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Iraq

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, for introducing this extremely important debate on Iraq. That Iraq is in a total mess needs no repetition from me. No one in that country feels safe. Militias and armed gangs roam the streets, and schools and universities function only intermittently. Shias and Sunnis, who despite their differences had lived together for centuries, fear and hate each other, and the entire social fabric is unravelling. Since the war on Iraq 100,000 civilians have died, five times as many have been badly wounded, 1.8 million have been internallydisplaced, and about 200,000—most of whom are professionals—have left the country. No less important is that corruption is rampant and people are developing habits of doing business relating to government which will last a long time and will leave a very dangerous legacy. Even after so many years, the coalition is completely clueless. Increasingly, we are losing faith in Prime Minister Maliki and we are trying to set up people who might be able to replace him one day who do not have much weight in the country and are unlikely to deliver. The question I want to address is: how did we end up creating a Hobbesian state of nature? It is important to know what mistakes are made—a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hurd—but it is more important to know what lessons we can learn. Here again we need to ask ourselves what kinds of lessons we want to learn. We do not want to learn simply about how decisions on going to war were taken. We need to learn even more important lessons about limits of power; lessons about the goals of our foreign policy in this increasingly changing and volatile world; and lessons about our relations with the United States, our ability to shape the events of the world and what it means to be a junior partner without being a poodle. Equally importantly from my point of view, the war on Iraq has damaged not only that country but our own democracy. We should ask ourselves: how is it possible for us to avoid being bounced into another misconceived adventure in future? My suggestion is that, rather than simply thinking in terms of an inquiry, we should think in terms of a national commission to explore the kinds of issues that I have raised about the nature of our democracy, democratic control on war-making, our foreign policy goals and our place in the world at large. We should debate these issues publicly; it is not just a matter of a small committee of inquiry. It is also very striking that those who have been associated with the war are now beginning to look for a moral fig-leaf which can allow honourable men to assuage their troubled consciences, and I am struck by the arguments being advanced. We are told that Saddam Hussein was evil; and should we not be glad that he is gone? My answer to that is that you do not reply to one evil by doing another which is just as evil. Even more importantly, with all the tyranny imposed by Saddam Hussein, we are in the process of not merely dismantling the state but of destroying the bonds of social cohesion which have existed between different communities. We were also told that, given the intelligence at the time about weapons of mass destruction, war was the only course of action and that no honourable person could have voted differently. I am not persuaded by this argument. The kind of intelligence that was available and the arguments that were made were put forward to many of us, and several of us on these Benches and elsewhere strongly opposed the war. I think that the intelligence was ambiguous, as was pointed out by our own people and the CIA. It was also widely known that it came from tainted sources and therefore needed to be scrutinised more carefully. Since the United States was determined to go to war under one pretext or another, we should have been more sceptical of the kind of intelligence proposed to us. Hans Blix was in Iraq and we should have allowed him to complete his mission and tell us conclusively one way or the other. We did not do that. Those who want to assuage their conscience also tell us that mistakes were made and that it is only human to make mistakes. My answer to that is that our mistakes follow a pattern. They are not isolated mistakes arising out of human fallibility. They reflect, as the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, rightly pointed out, a particular mindset—a mood of arrogance—and a simple and rather foolish assumption that once Saddam was toppled, people would embrace us most enthusiastically and would welcome us for going in. We should have known that no tyranny functions like that. It is a system and a tyrant is always supported by small tyrants in different walks of life. Therefore, chopping off his head would not remove the system. We were also so determined to go to war that we did not plan carefully and even tended to suppress critical reports that were coming to us from all directions. Since we went to war without the support of the United Nations, we denied ourselves access to the wealth and experience of various United Nations agencies and networks. What are the important lessons that we can learn from what has gone wrong? I want to highlight six important lessons, some of which are rather tentative because I am not entirely sure how they would work, but we need to ask ourselves some very important questions. First, what kind of democratic, institutionalised check can be introduced on the Government’s capability to go to war? Wars can be very attractive to politicians. They make ordinary politicians look like statesmen and national political figures rather than party-political ones. They also generate in the country at large, and certainly in political circles, a heightened sense of existence. Precisely because of the attraction of war, it is very important to have certain checks. The Prime Minister, rightly and courageously, put the matter to