"We've waited a long time for this," says Rose Gentle, whose 19-year-old son Gordon was killed by a roadside bomb in southern Iraq in 2004. "I want to know why our troops were sent to Iraq in the first place, why we unquestioningly followed America, and why our sons weren't sent with the right equipment."
Answers to some of those questions are likely to emerge over the next year. The Iraq Inquiry -- whose five members are drawn from the House of Lords, Parliament's upper house -- will take evidence from dozens of key witnesses, including politicians, diplomats, military commanders and spy agency bosses. The panel's findings will be published in late 2010 or early 2011.
The real stars of the inquiry, former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown, will appear before the committee early next year. The Iraq invasion is as politically linked to Blair in Britain as it is to the administration of President George W. Bush in the U.S. Many Britons believe Blair exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to win support for the war, which cost the lives of 179 British soldiers; polls show that 60 percent of the British public think the invasion was a mistake.
Stefan Rousseau, AP
Then Prime Minister Tony Blair visiting British troops in Iraq in 2006.
But as the first public hearing commenced on Tuesday, inquiry head Sir John Chilcot warned that his committee had not been set up to assign blame, but to explain how similar mistakes could be avoided in the future. "We are not a court," he said. "No one is on trial. But I make a commitment here that once we get to our final report, we will not shy away from making criticisms where they are warranted. [We will be] thorough, rigorous, fair and frank."
The panel's lack of legal power has already led some in the anti-war lobby to declare the inquiry a "whitewash." Simon Jenkins, a commentator with British newspaper The Guardian, observed that the panel cannot deliver the one thing many opponents of the Iraq invasion have long demanded: the trial of Blair on war crimes charges. "[They say] Blair must be hung, drawn and quartered," he wrote. "[The public] clamors not for facts but for retribution for the Iraq war." In an editorial, the Times of London came to a similar conclusion: "It is increasingly obvious that some zealots will hold all such inquiries tainted until and unless they arrive at the 'right' answer concerning Mr. Blair's supposed abuse of power."
Despite the heated language in the British media, the inquiry's opening day was a rather tame affair. The first three witnesses, former Defense Ministry and Foreign Office mandarins, fielded questions from the panel on the U.S. and Britain's stance on Iraq before and after the 9/11 attacks. Most interestingly, William Patey, ex-head of the Foreign Office's Middle East department, revealed that as early as February 2001, "We were aware of these drumbeats in Washington [calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein] and internally we discussed it. Our policy was to stay away from that. ... We didn't think that Saddam was a good thing and it would be great if he went, but we didn't have a policy for getting rid of him."
Ultimately, this measured method of evidence collection could, as the Guardian newspaper said on Monday, help "heal the wounds of war." But for Rose Gentle and others who lost family members in Iraq, the inquiry will succeed if it stops the country "from entering another illegal war, so that other parents won't have to experience my pain."
