Who knew that the morale of our troops in Iraq was in such a parlous state? Despite our boys being, as Tony Blair said last month, ‘the finest, the best, the bravest, any nation could hope for’, the Government, it seems, is extremely concerned that the lads are close to breaking point.

The reason the Government has dug its heels in and refused this week to hold a public inquiry into the Iraq war is because it would ‘undermine’ our troops, the poor, fragile things.

Here we have ranks of men, trained to fight, to kill and, sometimes, be killed. Hard men, in other words. And yet we’re expected to believe that an inquiry into the events that sent them there will destroy their morale. Clearly the British army is collectively on the point of mental collapse, needing only one more setback to reduce it to a parade of blubbing nancy boys.

Put yourself in the place of a squaddie finding himself returning fire on a militia mortar attack. Of course, your aim’s going to be off while you dwell on the outcome of an inquiry back home, isn’t it? As the shells explode around you, it stands to reason that consideration of your own life and the lives of your comrades are going to be secondary to that. ‘Sorry Sarge, I really tried to slot that sniper but I just can’t stop thinking about what those senior MPs are up to.’

No, a good soldier is a happy soldier, apparently. You would think though that the opposite would be true: if you want a man to rain white hot and merciless death down on an enemy, surely having him good and pissed off would be better. In that respect, if the troops are as easily upset as the Government says they are, an inquiry would be just the ticket. ‘A public inquiry is attempting to ascertain the reasons for the war? The bastards!’ our commandos would scream before bayoneting their prey with extra gusto. It’d be better than those drugs given to the soldiers to make them aggressively mental in the film ‘Jacob’s Ladder’.

You can see how the Government would consider the well-being of our lads as paramount, having done so much to maintain morale in the ranks up until now. Whether it be sending them out to Iraq without enough body armour, wheeling them out in poorly-armoured ’snatch’ Land Rovers (you’re buggered if somebody fires anything bigger than a bullet at one), delaying the inquests into soldiers’ deaths for up to three years and failing to visit injured troops in hospital, it’s clear just how highly Labour value troop morale.

But not only would a public inquiry into the war sap the morale of our troops, say the master tacticians who made Iraq the country it is today, it would also give succour to our enemies. If an inquiry had been called ‘it would have heartened all those that are fighting us in Iraq’ said Tony Blair this week. Shut up and stop asking questions is the message; it’s careless talk, not careless prime ministers, that costs lives. (It’s the same kind of gutless smear, borne of intellectual poverty and desperation, that saw George Bush say this week, in a sweaty attempt to salvage next week’s mid-term elections, ‘However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: the terrorists win and America loses’.)

You see, the militias currently running amok in Iraq are only doing it in a sort of half-hearted fashion. The terrorists who’ve just had one of their bloodiest months since the war began (100 US soldiers killed in October alone) really are a lacklustre bunch, aren’t they? The lazy sods. What they need, to really put some fire in their bellies, is an inquiry held two thousand miles away. Again, picture the scene.

‘You know, Osama, I really didn’t feel like rocketing that British garrison this morning,’ one militia will turn and say to his fellow fighter, ‘but there’s nothing quite like hearing Tony Blair sent his troops here on a false prospectus to really make me want to up my game. Let us away.’

‘Yes, Mousab,’ his comrade will reply, ‘I had believed their soldiers being poorly-equipped and their willingness to turn a blind eye to encroaching violent sectarianism in Southern Iraq to be their greatest weaknesses. But now I see it is their craven need to examine their mistakes in order to prevent such things from happening again that brings them low like dogs. Their spirit is broken. Basra is ours!’

‘Those forces of evil [...] will recognise an opportunity when they see it. They will see an opportunity to carry out more attacks, take more innocent lives and create a breach in our resolve,’ as Defence Minister Adam Ingram put it, understatedly, in an expression of the kind of wilful stupidity shamelessly posing as concrete logic that has made his Government worthy of the esteem in which it is held around the world. By ‘create a breach in our resolve’ he probably means the resolve of government ministers not to resign in disgrace.

There are reasons for and against holding an inquiry right now. The main reason against only really seems to be that the war isn’t finished yet. There could be years of it left. Although, taking the example of the inquiry into the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings in Northern Ireland which, having run for nine years already risks taking longer than the actual Troubles, we could kick off an Iraq inquiry now and have only just caught up by the time the troops are ready to leave.

The main reason for having an inquiry, apart from all that tedious stuff about preventing, in future ‘humanitarian’ interventions, the deaths of half a million people and handing an entire country to terrorists and fundamentalist headbangers, is to ram home to Blair the enormity of what’s he’s done. It should be a ferocious exercise in public humiliation matching only ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ in its capacity to make you wince. When he says we’re going to see Iraq right through to the end, you wonder what ‘end’ he’s talking about. Probably the end of his government and what’s left of his and its blood- and shit-spattered reputations.

It remains to be seen if there’s much new to come out about how we got where we are. What we do know, however, a public inquiry should collect in one place in order to appal future generations. There’s already so much information out there it would, you suspect, form a volume large and heavy enough to choke even John Prescott.

If it’s big and thick enough we could even bomb Iraqi insurgents with copies of it. Instead of the inquiry giving them heart, imagine the terror a plume of heavy reports falling from 35,000 would strike into the terrorists’ hearts. Although equally deadly, the report wouldn’t give anybody cancer or cause birth defects like the depleted uranium weapons we’re using out there, or lie around unexploded for children to find like the cluster bombs we’re so fond of.

In fact, there’s only one face it would explode in. And you can just imagine it making a satisfying boof sound as you thumped Tony Blair around the head with it.

(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)