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Iraq

rose to call attention to the issues which Her Majesty’s Government face in Iraq; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I do not apologise to the House for bringing its attention back to the problems of Iraq. I believe that we are living through one of the worst setbacks for British foreign policy for many years. We are still living with that story, and we cannot be sure how it will end. There are two questions before us—when I say ““before us””, I do not mean just before the Government, because these are matters for Parliament and for everybody. The first question is how we can bring this war to an end that is tolerable for us, our servicemen and, above all, the people of Iraq. The Prime Minister made a start down this new road yesterday. The second question is how we can learn the lessons from our mistakes so that we do not repeat them. In the time available to me, I shall concentrate on the second question about learning lessons. I shall develop the case for a proper inquiry into the preparation for and conduct of this war. I would like to say a word or two first about the present situation as I see it. We are faced with the collapse of a state, Iraq, which has been rickety for many years, partly because of the brutality and corruption of its dictator, and made more rickety when undermined by the process of sanctions. In April 2003 we brought that rickety structure down to the ground. We shook it to pieces and then we stamped on the pieces. That structure, that state, has not been reconstructed, now three and a half years after the invasion. The test is simple; it is posed in the Baker-Hamilton report and bluntly answered. The report wrote: "““The Iraqi Government is not effectively providing its people with basic services: electricity, drinking water, sewerage, healthcare and education””." The elements of a new state lie around. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, constantly tells us and will tell us again today, there are good people trying to do good things. An assembly has been elected, a constitution has been drafted, although it is agreed that it should be revised, and there have been elections—though I must say that the elections have been used by the people of Iraq rather, it seems to me, to register the tribe or sect to which they belong. Certainly they have not been able as a result of those elections to provide themselves with a valid Government, because the Ministers huddled in the green zone up until now have not shown themselves capable—maybe they have not been able—to administer a state. So the country is fragmenting all the time. The biggest fragment, the Shia fragment, is fragmenting within itself. Only the Kurds in the north enjoy a reasonably peaceful autonomy, which of course was not created by the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but by arrangements made after the Gulf War of 1991. Elsewhere, into the gap where there ought to be orderly government have poured the forces of disorder: militias, criminals, terrorists and corruption. Saddam Hussein ran a corrupt state, but last year corruption was estimated at between $5 billion and$7 billion a year, and 150,000 to 200,000 barrels of oil are stolen every day. Some estimates are that half a million barrels of oil are stolen every day. These are not wild figures. Some of the Baker-Hamilton report’s recommendations have been disputed or ignored, but I have seen no one dispute the actual analysis; and the figures I have given come from that report. Al-Qaeda is now established in Iraq for the first time. It was not there in 2003; it is there today. The death toll is formidable. We concentrate—and this is perfectly natural—on our own service casualties, at just over 100, and the Americans do the same. The estimates for the number of Iraqi civilian dead vary hugely because there are no valid figures, but the number killed since the invasion is in the wide bracket of 50,000 to 150,000. The United Nations figure for last year alone is 34,000 Iraqi civilians killed. They were not killed, of course, by American and British troops but in the presence of American and British troops, who have been helpless to save them, although they were dispatched to rescue Iraq from its problems. In these circumstances the number of Iraqis who leave the country is not surprising. Two million have left and others leave as soon as they can find somewhere to go. We are talking of course overwhelmingly of professional people, who can get out and find something to do elsewhere. A total of1.8 million are displaced within their own country as a result of different kinds of ethnic cleansing. Are those the signs of a country slowly reviving under our care? Are they not rather proofs of a country still losing blood? That is why the critics and opponents of that war, that invasion, are now in the majority in this country, as in the United States. It does not follow that those of us who have always opposed the war believe in immediate withdrawal. We are where we are. We should not, in my view, have joined the Americans in the invasion, but we did and we cannot leave them in the lurch. That is why I welcome what the Prime Minister announced yesterday about the drawdown of British