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Defence Policy

But the Government know the number of deaths that have occurred among civilians in Iraq and in Basra, and their policy of saying that they will not give those figures is a disgrace. We still need a proper answer about what has been happening in Basra. Then there is the matter of the death squads. The UN’s human rights chief, John Pace, said that they were overwhelmingly linked to the Ministry of the Interior. The then Minister, Bayan Al Jabr, said that it was not down to him and that the death squads were from the facilities protection service set up by the coalition. When I asked a parliamentary question about the FPS, I was told that the UK trained it. Why have we been training and unleashing the death squads that have caused so much damage? I could raise plenty of other issues, such as Saddam Hussein’s trial and the killing of his third defence lawyer. He is not going to get a fair trial in Iraq, and it should be moved to The Hague. If it is all right for that to happen to Liberia’s Charles Taylor, it should happen to Saddam Hussein. President Bush is hell-bent on delivering the death penalty to Saddam Hussein and a fair trial can go hang as far as he is concerned. I could mention a host of atrocities, but time precludes me from doing so. Robert Fisk said in an article that, when the Americans bring a lot of bodies into the mortuaries, they say to the people there, ““Don’t do any post-mortems.”” In Haditha, 24 innocent civilians—women and children—were slaughtered in their own homes. Even the American ambassador has said that there is huge social discord among staff. There is a catalogue of problems. We need an explicit exit strategy. Muthana is a start, but there needs to be a coherent and swift exit strategy overall. That is not consistent with the criteria set out by Ministers, which were completely subjective and not measurable. The situation is not improving; it is closer to civil war—