Chilcot has unearthed a lot of new evidence and put a new slant on several of the main actors involved, but where is it leading? As Blair prepares to defend the indefensible tomorrow, what will be the consequences if, as expected, the Inquiry concludes that the war was illegal, that there was gross deception in the use of evidence to justify it, and that Bush and Blair were anyway determined to go to war irrespective of the evidence in order to secure regime change? What then happens? This is a defining moment for UN institutions and the rule of law.
This is not the first time this issue has been faced. On 2 March 2004 BBC news online carried the story that “Blair ‘war crimes’ case launched”, and the same day the Guardian reported that “Lawyers submit war crimes petition”. It is worth noting what the result was. On 9 February 2006 the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC (international Criminal Court) put the following statement on its website:

“The information available constituted a reasonable basis to believe that a limited number of instances of wilful killing and/or inhuman treatment had occurred. However the crimes allegedly committed by nationals of State Parties (to the Rome Statute of the ICC) in Iraq did not appear to meet the required gravity threshold”. What this seems to suggest is that the Prosecutor had investigated cases of killing and torture that went beyond the prosecution of a war, not that he had examined the fundamental question of the legality of the war and, if it was concluded to be illegal, the colossal level of casualties that only occurred because an illegal war was deliberately initiated. It could be asked whether starting a war that breached international law was not a more serious war crime than the barbarity in which a legal war was conducted. I suspect that Chilcot will not be the end of this matter.

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