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Armed Forces

My Lords, we have now heard three former Chiefs of the Defence Staff give very sombre warnings, not only about future procurement but, in a particularly interesting speech on Afghanistan given by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, about the strategic evaluation of the situation in that particularly vexed and difficult country. I greatly regret that we are not having before the Summer Recess a full debate on the strategic implications on Iraq and Afghanistan. The Motion tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Garden, was awaited avidly by many of us on these Benches who wanted to contribute, but I gather that we can go wider in this debate. I certainly intend to do so. As we have heard from those three former Chiefs of the Defence Staff, using words which they weighed carefully, we face considerable—I would say unprecedented—levels of anxiety in the Navy, the Army and the Air Force. More or less every month, detailed reports in books—the most recent one was Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq—and many different analyses emerge about the extraordinary incompetence that has been demonstrated in the operation in Iraq. You have to go back to Gallipoli and the Dardanelles to find incompetence perceived as such a major factor in military operations. I do not think we can continue under the present situation. We have a new Leader of the Opposition, who is not committed, as in the past, and who can look afresh at these issues, and we have a new leader of the Liberal Democrats, who can look at these questions. There is now an overriding case to establish an inquiry that is very similar to the Dardanelles Commission. Noble Lords will remember that that commission was established in 1915 in wartime. It met in private for reasons of national security, but also because it wanted to talk to serving officers. It had on it two Members of the House of Lords, four Members of the House of Commons, an admiral and a general. It was in fact chaired by an admiral, although that would not be appropriate in the present circumstances. It would be better if it were chaired by a politician—one from the governing party. We have a very well equipped person—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg—who would make an excellent chairman. He is well known to the Prime Minister and the likely future Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and is a man of robust independence and intelligence with a legal framework. That commission should be charged with looking into the machinery of government in the conduct of the operations in Afghanistan and in Iraq from 2001 to the time when it may make its reports. I would expect it to sit predominantly, perhaps wholly, in private. As with the Dardanelles Commission, we are in many senses in a time of war, and it is not easy for serving officers to give evidence. Indeed, I think it is undesirable to give evidence in public in such circumstances. It is not easy even for people who have recently retired to speak out publicly while they know that what they say could be used against forces operating in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. They wish to say nothing to damage morale or to call into question the sacrifices already made by brave personnel who have either lost their lives or who have been very seriously injured. I speak as someone who believed, and still believes, that it was right to put forces into Afghanistan. I believed that it was right to invade Iraq, and I still believe that it is right to keep our forces in Iraq. I am very against some artificial exit strategy being devised. There will come a time when the Iraqi Government will ask us to leave Iraq, I hope because of success, or we may conclude that our presence is no longer making a better contribution and that we are doing more harm than good. I hope we do not reach that stage. In Afghanistan, we face horrendous problems. In practically no other country in the world is it harder to conduct a military operation successfully. History has shown us that painfully. It is where the British Empire arguably met its match many years ago, and where the Russian empire folded and collapsed in living memory. In those operations, which I believe, as I have said, should be conducted, it must be said, with some reluctance, that there is a massive loss of confidence in our capacity to handle these operations among many of the people who supported them in the first place and continue to support them. We need to be satisfied that the machinery of government that operates is the very best. If, in the First World War, it was possible for the first report of the Dardanelles Commission to focus on the Committee of Imperial Defence, the War Council and the very sensitive issue of what advice should come from senior admirals and generals—and now, of course, from Air Force officers—to the war Cabinet, why would such a thing not be possible now? Indeed, the question now is: why was a war Cabinet not established? It is also a time when we need to question very seriously the new machinery of government. In 2001, after the flush of electoral victory, with absolutely no independent objective study whatever, the Prime Minister introduced two Cabinet secretariats—one dealing with the European Union and the other dealing with the military and security question—inside No. 10, no longer serving the entire Cabinet, and breaking up the traditional structure of the Cabinet secretariat serving the Cabinet as a whole. It appears that there has been not the slightest change in the Prime Minister’s commitment to continuing with this machinery, despite the extraordinary record of incompetence. Just take one issue; namely, the Security Council debate on the second resolution. It is no good blaming President Bush or Secretary of State Colin Powell for that decision. They did not want a second resolution. At one stage, the French Government did not want a second resolution and were prepared to compromise. It was the British that went through to that and made the greatest miscalculation of the weighing of votes and opinions in the Security Council since the Suez crisis. We need to have more confidence in the machinery—the independent evaluation of the UN department in the Foreign Office—about what is happening in the Security Council, not just from New York, but from capitals, coming through the Foreign Secretary to the Cabinet to tell them how British interests can best be defended. This is not a judgment that can be taken solely in No. 10 with these secretariats, however well manned, without the full backing of the department of state of the Foreign Office. We need to know a lot more about how the Ministry of Defence also contributes to this debate. The resources question is vital. It cannot be ignored, but how is this independent advice brought and to whom does it go? I can think of no other occasion—certainly since the First World War—where the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Deputy Prime Minister, to say but two, have not been members of a war Cabinet which would have the independent advice of the chiefs in the Ministry of Defence; the full flow of information coming back from the field from commanders; the full flow of information from a Foreign Secretary who was reporting not just to the Prime Minister but to the Cabinet and the war Cabinet. The issues should be evaluated and the decisions taken in a properly balanced way with documents and minutes, and reported back from the war Cabinet to the full Cabinet. The absence of those things is no longer a minor issue. It is a deeply serious question. We have lost the lives of many servicemen during these operations already. Sadly, we will lose more. We in Parliament in this House of Lords and in the House of Commons have a responsibility. It is about time that we exercised it. I am extremely concerned about the Government’s response to the Public Administration Select Committee’s report, Government By Inquiry. Paragraph 215, recommends that,"““in future inquiries into the conduct and actions of government should exercise their authority through the legitimacy of Parliament in the form of a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry composed of parliamentarians and others, rather than by the exercise of the prerogative power of the Executive””." Not perhaps surprisingly, the Government disagree with the committee’s view that it is constitutionally less satisfactory for the Prime Minister to establish a committee of Privy Counsellors to address particular situations that may arise. It is time that majority, which exists in this House and in the House of Commons, called the Government to account, not in a spirit of vindictiveness or wanting to provide day-by-day headlines in public inquiries, but in a spirit of trying to find the best machinery for operating, particularly outside NATO. When we operate within NATO we know the machinery of government. We know the structures. We have worked with them for many decades. When we work in multilateral organisations, or bilaterally with the United States, different considerations apply. We need an independent look at that machinery of government for handling those difficult operations. I have spoken long enough. I say only this: I believe that there is no more important issue now for restoring morale in the services than for the Parliament of this country to assert its rights over the Executive and establish that inquiry, even though it is likely to be fought tooth and nail by the Prime Minister.