Peter Hitchens: Forget About Iraq Inquiry, Let’s Probe Libyan War Instead

In his latest column for the Mail on Sunday, journalist and author Peter Hitchens continues his campaign to expose the mistakes of Prime Minister David Cameron. On this occasion he turned his guns on Cameron’s “Libya folly” explaining the current situation and predicting the destructive long term outcome for European civilisation.

First, Hitchens dismisses the Iraq Inquiry currently being chaired by Sir John Chilcot. For him the long-delayed report is little more than a foregone conclusion and distracts from more recent controversial foreign policy events. Earlier this year UKIP launched a campaign demanding publication of Chilcot’s report, but as Hitchens writes:

“Let’s forget the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War. We all know who’s guilty, and the main actors are finished and disgraced in the public mind.”

For Hitchens the more recent Libyan war is both of much greater concern and more immediate in its short- and long-term effects:

“Instead, let’s have a new and urgent inquiry (report within a year please) into David Cameron’s equally stupid and irresponsible Libyan war, which is the direct cause of the scenes at Calais and Dover, and may, in the long run, mean the end of European civilisation as we have known it all our lives.”

Hitchens apocalyptic vision for European civilisation is doubtless informed by the negative effects of the failed state that Libya has become. Not only is the country now an embarcation point for economic migrants from North Africa and the Middle East seeking to reach Europe, but also it is a potential transit point for terrorist groups. International politicians as diverse as Nigel Farage, French Minister of Defence Jean-Yves Le Drian and leading Forza Italia MEP Giovanni Toti, have identified the same problem.

He does not limit his criticism to the foreign policy initiative alone, he also points to the effect of years of diminishing investment in border security and a failure to defend western culture in general. In this, Hitchens believes, Cameron is not alone:

“It is also thanks to people like him that we have, as a country and a culture, given up all the weapons and defences we might once have used to keep our island secure.”

That being said, it does not appear Hitchens believes anything of practical value will emerge from the inquiry he suggests. Finishing the brief section of his comment column he pessimistically predicts:

“You think this can be stopped, or will be stopped? No. All that will happen is that we will get used to it.”

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