The investigation into the Dutch support for the war against Saddam Hussein is seven years late. However, some comfort can be found in a comparison with our traditional ally, the United Kingdom. The report published by the Davids Commission includes surprisingly critical conclusions, whereas the British Goliath, the mother of all democracies, has just embarked on its fifth inquiry.

 
The Dutch have an incorrigible preference for bringing up the rear, and the inquiry into Dutch support for the US-led invasion of Iraq was no exception to this rule. A full seven years after the British parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee published its first report, the independent Davids Commission was only just getting started.

 
However, in July 2003, a few months after the invasion of Iraq, that first UK parliamentary commission got no further than expressing serious doubts about then prime minister Tony Blair’s stated motives for going to war: the serious threat to international security posed by Sadam Hussein’s Iraq and its alleged weapons of mass destruction. Both the prime minister and the intelligence services involved refused to cooperate with the inquiry.
 

Angry Brits
Whereas in 2003 the angry British demanded their prime minister give an account for his decision to join a war they did not want, the Dutch Davids Commission in 2010 presented a solid report and emphatically left it to parliament to pass political judgment, as commission chairman Willibrord Davis explained:

 
"The commission has interpreted its task as an investigation to discover facts. It does not give an interpretation, even though this can never be completely avoided. Under no circumstance will it provide a political interpretation of the facts. The government could, for example, have failed go give full disclosure to parliament, and if this were the case the commission would find accordingly, but only parliament can decide whether this failure would be unacceptable."

 
The second UK commission of inquiry - no longer appointed by parliament, but by the government - in September 2003 submitted its report directly to the prime minister who in turn was to inform parliament. The commission seriously questioned the Blair government’s statement that Iraqi missiles carrying chemical and/or biological weapons were capable of hitting British and other NATO targets on Cyprus and in Turkey within 45 minutes.

 
Taxi driver
The 45 minutes claim was based on just a single source, which also turned out to be unreliable. There were rumours the source was actually a taxi driver. Also, various bits of information had been mixed up. The original report concerned the alleged presence of biological and/or chemical weapons; battlefield munitions which could not possibly reach either Turkey or Cyprus. None of the aforementioned information stopped the Dutch government from invoking the British ‘September dossier’ as a justification for its policy.

 
In the spring of 2003, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende pointed to the risk of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, even though one month earlier the British Intelligence and Security Committee had released a report in which it said there was no evidence supporting such allegations.

 
On the warpath
The Davids Commission found that the Dutch intelligence services for the most part took their cue from information obtained from their British and US counterparts. However, the government decided not to inform parliament about the critical notes and differentiations added by the Dutch intelligence services.

 
In his reaction to the Davids Commission’s report on Tuesday, an otherwise surprisingly combative prime minister had very little to say on this issue:

 
"We will extensively address this point in our response. To my mind, Defence Minister Henk Kamp has repeatedly discussed the differentiations made by the intelligence services. When we are talking about the information that was available at the time, we are not just talking about intelligence provided by the UK and the US, but also by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations and others."

 
While the United Kingdom, following the Hutton and Butler reports – neither of which was a parliamentary commission – has just launched its fifth inquiry into the Iraq war, the Dutch Davids Commission, which sceptics never expected to amount to much, submitted a surprisingly critical report.
 
 
On the defensive
Mr Balkenende adopted a defensive attitude and showed little creativity. This was particularly true regarding the commission’s conclusion that there was no justification in international law for the Dutch political support for the war:
 

"There has been much discussion regarding the legal basis for military intervention. Opinions were and are still divided on that issue. The Netherlands, like many other countries, believed that the existing UN resolutions 678 through 1441 provided a legal basis for intervention. A new resolution would have been preferable, but from a legal point of view not strictly necessary."

 
The Dutch prime minister could only revert to old, and from a perspective of international law, fairly outdated arguments. However, this is of no importance to politicians for whom the politics of the day and self-interest are far more important than principles of international law. In this respect, Mr Balkenende finds himself in the illustrious company of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

(RNW translation: gsh)