International

Documents pertaining to the cabinet discussion on the eve of the Iraq war in 2003, revealed today on the Netherlands' leading TV news programme, show that the government's preparations for military intervention reached an advanced stage. SP Foreign Affairs spokesman Harry van Bommel says that he finds it “impossible to understand” why the existence of these preparations was never announced in Parliament. “Together with earlier revelations this proves that all relevant material must be brought into the open and that a parliamentary enquiry is now unavoidable.”

The Senate's disappointment over the government's answers to its hundred or so questions on the Iraq war; the latest revelations in the daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad regarding the concealing from the foreign minister of official advice notes which might have borne on the decision to offer the US/UK invasion political support; these could prove the overture to a parliamentary enquiry. The answers were followed by the endorsing by a majority of Senators of calls for just such an enquiry. In parliament's lower house too, support for an enquiry is growing after it was revealed that contradictory advice notes existed in relation to Dutch support for the Anglo-American attack on Iraq. Parliament's changing attitude is emblematic of an ever-broadening consensus that this subject deserves further and closer examination. Herman Wijffels, the senior Christian Democrat who was 'informateur' (principal adviser to the Queen) when the current coalition government was established, along with five former Foreign Ministers, recently announced that they also supported an enquiry into the decision-making process which led to Dutch support for the war.