UK cabinet instructed not to mention Iraq War

The Guardian issued an article on Friday quoting a leaked private correspondence which says that UK Foreign Secretary William Hague instructed Conservative MPs not to mention the Iraqi campaign and its death toll until the Chilcot Inquiry into Britain’s role in the 2003 war is published.

The results of the Chilcot Inquiry, which is the country’s public investigation into the issue, were supposed to have been published last year but were delayed and are not expected to be disclosed until the middle of 2013.

Although the British Foreign Office admits that as much of the inquiry as possible should be held in public, it prevented the release of the phone conversations between the then-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and the then-US leader George W. Bush in the days preceding the invasion. Sir John Chilcot, who heads the inquiry, once said that the report on the UK's role in the Iraqi campaign “would be twice the size of Tolstoy's ‘War and Peace’.

The UK's decision to join the US-led invasion of Iraq was met with mass protests across the country and worldwide. Ten years ago London had the largest political demonstration Britain had ever seen. Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction was used as a pretext for the invasion. The US-UK forces failed to locate them, sparking an international debate on the decision to unleash the war.

The death toll from the 2003 invasion stands at tens of thousands of Iraqis, and 179 British deaths.