Richard Heller: Inquiry must make Blair face the reality of his Iraq decisions

They may hope that it will be less cosy than his first, almost exactly a year ago, when he repeatedly congratulated the inquiry team on their questions, like a headmaster enjoying a session with some unexpectedly bright pupils.

Perhaps this session will be different: leaks yesterday suggested that the inquiry members are angry with Tony Blair for giving misleading evidence.

They may even have followed my suggestion in this newspaper, on November 24, 2009, and investigated the astonishing story, in Ron Suskind's book, The Way Of The World, that Tony Blair accepted on the eve of war that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

If this is true, he told a string of lies, not only to the Iraq inquiry but also to Parliament, Yorkshire, Britain and the world. Along with that suggestion, I offered the inquiry 10 specific questions for Tony Blair.

I still think that direct answers on them all would be informative, yet this time round I hope that the inquiry team will focus on all the justifications he has offered for the Iraq war – and make him compare them with its results.

Tony Blair has constantly linked the Iraq war to 9/11, and suggested that it was an intolerable risk that al-Qaida might acquire WMD from Saddam Hussein. The reality? There were no WMD in Iraq, and if he ever had acquired them, Saddam would never have given them to al-Qaida: they hated each other.

Al-Qaida did not acquire WMD, but in the chaos and conflicts of post-war Iraq, they acquired thousands of WDD – conventional weapons of daily destruction, which claimed many more victims than 9/11. Not only al-Qaida but terrorist groups all over the world have profited from the Iraq war to gain recruits, money and weapons. There is no country in the world (including Britain) where Britons are safer as the result of the Iraq war.

The Iraq war diverted resources and attention from the unfinished war in Afghanistan. The Taliban were able to re-establish themselves, and submit British forces to the fiercest combat operations since Korea. These killed at least 22 other Yorkshiremen, and their families deserve to hear Tony Blair's answers on this point.

He has suggested that the war was a necessary warning to Iran. The reality? Iran has acquired more influence in Iraq than ever before, and in the Middle East generally. The Iraq war gave Iran a compelling motive for acquiring nuclear weapons as fast as possible and, at the same time, made it much harder for the West to prevent this.

Tony Blair says regularly that Iraq is a better place since the removal of Saddam Hussein. The reality? That was never a valid reason for going to war with Iraq. If it were, it would be open to any country to invade any other to give it a better government.

There are legions of statistics about Iraq, including many new ones uncovered by Wikileaks, to suggest that daily life there is no better than it was under Saddam, and is often worse.

Comparisons with Saddam's Iraq have always been irrelevant: when George W Bush and Tony Blair invaded and occupied Iraq, they assumed full legal and moral responsibility for the welfare of its people. They must answer for all the deaths and suffering of post-war Iraq and they have no defence in arguing that these were less than they might have endured under Saddam Hussein.

Tony Blair has regularly suggested that joining the Iraq war was necessary to sustain the Anglo-American relationship. The reality? The war has worsened the relationship on both sides of the Atlantic.

Tony Blair has told the inquiry and others that in the modern world it is impossible for countries to wait until threats have become overt. They must be prepared to pre-empt them militarily on the basis of intelligence.

The reality? Largely as the result of Tony Blair's own conduct, Iraq destroyed the faith of the British people in intelligence-based wars, and made it far harder for any successor to launch another, however necessary.

Even if one accepts all of Tony Blair's premises, the Iraq war was a failure. It would be a huge service to the cause of good government if he were made to confront this.

Both in his previous evidence to the Iraq inquiry and in his memoirs Tony Blair often used a stylistic formula. Instead of saying "I did this" he would say: "In this situation, you do this." It is a convenient way of evading personal responsibility for his actions and making them sound like dictates of some universal principle which all right-thinking people believe in. The inquiry team must not let him do this again.

No decisions in Iraq were inescapable: all were the personal choice of the people that made them. Everything that happened in Iraq – including the deaths of 12 Yorkshiremen – could have been different.

Richard Heller is an author and journalist. His new cricket novel, The Network has just been published.