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Iraq and the wider Middle East

Like many of my hon. Friends, I have had Iraqi friends all my adult life, and I always opposed Saddam Hussein. However, I could not translate support for my friends into support for the war, and they did not seek to persuade me to do so. I have not spoken about Iraq in the House since I voted against the invasion, because I continue to be angry about the original decision and I am sickened by the terrible loss of life, both civilian and military. I take no consolation from the fact that I knew that I was right in thinking that no significant weapons of mass destruction would be found, that chaos would ensue, and that unilateral action would be disastrous for our standing in the world. I was prompted to contribute today, as was the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), by the Prime Minister’s speech on foreign policy and defence on 12 January. The Prime Minister spoke of hard and soft power. On Iraq, he simply said:"““with Saddam consistently refusing to abide by UN Resolutions and with alarm at the proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, Iraq was invaded.””" He then immediately moved on to a discourse on Islamic terrorism. There was no analysis of what that exercise of hard power had cost. There was no acknowledgment that al-Qaeda had never been active in Iraq before the invasion, and no mention of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have died as a result of the sectarian violence that we have unleashed. There was no mention of the millions—yes, millions—of Iraqis who have fled the country, although retrospectively we said that we invaded the country in order to liberate them. There was no mention of the fact that the country’s infrastructure lies in ruins, and the whole region faces destabilisation. The Prime Minister warned Britain against retreating from embracing both war fighting and peacekeeping, and instead embracing peacekeeping alone. He thinks that that might be a popular option, and he could be right. If he is right, it is because of Iraq, but he is wrong to counterpose war fighting and peacekeeping; there is also peace building, a more subtle art that may prevent conflict and heal wounds. Peace building has to be founded in international law, and it requires us to see the world from more complicated perspectives, not simply through the prism of US global interests. Many of us hoped that that would be part of the ethical foreign policy that we promised. That ethical foreign policy is still there in our superb international development work, in our support for Africa, in our leading on climate change, and in our positive role in helping to reform the international institutions. However, those huge international endeavours have been fundamentally undermined by our invasion of Iraq.