troops, of which Ministers have spoken in this House and elsewhere for some time. The Government should not deceive themselves. They should not be unrealistic or try to persuade us of something that is unreal about what we will be leaving behind, whether in Basra or in Iraq as a whole, as the American and British troops in the end withdraw. We shall not be handing over cities and provinces to stable institutions based on democracy and the rule of law. With luck—I underline, ““with luck””—we shall leave behind in Iraq something like a larger Lebanon, maybe just holding together, though subject to outbursts of sectarian violence, maybejust avoiding a civil war, though very far from reconciliation. That is an Iraq totally removed from the country that we aimed to create through our invasion. It is an Iraq that now, so far from serving as a model and inspiration to the Middle East, is regarded by its neighbours and everyone in the Middle East as a dark warning. Against that background the case for an inquiry into these matters seems overwhelming. Two sets of arguments were used initially to support and justify the war. One set was based on the threat to our security. That set of arguments broadly collapsed when it was found that there were no weapons of mass destruction. The second set of arguments was that it was our duty to rescue the people of Iraq from their brutal dictator. If we look at the results of that attempted rescue, they do not justify the invasion. How was that double miscalculation arrived at? The first set of arguments about weapons of mass destruction has been investigated and analysed to a considerable extent. We have the Hutton report and the report by the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, on the use of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. The noble Lord said, prudently, in his report that he and his colleagues did not regard his report on the question of the use of intelligence as the last word. An inquiry will need to look again at his serious, though soberly stated, criticism of the use of intelligence. However, in a way, the noble Lord urged us further. The paragraph in his report on the machinery of government perhaps lay a little outside his terms of reference, and he did not pursue it, but he blazed a trail for us. Very significantly, he criticised what he called, "““the informality and circumscribed character of the government’s procedures””," which make informed collective judgment more difficult. That is the noble Lord’s language; it is the kind of language which we are used to in our polite discussions in this House; but the crude profession of journalism very reasonably summed up his criticism as the criticism of sofa government. That aspect—what has gone wrong with the machinery of government—should be at the heart of an inquiry. The centralised direction of foreign policy, the sidelining of the Foreign Office and the consequent ignoring of experience inside and outside the Foreign Office, the tendency to listen to messages that those who are listening wish to hear and to sideline the others, and the tendency to take decisions informally without full and proper consultation are all allegations that need to be tested in an inquiry. Something went dangerously wrong at the heart of the decision-taking processes of our country. American democracy has now woken up, and is more vigorous in these kinds of things than our own. We now have across the Atlantic an outpouring of books and interviews, and we are only at the beginning of it. Now that we have a Democratic Congress, this process will continue. None of us could have mastered it all, but I have tried at any rate to follow some of the key things that have been published. One thing is common to them all; little or no attention is paid to British views or the British contribution to planning. I am not talking about our armed services and what they do, because I think that their contribution is understood; I am talking about the planning, the assumptions made at the beginning, and the thoughts on which the whole thing rested. There is almost universal silence on any contribution made by the British side. Can one imagine an American history of the American part played in the Second World War that did not pay attention to the views of Winston Churchill, or an American history of the Reagan presidency that ignored, for example, the contributions made at the Reykjavik summit, which I remember, by my noble friend Lady Thatcher? We are junior partners to the United States. Both Churchill and my noble friend were junior partners, and knew it. We seem to have lost that art, which is not an easy one, of being a junior partner, and we must somehow recover it. The most extraordinary and damaging question, into which an inquiry is needed, lay outside the inquiry of the noble Lord, Lord Butler. How did we proceed to war? How did we send our servicemen to kill and be killed without any serious planning of what would follow the immediate overthrow of Saddam Hussein? How did we take that decision on the basis of expectations that the Iraqis would generally welcome invasion and an army of occupation, contrary to the lessons of our own history, in Iraq and elsewhere, and indeed to common sense? I am genuinely amazed at how that