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Iraq inquiry: its time will come

An Iraq war inquiry will not be enough, says robert fox.
Blair’s casual approach to all warfare needs examining

So, the Opposition's call for a full-blown inquiry into the cock-up in Iraq failed to get through the Commons. But its time will surely come. As Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett hinted, and Defence Minister Des Browne appeared to confirm in his "slip of the tongue", it will come "when the time is right".

For those who believe there must be an inquiry, the defeat was not a disaster - for the Opposition MPs did not want to go nearly far enough. They were calling for a parliamentary inquiry along the lines of the Franks Commission into the aftermath of the 1982 Falklands campaign.

That commission looked at why the conflict happened, how it was executed and the mistakes that led up to it. But it held back on the really juicy stuff: the intelligence failures in understanding the Argentines' intention to

There is something fundamentally flawed in the casual way Blair has employed military force

attack, which was being signalled months in advance of the invasion.

The Franks model is too modest. It is clear that something much deeper is amiss than just the debacle in Iraq, or the mishandled campaign in Afghanistan for that matter. There is something fundamentally flawed in the casual way the Blair government has prepared and employed military force since New Labour came to power. It needs to be examined from top to bottom.

Any inquiry needs to start with the Strategic Defence Review of 1998 after which the Government demanded a rolling 30 per cent cut in the cost of procurement, spares, and logistic support for the subsequent three years. That is the reason why our forces in Helmand and Basra province today are operating with equipment so knackered it cannot be patched up at all. Forget "not fit for purpose" - some of it is not fit for any kind of future use.

With the cut in support and stores from 1998 came a new "just in time, just enough" procurement and spares policy - a notion beloved of the Japanese car industry and

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