The Chilcot report merely proves the British love hindsight

Do you remember the Chilcot report? It was way back, before gun mayhem in Texas, before the Tories chose two women to contest the leadership of their party and before Nato restarted the cold war with Russia. That’s the trouble with modern history. It goes from forward to fast forward to lightning.

The Iraq war is the day before yesterday. All that survives of Chilcot is a few old men demanding a few other old men say sorry.

Perhaps there should now be Chilcots on Afghanistan and Libya, and perhaps on the credit crunch. But they too are disappearing into the mists of history. The Chilcot report merely proves the British love hindsight.

Iraq was always America’s war. Britain was a mere hanger-on, a tin-pot cheerleader to America’s reckless aggression. Chilcot attempts to make out it was a far bigger player, and therefore its role the more damnable and Chilcot’s delay more justified. But Britain could no more have stopped the Iraq war than it could have “prepared for the aftermath”. Its sole choice was whether or not to do what Harold Wilson did in Vietnam and stand aloof. Tony Blair chose to fight.

Blair emerges as other Iraq historians have already portrayed him, as a pathetic and self-regarding figure in awe of the transatlantic power. The most culpable participants in the story were his cabinet colleagues who, with the exception of the late Robin Cook, failed to do what they knew to be right and stop him. As for “being accountable”, the idea of historical remorse is a fad, a device of political rhetoric.

Blair renders his account for Iraq every day. He cuts a lonely and wretched figure. Seemingly scared of the outside world, he is imprisoned by armed guards day and night. He travels the world, living out of suitcases and hotel rooms, attended by a dwindling band of courtiers, sustained by shady friends and “consultancies”. If Blair said sorry for Iraq, the world would yawn.

Chilcot wants us to “learn lessons”. But we knew the lesson of Iraq from day one and ignored it. British governments repeated its misguided interventionism in Helmand and Libya, and tried to do so in Syria. The still current idea that “we” could somehow sort out Syria is neo-imperialist fantasy.

The true message of Chilcot is that, in foreign policy, lessons are never learned, merely repeated. Military glory offers headlines that may come cheap to a leader in a democracy, but others pay the price.