LONDON, 2 November 2006 — The British Parliament is a gift to dictatorship. If I were an absolute ruler I would get one immediately. Tuesday night Britons were offered the spectacle of their MPs pleading with the government to be allowed an inquiry into the Iraq war. For all the vigor of the debate, they were still humiliated by the government’s supporters. While British soldiers ram democracy down others’ throats at the point of a gun, their representatives seem incapable of performing democracy’s simplest ritual, challenging the executive.
In London at present is veteran US political operator Vernon Jordan, member of the congressional inquiry into the conduct of the war in Iraq. The inquiry, set up by the US Congress, is chaired by former secretary of state, James Baker, and a former congressman, Lee Hamilton. It includes retired politicians and intelligence and judicial figures. It is talking to everyone and its conclusions, essentially on how to leave Iraq with dignity, will carry weight with the US government and people. George Bush was forced by the sheer gravity of its membership to give it his blessing.
Congress was notoriously slow in scrutinizing presidential decisions on this war. A Republican body, it voted the Republican president a license to invade and, with victory in the air, treated the absence of plans for the occupation tolerantly. But this did not go unnoticed. Sen. Robert Byrd remarked that the Senate was “ominously, dreadfully silent...paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events.” In his devastating study of the war so far, “Fiasco,” Thomas Ricks called it “the silence of the lambs”.
That facade began to crack after the Abu Ghraib revelations in spring 2004. The Silberman-Robb commission sat on the non-appearance of weapons of mass destruction. Congress’s armed services committees began interrogating a parade of administration officials on strategy. Officials such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were treated with mounting, albeit partisan, savagery. Returning commanders such as generals John Abizaid and George Casey were scrutinized, as were Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. While few of these inquisitions changed policy they fed a reviving debate over the wisdom of the war that is now in full flood. Its culmination is the Baker/Hamilton commission.
Britain has seen no indictment of the pre-invasion mendacity or the lack of post-invasion planning. The Commons has not cross-examined returning generals or diplomats with anything but cringing deference. Occasional hearings by the defense and foreign affairs committees have yielded only pat repetitions of the official line. British MPs enjoy themselves in Basra palace, where they congratulate the army on behaving better than the US. But frank military assessment must be gleaned from gossip, seminars, websites and the occasional general cutting loose on television.
Two official inquiries, into the war’s preliminaries by Lords Hutton and Butler, were instant satirical hits. That on the death of David Kelly was by a judge selected by the Lord Chancellor for his dexterity with whitewash. The other contrived to examine Downing Street’s spin machine without once mentioning the words, Alastair Campbell.
As for the Commons, its intelligence, defense and foreign affairs committees have been safe in the hands of Ann Taylor, Bruce George and Donald Anderson, as reliable a trio of loyalists as you could hope to find. The intelligence committee does not even report to Parliament but to the prime minister, who also supplies its secretariat, an absurd state of affairs. While the Westminster lobby dutifully refers to these bodies as “powerful” or ‘influential” the epithets are nonsense. Love or hate the Iraq war, it beggars belief that a democratic assembly can have been party to it for three years without ever inquiring into its conduct. Charles I would have been proud of today’s Commons. Even Tuesday’s debate required the initiative of the separatist Scots and Welsh nationalists to get on to the order paper.
As for the “official, loyal” opposition, never did two adjectives so negate their noun. Despite widespread disquiet on the Tory backbenches and in the country, the opposition front bench has managed only a strangled gurgle of assent to each twist in Blair’s war policy. David Cameron’s vote Tuesday night against the government was hardly savage. It was to request an inquiry in a year’s time, after the troops have supposedly been withdrawn. In other words, do not expect Parliament to discuss an exit strategy until you have passed the exit.
There cannot be a more serious moment for democratic scrutiny than when a government is involved in a controversial and dangerous foreign war. It is the more urgent when troops seem trapped and facing defeat on two fronts. There is nothing to stop MPs debating what they like. There is nothing to stop a grand committee being appointed to inquire into the war. It can demand “persons and papers” and subpoena anyone it likes. Even if select committees are too scared of the whips to act, Parliament is sovereign. It need not ask Downing Street’s permission to scrutinize. Parliament even has a second chamber, albeit one too terrified for its future to do more than rap the government’s knuckles.
Britain’s debate on the Iraq war is taking place in the media. It should be in Parliament. Parliament’s mission is to “legislate, deliberate and scrutinize”. Since it no longer legislates independent of government (except on such trivial matters as hunting) and its debates are worse attended than a pub game of Trivial Pursuit, it is left with scrutiny. Of that there is none. The Commons has become little more than an electoral college for the prime minister.
Parliament at present regards Iraq much as does the Cabinet, as an American problem which America must solve before Britain can do so. Blair has merely supplied an army to cover George Bush’s diplomatic flank. If the present congressional inquiry can help get Bush off the hook, Parliament hopes that it will do the same for Britain. This appears to be its strategy. I repeat, this is humiliating.
