Villepinists like to hold fake inquiries. So the Stop the War Coalition (yes, they still exist – we were surprised too) are planning to hold an inquiry into the conduct of the Iraq war, along the lines of the so-called International War Crimes Tribunal of 1967 dedicated to demonising the Americans and their allies for their conduct in the Vietnam war. No doubt the same mixture of daft conspiracy theories, facts taken out of all context and wilful ignorance of the evils of the totalitarian enemies against whom America and her allies were fighting will be on display. So while any act by American forces will be picked and worried to death by this inquiry, one can be sure that they won't pay much attention to the record of Saddam's regime, just as the left has largely ignored the crimes of the communist regime in Vietnam before, during and after the Vietnam war.
It's not going to be an ‘inquiry’ in the sense of a quest to discover what really happened. Everybody knows in advance what its conclusion will be, it is as foregone as the result of one of Stalin's show trials. This makes an interesting contrast with another inquiry that is going on right now – the Hutton Inquiry. Despite attempts to forecast that the government will be exonerated or damned nobody really knows what the outcome will be. The reason is simple: genuine inquiries are held when the truth is hard to find and one wants to make every possible effort to find it. Since we don't know the truth about the circumstances surrounding Kelly's death we don't know what the inquiry will find. A real inquiry requires an interest in the truth, whether or not it fits one's preconceptions, and that is absent from everything the Stop the War Coalition and other Villepinists do.
