Why a mother had to visit the place her son died

They scatter 179 poppies - one for every serviceman and woman killed in Iraq, looking so British in this alien and dangerous place.
A mother, her blonde hair covered by a white scarf, holding the hand of a father in a blue shirt and sensible shoes as they stand on a dirt road in a slum in Basra, Iraq.
"I just wanted to see where Matthew took his last breath," says Maureen Bacon, "to try and make sense of it all."

"Soldiers put their lives on the line," her husband Roger tells me. "You know that, but it doesn't lessen the grief."

Matthew, the Bacons' son, was a major in the Intelligence Corps. He was killed in this desolate spot in 2005 when his army patrol was targeted by a roadside bomb. Maureen and Roger have waited 11 years to visit the place where Matthew died, to lay a small cross and to try to understand why their son died here.

"It's a rite of passage in a way," says Roger.
They had both been against the war from the start, but knowing Matthew was a professional soldier whose life was military service his parents accepted the risks. But like many families who lost loved ones they want to know if they were told the truth about why the nation went to war here.

For me this trip is the culmination of 14 years of reporting for Panorama from Iraq - a chance to re-visit Basra to assess what went wrong ahead of Sir John Chilcot's Iraq Inquiry, which will report next week.
I was with British troops when they entered Basra in 2003, as they fought a losing battle and when they pulled out after six years of war. The inquiry is expected to tell us all why the nation went to war, who was responsible for the mistakes that were made and what lessons should be learned.
Just a few days after the British took Basra I found poor families squatting in the pink stucco mansion of the governor here - Saddam Hussein's cousin who had just fled the city. Nicknamed Chemical Ali for masterminding the killing of thousands of Iraqis with poison gas, he had become the symbol of the brutal regime. A small crowd outside the mansion burst into applause when they saw me with British troops. "We want to thank Tony Blair," a woman told me.

That sense of gratitude and optimism that there would be a new and prosperous future for Iraq soon disappeared. Within a week of the invasion, on night patrol with the Irish Guards it was clear to me the British Army was in for a long haul.
Looters and criminals were terrorising householders who were arming themselves. There were never enough British troops on the ground to prevent a breakdown of law and order in southern Iraq, where five million people live, mostly Shia Muslim.
Saddam Hussein's Sunni Muslim regime had been ousted but now there was a power vacuum that would be filled quickly by Shia militias - backed by neighbouring Iran, the biggest Shia power in the region.

The brigadier who led British troops into Basra has also returned with me to the city, 13 years after we first met here.
Graham Binns and I walk beside al-Zubair road bridge, now busy with traffic, where his forces had tried to prevent Saddam Hussein loyalists mortaring their own people as the city fell to the British.
Now retired, Binns is frank about the mistakes that were made. "I don't think we had a coherent plan in the longer term. The coalition hadn't thought through how we were going to operate in the aftermath of the war fighting," he admits. "We were unprepared both physically and mentally."

Within weeks of the invasion the British government had drawn down the troops from 46,000 to just over a third of that. The liberators had quickly become occupiers, but on a visit to Basra Tony Blair assured the soldiers that the Iraqis would be grateful.
"When people look back on this conflict I honestly believe they will see this as one of the defining moments of our century," he said then.
However, I had watched British troops struggle from the beginning to provide basic services such as water. Saddam Hussein's regime had deliberately run down the infrastructure of Shia-dominated Basra.

For Mark Etherington, one of a handful of British civilian administrators sent to Iraq, it was clear there was no strategy, no real plan for the reconstruction promised by the British. "A local tribal chief told me, 'Everything is broken and needs to be fixed - now,'" says Etherington, "and there were only two of us at the time."
For the Americans it was "mission accomplished" by May 2003 although Iraq was fast descending into anarchy - ministries in Baghdad had been burned and looted as soon as Saddam Hussein was toppled. The Bush administration imposed the policy of de-Baathification, removing not just the dictator's ruling party but the whole infrastructure that had held the nation together.

"This was a centralist economy - the factories, the dams, the police - you name it, we were now responsible for it," says Etherington. "We stripped the framework of the nation by removing a regime," says Binns, "and didn't replace it with anything that promoted stability. We drew down too quickly."
Before the war Tony Blair disregarded experts who warned of the risks of removing a dictator. He told the nation the real threat was Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. In Iraq then with UN weapons inspectors, I visited many alleged WMD sites. We were guided by Blair's infamous dossier, which had been produced by British intelligence and made the case for war. The weapons were never found despite Blair's assertion in parliament that Saddam Hussein had existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons which could be activated in 45 minutes.

The Iraq (Chilcot) Inquiry

British public inquiry into the nation's role in the Iraq war, announced in 2009 by the Prime Minister Gordon Brown,
Proceedings were originally to take place in private, a decision which was reversed after criticism by MPs and the media
Former senior civil servant Sir John Chilcot (pictured) was appointed chairman of the inquiry; he defined its terms thus: "It will consider the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009, embracing the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, the military action and its aftermath."
Open sessions of the inquiry began in November 2009 and concluded in February 2011 - witnesses included senior military figures and politicians, including Tony Blair and Gordon Brown
The inquiry will publish its report on 6 July 2016

In New York at the time, the UN chief inspector Hans Blix told me he never knew if the Iraqis were telling the truth when they denied there were any WMDs but he was sceptical of the intelligence provided by the British. So did the prime minister put a gloss on flimsy evidence to make a false case for war, I wondered?
I've been back to see Blix, this time in Sweden. He reveals he believes Blair misrepresented the facts in Parliament, by suggesting any weapons unaccounted for from a decade before were still in existence. "I never claimed that it was in bad faith," said Blix. "Many people bring themselves to believe something that they want to believe."

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