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Debate on the Address

My Lords, I have hesitated a little, because what I want to say about Iraq runs against the convention of this House, which I admire and try to follow; namely, that debate should be cool and courteous in tone, whatever the subject being discussed. However, if Parliament is not angry about what is now happening in Iraq, it is not doing its job. The Prime Minister said at the Mansion House a few evenings ago that the situation in Iraq was changing and evolving. I am not sure that it is greatly changing in Iraq itself, although perhaps we are more conscious of it. Every day dozens of tortured corpses of Iraqis are discovered in Baghdad; it is as normal as a rubbish collection in a normal city. The American forces make gallant attempts to pacify one town after another, only to find that it lapses out of control when that effort ceases. In the south and elsewhere we continue to train police—only to find that their men, weapons and uniforms turn up at the disposal of some murderous militia. Iraqis of talent and education who can get out of Iraq are pouring out. This is a country bleeding to death in the presence of 150,000 American and 7,000 British troops. Yet we listen day by day to comforting announcements of progress from Iraqi and British Ministers—and I am afraid that the Minister today yielded somewhat to that temptation. There is nothing new in any of that; what has changed is the attitude across the Atlantic. The American people under their constitution have found a way to turn their anxiety and anger into action: one of the main authors of the war has been dismissed from his post. I have just spent a few days in the company partly of the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, in Washington. It is exciting to find that, although there are no new answers yet, there is an intense and open debate based on an assumption that Ministers here were denying until a few days ago—the assumption that the present policy in Iraq has been a failure. I can understand why with some exceptions there has been no such angry debate in this country since 2003. Many people were misled by the original misinformation about weapons of mass destruction. More important is the strong and good tradition that, once our forces are in the field, they are entitled to support and criticism should be muted and questions put to some extent in private. But that entitlement of our Armed Forces does not protect Ministers who launched them on this misadventure. They must not be allowed to hide, as they sometimes do, their persistent blindness and many miscalculations behind the admiration that we feel for the Armed Forces of the Crown. None of your Lordships can be unaware of the deep current of unease which is seeping out of our Army at all levels. That is the unease that led the Chief of the General Staff, remarkably, to say what he said the other day. Soldiers does not think that it is for them to judge whether a war is right or wrong—they see that, I am sure, as a matter for government and Parliament—but they do expect a proper plan and credible strategy. They expect Ministers to think things through clearly in a way in which they have clearly failed to do since 2003. At the right time there must be a proper inquiry. I do not mean that we should trail again through an inquiry into the use or misuse of information about weapons of mass destruction but about the whole question of how with so little thought and so little valid planning for the post-war phase we were led into an invasion which ignored all the lessons of history—as the right reverend Prelate said—all that we knew about Iraqi and Arab nationalism and all that we should know about the limits of military power. This is a matter not simply of historical analysis but of pressing present interest. What assumptions were made in 2003 about our needs with regard to the turn of events in Afghanistan? Our operation there, as most noble Lords and Ministers would agree, is at a tipping point. Within a short period we will know whether or not we can make a good difference in that country. Some argue that our chances of success would have been greater if we could deploy more than 5,000 men in the south of Afghanistan. But we cannot; the men are not available, because they are in Basra struggling with gangs of criminal kidnappers and a politicised and corrupt police force. The word ““strategy”” is used for more or less everything. The Prime Minister uses it constantly for just about every form of public activity. But we have had no military strategy in the Middle East. We have wandered into these policies without regard for the relationship between them. That is the reason for the unease I have mentioned in the Armed Forces, and one reason out of many why I believe an inquiry is required. Regarding the future, we cannot pull our troops out of Iraq regardless of the Americans. Now we are there, we have to act with them. I support the proposals sketched out in the Washington Post over the weekend by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a wise adviser to this Government. I wish his advice when he was in Baghdad had been more constantly taken. In brief,he suggests an external conference of all Iraq’s neighbours, called by the UN rather than the Americans; internally we should require the Iraqi Government to insist that their state has a monopoly on the use of armed force; and the Iraqi Army, which, as has already been said, is much less corrupted by politics than the police, should be used to disarm the militias. That is a gamble, as Sir Jeremy acknowledges, but the truth is that there is now no tolerable outcome of the Iraq war that is not a gamble. There is one point the Prime Minister makes that puzzles me. He says we will stay in Iraq as long as the Iraqi Government want us. Any Iraqi Government, whatever happens? Surely that cannot be right. There is an elected Government in Baghdad, but they do not in effect rule the country. Iraqi Ministers are huddled in the Green Zone in which they rely on us for their protection, even survival. We cannot tell who the Government will be in coming weeks or months, or what they will say. In such uncertainty, surely it must be for Her Majesty’s Government, not the Government of Iraq, to decide in the last resort, with our United States ally, how long we stay in that country. I hope the Minister will confirm that. It seems to me an important point. If we stay with the Americans, as we must, we are entitled to a full voice in their debate. I have huge respect for Jim Baker, who was my colleague and friend in the first Gulf war. Although a study group is difficult to imagine as an instrument of policy, I hope he will come up with wise ideas that may help. The Prime Minister spoke to the policy group about Palestine. He said what was right: that a new initiative to reinforce the peace process is needed. But he has been saying that to the Americans for three years now without any great effect. The truth is that, although he has gained a lot of respect, particularly in Congress, which supported the war, he has lost the art of acting as a junior partner to the United States. Winston Churchill pioneered that art and I have seen it practised by Margaret Thatcher and John Major. It is a difficult art which relies on having a firm voice and something useful to say, and we have lost it for the moment. We must wait—I hope not for too long—for a leadership that somehow acts as a true partner to the United States, but finds again a British voice.