Chilcot Report: Britain must overcome its addiction to inquiries

After the uncertainty and divisiveness of the Brexit referendum, predictability and harmony will be restored by Sir John Chilcot, appointed to head up the inquiry into Britain's decision to participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its findings, we're promised, will be like nothing we've ever seen.

The 2.6m-word report will tell us what motives lay behind the Blair government's decision - seven years after British forces withdrew from Iraq, and over a year since they started bombing it again.

Once and for all, we will find out whether or not the US and UK have had a strong military and strategic partnership, one that involvesd close consultation between leaders. At long last, the report will tell us whether or not there were effective plans in place to deal with post-conflict reconstruction in Iraq - which has been in constant security crisis since 2003.

The publication of the report, now years overdue, will offer a set of lessons to guide us before we ever again send our forces to intervene in a fragile Middle Eastern dictatorship - never mind that we joined in the Libyan conflict in 2011 and the Syrian one in 2015.

Most importantly, we will finally discover whether or not one of Britain's political leaders, Tony Blair, took the unthinkable and unprecedented step of lying to his own people.

This is not exactly earth-shattering stuff. Beyond specific details of the war, the real mystery of the report is what lessons anyone actually expects to take away from it and why we seem so convinced that inquiries are going to solve our problems.

That so much of British political life has been organised around the delayed publication of the report is a shame, as is the one-upmanship of trying to pre-empt and anticipate its findings and the fixation on precisely what George W. Bush agreed with Blair in the run-up to the invasion rather than the consequences of the war itself. This has sunk to the level of an interminable parlour game, no more edifying than he-said-she-said gossip.

Worse still, the focus on whether or not Blair misled the public speaks of a politically infantile outlook, one in which the grossest imaginable transgression for an authority figure is not to tell the truth.

In reality, there are more important matters at issue: hundreds of thousands of people are dead as a result of the military intervention, which has in turn spawned new global terror networks. The Middle East has been knocked into a generational sectarian conflict, and Britain has been at war since 1998, on a tour taking it from the Balkans through West Africa to the Middle East. But to go by the debate around the Chilcot report, what matters more than any of this is whether or not an authority figure lied.

This is not the main lesson we should learn from Chilcot. The report must not be allowed to simply set the stage for the repeated booing and hissing of "Bliar"; it should prompt us to question why the British establishment is so preoccupied with retroactively examining itself.