Britain to Investigate Role in Iraq

JOHN F. BURNS

LONDON — After years of delay, the British government said Monday it would go ahead with an inquiry into the country’s role in the Iraq war, an issue that has been deeply divisive ever since the former prime minister, Tony Blair, committed more than 40,000 troops to the invasion in 2003.

Britain’s combat role ended in April, and the last British troops are scheduled to withdraw from their base at the southern city of Basra by July 30, their role taken over by American troops. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, under pressure for an inquiry from his own Labor party and from the opposition Conservatives, has long insisted that the British role in the war should be ended first.

Mr. Brown was scheduled to make a statement on the inquiry in the House of Commons on Monday afternoon, but the decision to go ahead was confirmed by Michael Ellam, his spokesman at 10 Downing Street. Key issues to be settled by the prime minister include whether the inquiry will be held in public or in private, and whether it will review the political decisions that led to war, as well as the conduct of military operations.

Few issues in Britain have been as contentious in the past generation as the decision to join the United States in the 2003 invasion. The commitment took on the character of a personal mission for Mr. Blair, who prevailed over a divided cabinet and Britain’s largest street protests in decades in forging the war coalition with former American president, George W. Bush.

It was an improbable partnership, given the wide philosophical differences between Mr. Blair’s Labor party and the conservative Republicanism of Mr. Bush. It ended, for Mr. Blair, two years ago this month, when he was hastened from office after 10 years by a left-of-center cabal led by Mr. Brown, his successor as prime minister, whose campaign to oust Mr. Blair rested in large part with the party’s unreconciled opposition to the war.

Mr. Blair has gone on to become a Middle East peace negotiator and a highly paid adviser to international banks, as well as a much-sought-after public speaker, particularly in the United States. He is said to have amassed a personal fortune of about $32 million. Mr. Brown, meanwhile, has seen Labor’s political fortunes plunge for reasons not related to the Iraq war, and narrowly survived a cabinet revolt earlier this month that threatened to unseat him.

He has had to tread warily in ordering a formal war inquiry. If the probe examines the political decision-making that preceded the invasion, Mr. Brown, who is said to have had serious reservations about the British commitment when the cabinet made its key decisions in March 2003, will be under pressure to explain why he subordinated his doubts and supported Mr. Blair. Earlier this year, the Brown government intervened to halt the publication of the minutes of cabinet meetings held just before the war started.

A key issue to be addressed by the inquiry will be the use — or abuse, as critics of the war have contended — of the pre-war intelligence provided by Britain’s security agencies, particularly MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. The issue has already been examined twice by public inquiries, both of which broadly exonerated the government.

One inquiry was held into the death by apparent suicide in 2004 of Dr. David Kelly, one of Britain’s top weapons scientists, who told a BBC interviewer he believed the Blair government had overstated the intelligence on which it based its conclusions that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of biological and chemical weapons that posed a ready-to-launch threat. A second inquiry into the Blair government’s use of intelligence in 2005 criticized intelligence officials for relying on flawed unreliable sources.

Another consideration weighing in favor of holding the inquiry behind closed doors, according to government officials, is the risk that public criticism of Britain’s military operations in Iraq will damaging the morale or combat effectiveness of the nearly 9,000 British troops fighting in Afghanistan, many of them from units that have seen combat in Iraq. The sensitivities of families who have lost relatives among the 179 British troops killed in Iraq — some of them in favor of an inquiry in public, others against — has been another factor.