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Iraq and the wider Middle East

It is nearly four years since the great debate of 18 March 2003. Many hon. Members of all parties have entered the House since that date, and they may not be aware of all the arguments put forward then, but we must not forget that that debate had many precursors. The question of Iraq was discussed ad nauseam—certainly during the 1990s, and some would argue as far back as the 1980s. The problem of Iraq has a long genesis. Some of the earlier speeches astonished me, because it seems that history is still being rewritten. For example, the Foreign Secretary made little or no reference to the real origins of the mess in which we find ourselves. The right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) made some allusions to them, but did not go into detail. We cannot understand where we are going in respect of Iraq and the middle east in general if we do not understand where we are coming from. My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) referred to the changed tone in Washington. I was quite taken by that, but I trust that he has not looked at the websites run by organisations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Centre for Security Policy or the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. The approach of such hotbeds of neo-con ideology has not shifted one iota. That ideology remains the powerhouse driving American thinking in respect of both foreign and security policy, and we ignore it at our peril. My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South should not ignore the influence of neo-con ideology. We are all glad to see the hints and changes that we hope will result in a more benign American approach to the world, but it is a little simplistic to expect that a few quotations will be sufficient to change the existing solid commitment and direction of that country’s foreign policy. We must not forget how the problem started. Leading Members of this House did not mention that—an astonishing sin of omission. Indeed, one Opposition Back Bencher made an intervention earlier in which he advocated regime change. He clearly did not understand that one of the problems that we faced before the invasion of Iraq was that regime change is illegal and specifically ruled out by the UN charter. Any post facto attempt to justify what was done on the basis of regime change puts us on very dodgy ground. We should recall that the premise on which we went to war was that there was a clear and imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction. There were no weapons of mass destruction; there was no clear and imminent threat. We should remember, too, what the threat consisted of—capability plus intent—but there was no capability and no obvious intent on the part of Saddam. We can argue as much as we like about what a terrible man he was; of course he was, but he was no more terrible than many other authoritarian rulers on the planet. We were taken into war on a false prospectus. There were no weapons of mass destruction and no threat from them or anything else. At the time, much was made of UN Security Council resolution 1441, which we debated for a long time in this place. However, subsequent events—leaks, memos, memoirs—all reinforced the view held by many of us at the time that the resolution was just a pretext and that the decision had already been taken and the die was cast. It all goes back to 1998 and the letter to Bill Clinton from the Project for the New American Century. Studying the ““Who’s Who”” of the neo-con world who signed that letter helps us to understand why we ended up in the position we are in. That was America, however. The real problem was the decision taken by our Government, in our country, on our behalf. With that hindsight, it is truly amazing that the Prime Minister is still Prime Minister and that the then Foreign and Defence Secretaries—with the Prime Minister, the triumvirate who seemed to run the whole thing—are still in the Government. Nobody has been held to account, and I fear that nobody will be until the independent inquiry that is required looks into the whole process by which we were taken into what remains, by any objective analysis, an illegal and immoral war. What have we ended up with? Iraq is in complete chaos. The country is fragmented. I do not know how we define civil war if we do not define the situation in Iraq as such. There have been many deaths—estimates vary but the number is 650,000, according to The Lancet. After a while, we become numb. I am reminded of Stalin’s observation that the death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a mere statistic. I cannot cope with a figure of 650,000, but I am aware of the bodies scattered around marketplaces that we see nightly on our televisions. One of the other great damaging aspects of the situation has been the effect on our diplomatic and moral standing in the world, because other people view those scenes, not least in the Islamic world and the Arab world at large. As has already been adequately stated, there has been tremendous damage to our security. Like everybody else, I deplore violence wherever it takes place, but nobody can deny that the security situation facing Britain and British nationals has been immeasurably worsened by the fact that we took part in that illegal and immoral war. In conclusion, I can add little to what my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) said about Israel. He is an expert on that country, as well as on many other things. I concur with everything he said. I would add only that it is risible to suggest, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Jane Kennedy) did, that the wall was a security measure. It is not a security measure—it is a prison for Palestinians. The logic of her argument is that the Berlin wall should have been retained as a security measure for 17 million East Germans, which was patently not the case.