can have happened, having had a little experience, as many noble Lords have, of this particular bit of our decision-taking process. This was well summarised in the recent Brookings Institution report, which said: "““It was arrogance in the face of history that led us to blithely assume we could invade without preparing for an occupation, and we would do well to show greater humility when assimilating its lessons””." That, in a way, is my text. Did we query that arrogance in the face of history when there was time to do so? Did we bring our own experience to bear? Apparently not. One commentator wrote about the ““blind spot”” in planning. Another wrote: "““It remains astounding that the coalition had no idea how to run the country they had just conquered””." These are quotations not from captious commentators outside the event but from Sir Christopher Meyer, Her Majesty’s ambassador in Washington, and Mr Robin Cook, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, both of whom were closely involved in the matters of which they wrote. Today in the newspapers we read of a similar statement by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, again an able and wholly dedicated public servant with precisely the experience that should have been brought to bear. The Prime Minister urges us to look forward and not back, but you can make better decisions in the future only if you know how you made your mistakes in the past. Somewhere in our system, fences were broken and walls were breached, and we need to repair them before the system is put to the test again. Some argue—I hope that Ministers will not shelter behind this argument, because it seems quite wrong—that we would be in some way prejudicing and upsetting our Armed Forces if an inquiry were announced. We are extraordinarily fortunate in our armed services, which are quite different from the kind of services in which some of us served briefly after the war. They are better trained, more intelligent and much more aware of the world. They know perfectly well that the Iraq War is now questioned and opposed by many—indeed, most—people. It is not a happy position for them to be in, but it is not created by the prospect of an inquiry. Of course they know it and it is patronising to suppose that they do not. The reassurance that we can give them is that what they are doing is praised and supported wholeheartedly by the overwhelming majority, even among those of us who are angry that they were led into this position. The Chief of the General Staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, in his rather remarkable outburst/statement some weeks ago, spoke from the heart of a covenant between servicemen and our Government. That covenant is now shaky for many reasons. I am glad that your Lordships will have an opportunity to discuss this next month in a debate to be introduced by my noble friend Lord King of Bridgwater. I believe that our servicemen are entitled to an inquiry on these matters and to ask that the mistakes be identified so that they are not repeated. It is not a rush, but the matter should not be left so long that memories fade and the trail of evidence goes cold. I therefore support what Mr William Hague said in another place; I support the suggestion that the Government should say now that they will establish an inquiry and that it should be set up by the end of the year. The precedents are there—Crimea, Dardanelles and Falklands. The Dardanelles inquiry was set up during a war, with strong support from the man who was chiefly pointed at—Mr Winston Churchill—so that is a good precedent. The case is stronger than the case for setting up the Franks inquiry into the Falklands War, which we did, after all, win. But, in all those cases, Parliament took its responsibility, which I believe we must do. This should be an inquiry not in anger. Some of us are angry, but the inquiry should be cool and sober. It should not be a trial; it should not be pointing to impeachment or criminal proceedings; it should be chaired by a judge; it should not be thronged by lawyers; and it should not be like the Bloody Sunday inquiry, which drags on. These were enormously difficult decisions for Ministers to take. However lamentable and, in my view, predictable their mistakes, they were decisions taken in good faith by those concerned—I do not doubt that—which should be part of the background. I would suggest an inquiry of privy counsellors, including individuals outside the present Privy Council who would be well qualified to serve on the inquiry and would become privy counsellors for the purpose of receiving information. The inquiry should be appointed by and answer to Parliament; it should have full access to all papers; and it should meet in public, except occasionally where that may not be right for intelligence reasons. But the report should be in full to the public through Parliament. The aim should not be to punish, or for X and Y to say, ““We were right””, and so on; that is secondary. The aim should be to learn. I believe that this is a necessary undertaking because there is much to be learnt. I hope that the Government will tell us now that at the right time and in the right way they will come to Parliament and set such an inquiry in hand. I beg to move for Papers.