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Iraq

I have been on my feet for seven minutes, and I have made very little progress. It is now more than three years since the Government committed UK forces, as part of an international coalition led by the United States, to military action against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Saddam Hussein had repeatedly and openly defied the authority of the United Nations, and before UN Security Council resolution 1441, which was carried unanimously because of the unanimous conviction that he represented a serious danger to the international community, he already stood in material breach of 17 separate UN resolutions. He refused fully to co-operate with the weapons inspection regime imposed on him as someone who had both possessed and used weapons of mass destruction. The international community as a whole—not just the United States and the UK—believed that he had developed and wished further to develop WMD capability.