I listened to much of the Chilcot inquiry today - and twittered like a tweeting fool as I got angrier and angrier. And not just because the questions I wanted asked (see previous blog) were not being asked. But to recap the day…

It took no time at all for Blair to start reinventing history - even recent history. The Fern Britton interview was dismissed as if he had simply been careless with his choice of words, even with all his great experience of the media. And the panel failed to press him on this as they failed to press on so many other lines of inquiry - one can only hope that their inscrutability is masking a stinging report when it finally gets published, however many months away that is.

Then he was off, running the show virtually, making mischief with 9/11 when one thing we do all know is that prior to the invasion there was no link between Saddam and global terrorism. And once again he was allowed to get away with it.

The dossier and its presentation was raised - but Tony swatted this away as an irrelevance - and he quoted some totally spurious statistics on how little this had been raised in parliamentary questions - as if that was a sensible measure of anything! And again they didn’t question this at all.

The excuses kept coming: he complained that many were pushing him to move more quickly to war - yes, we know who those people were, and they were mostly in Washington. In the afternoon when it got onto the reasons why the aftermath was such a disaster, it wasn’t that the planning was cavalier (or non-existent)it was apparently because they had not anticipated the role that Iran and Al Qa’ida would take. And it was not our troops that were responsible for the thousands of civilian deaths each month, three or four years after the invasion - no, that was all down to the insurgents. (At this point in the proceedings I have to admit my tweets were becoming rather colourful). Read the rest of this entry.

I think the answer the first question is much easier than the second.  We are currently in a nightmare situation militarily and diplomatically and there are few signs of it getting any easier. Read the rest of this entry. Read the rest of this entry.