This House of Commons is God's gift to dictatorship

Last night's vote against an inquiry into the Iraq war underlines parliament's surrender of its democratic function

Simon Jenkins
Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian

"The British parliament is God's gift to dictatorship. If I were an absolute ruler I would get one immediately. Last night Britons were offered the spectacle of their MPs pleading with the government to be allowed an inquiry into the Iraq war. For all the vigour of the debate, they were still humiliated by the government's supporters. While British soldiers ram democracy down others' throats at the point of a gun, their representatives seem incapable of performing democracy's simplest ritual, challenging the executive.

Congress was notoriously slow in scrutinising presidential decisions on this war. A Republican body, it voted the Republican president a licence to invade and, with victory in the air, treated the absence of plans for the occupation tolerantly. But this did not go unnoticed. Senator Robert Byrd remarked that the senate was "ominously, dreadfully silent ... paralysed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events." In his devastating study of the war so far, Fiasco, Thomas Ricks called it "the silence of the lambs".

That facade began to crack after the Abu Ghraib revelations in spring 2004. The Silberman-Robb commission sat on the non-appearance of weapons of mass destruction. Congress's armed services committees began interrogating a parade of administration officials on strategy. While few of these inquisitions changed policy they fed a reviving debate over the wisdom of the war that is now in full flood. Its culmination is the Baker/Hamilton commission.

Britain has seen no indictment of the pre-invasion mendacity or the lack of post-invasion planning. The Commons has not cross-examined returning generals or diplomats with anything but cringing deference. Occasional hearings by the defence and foreign affairs committees have yielded only pat repetitions of the official line.

Parliament at present regards Iraq much as does the cabinet, as an American problem which America must solve before Britain can do so. Blair has merely supplied an army to cover George Bush's diplomatic flank. If the present congressional inquiry can help get Bush off the hook, parliament hopes that it will do the same for Britain. This appears to be its strategy. I repeat, this is humiliating."