a vote in the House of Commons. That is not enough. It is quite possible for people of a particular political party to have their arm twisted into voting this way or that. I believe that it would be a good idea, if a war is really in the national interest, to insist that there must be a two-thirds majority. After all, if the matter is of that importance and the country is to go to war and to sacrifice lives and property, it should carry national cross-party support. Therefore, a minimum two-thirds majority should be necessary. It is also important that your Lordships’ House should not be marginalised, as if going to war was entirely the business of the other place. I therefore suggest that the House of Lords should be involved and that decisions relating to going to war should be debated and voted on here. The second important lesson concerns intelligence. Everyone involved knew—they say so now—that, given the intelligence, there was no alternative course of action open to them. If intelligence is so important, which it is, we should ask ourselves some very searching questions. Intelligence can be doctored and misinterpreted. Sometimes, even the way in which intelligence from various sources comes up the system causes many dissenting voices and reports to be sanitised or eliminated, and a kind of consensus is created. That is what happened here. It is also quite possible that the head of the Joint Committee and the Government or the Prime Minister might have prejudged what the other was going to say, and thus certain probing questions about the intelligence do not get asked. Given that intelligence is so crucial and that it has to remain confidential, is there any way in which we might be able to introduce some new procedures? A further thought occurs to me. I am new to your Lordships’ House, having been here for only six years. Nevertheless, I should have thought that therewere certain innovative ideas in one or two other jurisdictions that we might care to think about. One possibility might be to have two or three senior privy counsellors accustomed to handling evidence of this kind, utterly reliable men of honour who could be asked to look at the evidence and advise the Prime Minister on whether they are satisfied that the intelligence is reliable and takes into account all the floating bits of information that might have come from a variety of sources but became sanitised on their way through the system. The third lesson we might learn concerns the Attorney-General’s legal advice. If the whole nation is to be committed to war and to make sacrifices oflives and property, it should be reassured and its conscience allowed to be quite clear that the war is lawful and right. I suggest that the Attorney-General’s advice should be published in full and debated among the pundits in the area so that we are reassured that the available expert legal advice really is agreed. The fourth important lesson has to do with our relations with the United States. The noble Lord, Lord Hurd, made an extremely important point when he said that we cannot be a senior partner to the US, but can be a junior one. But junior partners do not have to be obsequious or behave like poodles. What does it mean to be a junior partner? Junior, yes, but nevertheless a partner. It is therefore important that we are able to speak our mind freely and bring to the Americans the wisdom that has grown out of our300 years of political experience in all walks of life. I was struck during my time as a professor there when many of my friends in the Democratic Party would say, ““Look, the whole thing is wrong. Why is the British Prime Minister not speaking up? If he did, it would give us the kind of strength we need””. Many of them either felt strongly or were convinced that if we had taken a more open and courageous stand, perhaps the course of war might have been different. If we are going to measure up to the Americans, we ought to link up with other important units of power. They could be the European Union, India, China or other countries. When we work with them it will become possible for us to carry a lot of weight. The fifth lesson concerns the fact that the idea of imposing democracy and justifying imperialism in terms of democracy is not at all new to the neo-cons. Those of us who know American history will know that unlike European colonialism, which was legitimised in terms of spreading liberty and civilisation, for nearly 150 years the Americans have legitimised what they have done in terms of spreading democracy. I cite Cuba in the 19th century. It was occupied and ““liberated”” by the Americans from Spanish despotism. The same sort of story was told of the Philippines. The project of spreading democracy was suspended during the Cold War for obvious reasons. It was resumed on 9 November, or 9/11 according to the European calendar, when the Berlin Wall came down, and it was resumed with more ferocity according to the American calendar after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We need to use our wisdom and power to try to persuade the United States that this is not the way to go. The sixth lesson is that it is likely that we may fall into the trap of thinking that because democracy cannot be imposed, we have no duty to propagate it abroad or to promote it in other countries. That would be a mistake. We do have a duty to promote democracy, but we can learn important lessons from the European Union and how it has gone about it: through incentives, expert advice, making money available, encouragement, joint seminars, training experts, and making sure that democratic ideas are spread in the accession and candidate countries. We know also from painful experience that democracy cannot survive in a country if its neighbours are hostile, because they will see that society is fragmented. If we are to promote democracy in countries where it is badly needed, there will have to be a regional solution because there cannot be a single-country one.