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Address in Reply to Her Majesty’s Most   Gracious Speech

My Lords, these are the first-ever words I have uttered in public on the subject of the war in Iraq. In truth, I have also said rather few words in private, if only to preserve domestic peace and the amity of my closest friends. Those have required me to remain silent for a lot of the time. I want to come back to the subject today not to rake over the coals or to replay history, but because I think that some lessons have yet to be learnt from what we have been through over Iraq. They are lessons more about the style in which we conduct the kind of debate that occurred nationally over Iraq than about the content. My reluctance to speak will, I am sure, be understandable to everyone who knows the depth of experience and knowledge of foreign affairs in this House and the depth of my ignorance. I owe the little I know to a brief year as political adviser to Tony Crosland in the Foreign Office where I had the good fortune to be taught by, among others, the noble Lords, Lord Wright and Lord Williamson, and others whom I see in the Chamber today. I felt that ignorance probably counselled silence. Perhaps more relevant to what I want to pursue this afternoon is the fact that I found it amazingly difficult to make up my mind on what I thought about the war. The arguments on all sides were extremely compelling, but the shortage of information on which to base the view one took was severe, and I found it jolly difficult. I can remember what my position was on the day that the decision was taken. It was 51:49 as follows: I thought that the Americans were making a mistake by going in without a second UN resolution, but on the whole I was inclined to think that it would be best for us to go with them in the hope of exercising some limited moderating influence. That was my position, although I could have taken any number of others. But there was great doubt in my mind. Like all Members of the House, I try to follow public affairs, but the ““Not Very Sure, Don’t Know”” party went totally unrepresented in the debate we held as a country. I blame that on our polarised national politics, where people take partisan positions and are reluctant to diverge from them. I also blame it on developments in my own profession; namely, the media. Someone cannot take part in a phone-in programme and say, ““I am not sure what to think about Iraq”” or ““There is something to be said for the Prime Minister’s position and something to be said for the other side””. One has to go in with an absolutely hard attitude, however little it may be based in research and fact. Seeing the noble Lord, Lord Rees-Mogg, in his place has reminded me of a remark made by another distinguished editor of the Times. When approached in the newsroom by a junior reporter who wished to explain what would be the correct line for the paper to take on one of the great issues of the day, the editor drew himself up to his not very full height and said, ““Listen, laddie, when I want yer opinion I’ll give it to ye””. To some extent, we have found it hard as a society to accept a position where we take the lead from those who have greater knowledge and somehow the worship of demos—in particular by the media—has gone too far. That concludes the first point I want to make. My second point is that there were two bases for the war—weapons of mass destruction and getting rid of Saddam. As regards the first of those, the fact that a decision turns out to be wrong does not make it a wrong decision. Decisions have to be made without the benefit of hindsight and on the facts as they are known at the time. As I came to the position that I took, it seemed to me that Saddam almost certainly had weapons of mass destruction. That was not because I had seen the intelligence—it would not much have affected me if I had because my one year in the Foreign Office taught me to apply due scepticism to intelligence—but because I thought that, if he did not have weapons of mass destruction, why was he pursuing a course that looked certain to lead to the destruction of his regime? And that is what happened. He ended up being dragged out of a hole in the ground to face probable execution. I obviously had an insufficient understanding of the mind of dictators—Saddam was prepared to continue on his course of action despite that—but it did not seem a bad shout at the time to think that he would not do that unless he had some weapons of mass destruction. That also applied to my right honourable friend the Prime Minister, who had to make the judgment. It seemed a strong reason for supposing that the intelligence was not faulty. My next point is perhaps more controversial, but I shall make it nevertheless. As I say, these are difficult matters and difficult judgments, and it is very distressing—I felt this strongly over the past few weeks of the election campaign—when the debate gets dragged down in language to the point where one side is casting doubt, not on the correctness of the judgment made by the other side but on its bona fides in making it. I was deeply sorry, therefore, that the Leader of the Opposition chose to apply to the Prime Minister during the debate the word ““liar””. I was glad that the Liberal Democrat leader avoided that trap. ““Liar”” is a very strong word. It does not mean ““wrong””—you can be wrong without lying. It means that you were wrong, which is a necessary condition, and that you knew you were wrong. I am prepared to believe that the Prime Minister made all kinds of mistakes, including gilding the lily on various aspects of the case for war. I am not prepared to believe—there are very few people of whom I would believe it—that he would send the country to war deliberately on the basis of an untruth on a false prospectus dreamt up in his own mind. Very occasionally in foreign affairs lying is necessary—for instance, you lie about your intentions if you are about to go to war, otherwise you would endanger your troops. Even in this country, very occasionally lies have been told in foreign affairs—I think of the Suez case, which has left its image on us. But it would be sad if that term, which, rightly, in another place, is an unparliamentary term, becomes part of the abuse of democratic politics. We need to show continence. I do not believe that it did the Conservative Party any good. Such evidence as I have seen has suggested that it put people off voting Conservative rather than helping. But more, it did no good to politics in this country because it dragged it down to the level of dialogue below that to which it should aspire. So there were no weapons of mass destruction, but can you do what the Prime Minister sometimes does without quite doing it and say, ““Well, it is all right because we have got rid of Saddam. That was enough of a reason to go to war””? People who say, ““It was all right to go to war to get rid of Saddam; the trouble was that we did not have a plan”” are going down a false route. I am not sure that that is factually correct. I have heard of 15 volumes of American plans for a post-war, post-Saddam Iraq, but I do not know what has happened to them. But none of us believes now that even such a simple thing as an economy can be planned centrally or that you can know all the facts you need to know to plan an economy centrally. That is why we have moved to a market economy. If you are talking about highly complex societies of which, because they are dictatorships, our knowledge is of necessity insufficient and about which our emotional intelligence may be inadequate, the idea that we can plan a future for such countries and have a blueprint that will take wings when we get in there and deal with the succession problems is nonsense. Such operations are by their nature uncertain and hazardous. I draw a final conclusion from that in regard to intervening for reasons of regime change in general. There may be in the future—I hope not—such a case in respect of Iran. Clearly, you should never say that you will never intervene militarily against a regime that is behaving unbearably. You should not do so because, in a very limited number of cases, it would be right to intervene, particularly when that regime is extremely weak in its own country and you can be fairly sure, even without having a detailed plan, that you can put things right. You should not do so because, once you take away the threat of military intervention, you reduce the chance of better behaviour by whoever it is you want to change. You should not ever rule it out—but, by God, you should be incredibly careful before going in. I notice that the noble Lord, Lord Garden, is nodding; I find that military people are most aware of the case against intervention. Before you intervene, you must think about it. If you think the answer is ““Yes””, you must think about it some more. If you still think the answer is ““Yes””, half the time you had still better not do it.