I WAS gripped by the TV series, Occupation, last week. The BBC's first Iraq war drama was many things, among them a study in post traumatic stress disorder.
One soldier misses the action so much he returns to Iraq as a 'private contractor' and loses his soul in corruption.
A second, pushed over the edge by the murder of an Iraqi friend, gives away his savings to the friend's family, in a foolhardy mi
ssion that finds him facing televised execution at the hands of a Shia militia.
A third soldier, no less tragically perhaps, responds to the horror by falling in love with, and risking it all for, the one good thing he finds in Iraq - a woman not his wife.
I missed the final episode, but I hear it ended tragically.
The series showed how people react to trauma in different ways.
Sometimes the cause and effect is clear; other times it's only when you look back, when it's too late, that you realises your destructive behaviour was the errant child of your suffering.
It was powerful stuff, and a welcome sign that the BBC is recovering from its own PTSD following the Hutton inquiry.
Gordon Brown, however, appears less willing to allow the public the chance to dwell on the details of the conflict.
I'm sure there are sound reasons, to do with national security, for keeping much of the inquiry into the Iraq war from us.
But I suspect there are also unsound reasons, to do with guilt, shame and fear of the electorate.
I'm not one of these people who thinks the Iraq war was an act of unmitigated folly.
I'm prepared to believe, or at least hope, that one day history might judge it an event that made the world a better place, albeit at a terrible cost.
And I concede that most of those who want the inquiry know already what they think of the war. (They're against it.)
But I hope those campaigning to have the inquiry made public get their way.
Last week I interviewed Peter and Christine Brierley, whose son, Shaun, was killed in Iraq days into the invasion.
Like the characters in Occupation, their responses to tragedy diverge.
Christine would be prepared to let it lie. But Peter cannot rest until he's done everything he can to find 'answers', and ideally an admission from Tony Blair that he got it wrong.
Peter argues that the war was a mistake, which would stand less chance of being repeated if Prime Ministers had to account in public for a decision to go to war.
This would be a powerfully inhibiting development - no bad thing, you might say.
As I write, Brown appears capable of being persuaded to go more public than he initially intended.
But his initial reluctance makes it hard to believe we are about to see a new era of transparency.
The government that blacks out details of the expenses it 'publishes' will have to be forced into letting us in on its private discussions in the run-up to war.
Meanwhile, the families of dead soldiers, like the poor souls in Occupation, will find it all the harder to move on.
