Wilkie says Iraq war inquiry still needed INDEPENDENT MP Andrew Wilkie says the Iraq war will remain a "festering sore" in Australia's history until a full inquiry is held into the country's role in the conflict. It's a decade on Monday since Mr Wilkie quit Australia's peak intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments (ONA), over the Iraq conflict. The former Army officer said he was the only serving intelligence official from the "coalition of the willing" to break ranks before the war started in March 2003. Time had not diminished the shocking reality that Australia's involvement in the Iraq War was unethical, unnecessary and illegal, he said. Mr Wilkie said the former coalition government took Australia to war on grounds that Iraq possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction which could be passed to terrorists. "But no WMD or evidence of co-operation between Iraq and al-Qaeda were ever found," he said in a statement on Monday. This was no accident, because the invasion of Iraq was based on a lie and no amount of Liberal Party revisionism of the reasons for the war will let the Howard Government off the hook. Mr Wilkie said there had been two reviews but no full inquiry into Australia's role. "The Iraq war will remain a festering sore in Australia's history until a proper inquiry into our country's involvement is held and those responsible for the misadventure held to account," he said. Such an inquiry should include the still secret ONA assessments and reports, diplomatic cables and emails which clearly explain the thinking in Washington and London at the time and which make a mockery of the Australian Government's repeated official explanation for the debacle. The Greens, former prime minister Malcolm Fraser and others have called for an inquiry into Australia's participation in the Iraq war. Neither Labor nor the coalition have shown any inclination to launch such an inquiry.