It isn't just John Major who is unhappy that transcripts and full notes of conversations between Tony Blair and George W Bush about the lead-up to the Iraq war will remain secret. The entire world needs details of conversations between Blair and Bush about the 2003 war, but instead the Chilcot inquiry will only get the gist of the talks. For a war which killed 655,000 Iraqis and over one million in total, and for a reason never proven, it cannot be just the former British prime minister who is troubled by the lack of information and transparency. While the deal reached between the British Iraq inquiry and the Cabinet Office about the release of confidential information could clear the way for its longstanding report into the war to be published this year, the decision to exclude full details of the correspondence between Blair and Bush is unacceptable. It was bad enough that the inquiry, which has been given access to full records of talks between the two leaders, is being prevented by senior civil servants from publishing them in its final report, even after offering to block out sensitive parts. The Cabinet Office's grounds for this decision, that it could prejudice future relations with the US, virtually assures that not much of substance can ever be published about the contacts between the two former Western leaders who launched the war. Britain's relationship with the US is ironclad and London is not about to compromise the ties when it has a better idea: Blair and Bush can simply get away with it. Major made some damming remarks on the issue: that Blair is hiding behind government protocols to keep the notes between himself and Bush secret; that the decision not to allow the Chilcot inquiry to publish the full correspondence between the two leaders would allow conspiracy theories to "fester"; and that withholding the notes would be very embarrassing for Blair because it was he who brought the Freedom of Information Act into law when he was in government. Major's intervention will pile pressure on Blair to publicly ask for the notes to be published, especially since the Iraq inquiry has been condemned as a whitewash over the deal to keep the notes secret and after the shabby compromise that could undermine public confidence in the findings. The letters could reveal the real reason why Blair dragged Britain into the catastrophic war to topple Saddam Hussein. According to Bush and Blair, the coalition mission was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. According to Blair, the trigger was Iraq's failure to take a "final opportunity" to disarm itself of alleged nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that US and British officials called an immediate and intolerable threat to world peace. But in 2005, the CIA released a report saying that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, resulting in relentless criticism of the Bush administration on both sides of the Atlantic for its rationale for the war. Unless there is full and open transparency, the credibility of the inquiry will be completely undermined. People the world over, and not just in the UK, are going to be unimpressed with a version so edited that we will still have no idea what took place in those conversations. That the inquiry will be able to publish some of the truth means it will not be able to publish the whole truth.
