I doubt if the Hutton inquiry now under way in the UK into the circumstances surrounding the death of the weapons expert, Dr David Kelly, will go to the heart of what occurred, writes John Waters.
I do not mean the British government's decision to go to war in Iraq, but rather the murky role of the British media.
Responses to last week's off-the-cuff remarks by the Prime Minister's official spokesman, Tom Kelly, suggest that the climate of piety surrounding Dr Kelly's death will make it difficult for anyone to suggest a disapproving interpretation of his actions.
Moreover, that one of the "defendants" will have a virtual monopoly on the presentation and interpretation of the proceedings casts the chances of objectivity in doubt.
The danger can already be observed in the fact that the inquiry is being framed as the Trial of Spin, as though spin had nothing to do with the role of the media.
Spindoctors emerged as a political response to a massive change in the culture of journalism. Once, journalists saw their role as the promulgation of information and opinion. Latterly, there has developed a sense that, by hunting in packs, journalists could actively intervene in the political arena - dictate policy, demand heads on plates and even topple administrations.
Although this daily scalp-hunt is presented in the language of a morality play, it is more like a computer game, with opaque, often arbitrary rules. Although there is a degree of ideological content, the chase has a hidden purpose and is only distantly connected to the public interest.
Its chief aim is to promote momentum. Although journalists embrace a range of political opinions, their primary agenda is not ideological, but plot-related.
They require a fast turnover of events, are indifferent to consequences and sometimes prefer a bad government to a good one. To regain the edge in this game, politicians began surrounding themselves with media experts. The best players, unsurprisingly, were people who themselves had worked in the media.
Following the toppling of Saddam there emerged a deep bitterness in the British media, centred on Tony Blair's refusal to do what leader writers said he ought to. He committed the cardinal sin of defying the media, and there is no coming back from that except in a fight to the death.
The events being investigated by Lord Hutton are in the train-spotting category, in no way concerned with the morality or otherwise of what has occurred in Iraq.
It is sad that Dr Kelly could not endure the pressure he had brought upon himself.
But the idea that he and the British media were engaged in some kind of heroic mission to expose the government's justification of its mission in Iraq is risible. The hypocrisy is awe-inspiring: that the Ministry of Defence breached convention in confirming to clamouring journalists that Dr Kelly had spoken to the BBC is treated as a grave matter, but the reporting of remarks made in a private conversation between a journalist and Tom Kelly, in breach of long- established parliamentary lobby conventions, is not.
Interestingly, neither Dr Kelly nor Andrew Gilligan, the BBC journalist to whom he gave the interview that led to his demise, espoused the peacenikism attributed to them. Both felt the government had acted correctly in sending troops into Iraq. Dr Kelly, according to various tellings, believed Saddam was indeed very close to being able to deploy weapons of mass destruction, and wished to return to Iraq to find the weapons which he believed to exist. From what has emerged, he raised with Gilligan only a minor quibble with the assertion that Saddam could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. Gilligan's view was even more supportive of the government's action, except that he believed it had advanced the wrong arguments.
In an article for the Spectator in April, he wrote that he had been convinced of the need to remove Saddam from power by studies he had read detailing the effects of sanctions on the Iraqi people, including the premature deaths of 150,000 Iraqis between 1990 and 1998.
He also believed that UN weapons inspections, being incapable of placing long-term pressure on Saddam, who would "have eventually resumed his policies of cheat-and-retreat", were unworkable.
Gilligan regarded the government as inept in its presentation of the arguments for intervention, and the Downing Street spin machine incompetent rather than "evil or Machiavellian".
How a conversation between two people with such views could feed a hanging party of bloodthirsty journalists in their pursuit of the finest European leader in our lifetimes will one day make an interesting PhD thesis.
In the meantime, it falls to Lord Hutton to save the world from the consequences of mutant journalism.