidence may be heard in public. In the end, we were presented with a political fudge with Brown stating that it was up to Sir John to decide how the Inquiry should proceed (the settled position became that hearings would take place in public unless there were compelling reasons of national security not to do so).
The membership of the committee has been criticised for lacking sufficient input from those with military, aid and reconstruction experience. Another bone of contention has been the manner of information gathering. Evidence sessions are to be conducted by the Privy Counsellors who made up the Inquiry Committee (supported by the Inquiry Secretariat and where necessary, specialist advisers) but the lack of senior lawyers has been widely condemned.
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