Tony Blair is adept at evading the tough questions Photo: Getty  I will admit that I feel more than a batsqueak of sympathy for Sir John Chilcot, the former Whitehall mandarin tasked with the small matter of finding out what went wrong in Iraq. His inquiry, launched on Thursday, is entrusted with a notionally forensic mission that is actually a grand exercise in mass psychotherapy.  Sir John and his fellow committee members – Sir Lawrence Freedman, Sir Martin Gilbert, Sir Roderic Lyne and Baroness Usha Prashar – promise inquisitorial proceedings, but their work can be more accurately compared to the work of a shrink, doing his best to soothe the patient lying on the couch: in this case, the whole nation. As those who love psychobabble would say, Sir John is expected to deliver "closure". And this, I would contend, is an impossible task.  To judge from his performance last week, the inquiry's chairman is determined to pre-empt all the most obvious criticisms of his work. "The inquiry is not a court of law and nobody is on trial," he declared. "But I want to make something absolutely clear. This committee will not shy away from making criticism. If we find that mistakes were made, that there were issues which could have been dealt with better, we will say so frankly." The families of dead servicemen will be consulted, a technique of "victim justice" first deployed in the United States. This will also, in the spirit of the age, be a "wiki-inquiry", with a website inviting members of the public to chip in "if they think they have information relevant to our investigations".  Many who take an interest in the Chilcot hearings and its eventual report will, I suspect, have one hope above all others: namely, that the committee will, finally, on behalf of the nation, the world, and the cosmos, nail Blair once and for all. It is never pleasant to dash anyone's dreams, but those who harbour such expectations should banish them now. Forget it: there is no way this lot are going to skewer the former Prime Minister.  For a start, they are not up to it. I am not sure if anyone is. After Sir John's launch, I went back to the records of the Hutton Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly and re-read the transcript of Blair's appearance at the hearings: a little less than six years ago, on August 28, 2003.  Cross-examined by James Dingemans QC, senior counsel to the inquiry, Blair bobs and weaves and counter-punches, unfailingly polite to silk and Lord Hutton alike, but is never remotely at risk of hitting the canvas. He listens very carefully to each question ("Hmm, hmm," as the stenographers record the prime ministerial musing: one can picture the furrowed brow as he weighs up each word). But he is a master of the artfully vague answer. Asked about a Ministry of Defence statement related to Dr Kelly, he says: "I think certainly it came to Jonathan [Powell, his chief of staff], and I may have scanned my eye over it myself, but I cannot absolutely recall that."  Whenever he can, Blair ensures that the dabs of colleagues are visible all over decisions he took ("I thought it was very, very important to involve the senior officials"). He likes to respond with a question, as if he can get Dingemans and Hutton to sign up to his logic there and then ("Do you see what I mean?"). It is a masterly, understated performance. One forgets at one's peril that Blair was a barrister as well as a schoolboy actor. I doubt there is a single question the Chilcot Inquiry will be able to throw at him that he has not answered in his head a thousand times.  Will the investigation settle any arguments or tell us much that we do not already know? Lord Butler's inquiry into the intelligence background to the war was fairly comprehensive, although that does not mean Sir John and his colleagues will not visit the matter afresh. The legality of the invasion will, of course, be at the heart of the matter, and Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney General, will have to deny, once more, that he was leant on to give the legal green light to military intervention. Yet again, we shall sift through United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 of November 8, 2002 – the arguments that surrounded its drafting, whether paragraph 12 required a further resolution to be passed before military action, or whether the warning of "serious consequences", should Saddam be found to be in "material breach", was sufficient legal grounds for intervention.  What I would like to hear much more about is why the plans for post-liberation reconstruction were so woefully inadequate, and why Blair did not press George W Bush to listen to Colin Powell (who had drawn up a multi-volume plan for rebuilding Iraq at the State Department, brushed aside by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney). I have lost count of the explanations I have been offered over the past six years. One of the most senior civil servants in the land assured me that it was all Clare Short's fault, as the question of reconstruction had been delegated to the Department for International Development. Hmm (as Blair would say).  Others say – more plausibly – that Blair tried to get Bush to focus on the issue and got nowhere. One of his closest Cabinet allies told me in the week after the invasion that the traffic between No 10 and the White House was especially tense: not over the "shock and awe" military operation itself, but the great strategic vacuum thereafter. Blair had been completely absorbed by the domestic politics of the war: selling it to Parliament and public. Now, at last, he grasped fully the trouble that might lie ahead: as, indeed, it did, with calamitous geopolitical consequences. Had post-Saddam Iraq settled into something like civil order within a year or so, the world's perception today of the conflict and the merits of the liberation would be very different.  Perhaps the Chilcot Inquiry will enrich our understanding of why such unforced errors were made. What it cannot do is what, in primitive terms, the polity wants: to draw a line under the war and the Bush-Blair era, to name and shame the guilty men, to arrive at a destination marked "truth and reconciliation". In short, to make all that Bad Stuff go away once and for all.  It would be so psychologically convenient if the committee declared the Iraq war to be a unique and terrible mistake, rather than one sorry, bungled chapter in a long saga involving Islamist networks, global terror, rogue states and the spread of WMD: a saga that began on September 11, 2001 and will go on for decades to come. Convenient, but a lie. There is no closure to be had. Whatever Chilcot decides, the Bad Stuff will not go away.  Matthew d'Ancona is Editor of 'The Spectator'
The nation may be longing for closure - but never underestimate the former PM,    says Matthew d'Ancona.