---

Iraq

My Lords, I start by complimenting the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Walker of Aldringham. At times like this, it is particularly appropriate to remind us that when war comes to an end the experience that people suffer in them continues. He has great knowledge of that and it is something that we should never let ourselves forget. I congratulate again the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, for bringing forward this debate. It is an important one. I agree with him about the inquiry. I took the view early after the conflict that we ought to have an inquiry of the Falklands type and I dropped a note to the Prime Minister to that effect. However, it is too late now. This is not the right time for it in any event and I am not sure that the topic is right. I agree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Butler, that the areas have been well covered in the media and elsewhere, which enables us to know what the key mistakes were. I will return to those, but the core issue for me and for many of us—this was put well by the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson—is that Iraq is not the beginning and end of this problem. It is part of a wider problem that has been growing and confronting us, particularly since the end of the Cold War: when and how we should intervene. The noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, who is not here today, made an excellent speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies yesterday. It really bears reading by noble Lords. It addresses the issue that troubles some of my friends on this side—my noble friend Lady Turner would have been impressed by it. The issue is not whether it was a good idea to remove Saddam Hussein, although I understand what the noble Lord, Lord Butler, said about the legality of that. My view has always been that there is a case for regime change. We need to make that case. The problem is not just one for Britain and America: it is a problem for the European Union and also the United Nations. Why is it a problem for the European Union? The noble Lord, Lord Hurd, will remember well that at the time of Bosnia, when he was a distinguished Foreign Secretary, many of us including myself called for intervention. I remember him saying very clearly, ““I understand those people who are calling for something to be done, but the problem is they never say what””. I understand that—but let us recognise what was happening there. White European Muslims were being murdered, massacred and tortured by white European Christians and the white European Christians sat back and wrung their hands but did nothing. Then came Kosovo, where the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, worked very hard to get the United States involved. Europe, with all the soft power that it exercises, which is very important and effective soft power, has neither the will nor the ability to deliver hard power. So we could not actually deal with Kosovo—we wanted the United States to come in and do it for us. We have to ask the question that if the United States is asked to come and sort out some of Europe’s problems, which we cannot deal with ourselves, where is the position of Europe in relation to the United States? That question goes beyond the present Administration in the United States. It is not impossible that we will have other Kosovo-type problems around the borders of Europe, so we really do need to think about this issue of intervention. The noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, yesterday made the point that intervention involves a plan before, a plan during the military operation and a plan after it. I do not think that it is true to say that the United States or the British Government did not have a plan for post-conflict—they did. The trouble is—and the noble Lord, Lord Jay, made this point very well—that there was not enough focus on it here, for reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Butler, has given. But, more importantly, two key mistakes were made. The first mistake, to which a number of noble Lords have referred, was that there was a lack of sufficient numbers of troops on the ground to deal with policing the situation. The other mistake was profoundly important. If you are going to make the assumption that we have lost Iraq, although I do not think we necessarily have, the period in which we lost it was between 16 and 23 May 2003. Why? Because on 16 May Paul Bremer, who was put in charge very suddenly by the United States, took the decision to get rid of the whole civil service in Iraq just because it was Ba’athist. Before that, of course, you could not get a job in the civil service in Iraq unless you were a member of the Ba’ath party—so there were good and bad people in that civil service structure. Then, on23 May, the truly disastrous decision was to get rid of the Iraqi army, sending all those people with training and knowledge of weapons and who knew where theweapons were into long-term unemployment without any pay. At that stage, we lost control on the ground. My answer to the question whether we should have intervened is yes. But if you are going to intervene you make sure that you have a pre-conflict plan, a plan for during the conflict and a post-conflict plan. We had a lot of that but the mistakes were of the type that I outlined. I do not think that any of this was done with bad intent—which was a point that was made by a number of noble Lords. All of it was done with good intent, but we are still struggling with the issue of how and when to intervene. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, will like this or not, but I have always seen him as one of the post-Treaty of Westphalia Foreign Secretaries. That treaty made the point, 400 years ago, that you should not intervene in the internal affairs of the nation state. That treaty was really at an early stage of the development of international relations. If you think about it, that treaty, which was held to for many years, was thrown out in 1944-45, because if we had held to it then we would have stopped attacking Nazi Germany at the time when we reached its borders, having excluded it from all the countries that it had invaded. We would have let Hitler get on with governing the rest. That is precisely what we did with Saddam Hussein in 1991—and at that stage we had Muslim countries on board with us. I understand why at that stage we made the decision not to carry on and remove him, because there was a fear of civil war—of what we have now, which is something very close to civil war. The words here are not important; we know that the killing is appalling and nobody wants to see it continue. But the issue then was that we had an opportunity to remove a despotic leader. Another aspect of that argument is that we always underestimate how disastrous a long period of brutality is on a nation, although we got it right in Germany and, largely, with Japan, where again it is worth remembering that far from disbanding the Japanese army the British used it to police Vietnam and parts of Indonesia with British officers in charge. We administered it for six months to a year before the French came in again to take over. We knew what needed to be done in broad terms—but now things are infinitely more difficult. The nature of modern weapons means—and the Prime Minister is absolutely right on this—that you cannot ignore problems elsewhere in the world. That is where the Treaty of Westphalia approach fails. That process, which held for 400 years, broke down in the 20th century and is certainly not appropriate now. We need ways in which to decide how and when to intervene. If we ask ourselves what would have happened if instead of just saying no to Britain and the United States having made a decision to go into Iraq the United Nations and the European Union had said, ““Yes, but we want to make sure that we manage the post-conflict situation””. I venture to suggest that the situation would be significantly different and better, had that happened, because the European Union particularly is very good at post-conflict situations, as is the United Nations. By doing it without them we had the dreadful position of Europe being divided—and when people ask, as a couple of noble Lords have done today, whether the influence that the Prime Minister had in the United States could have been greater, the answer is that yes, it certainly could have been if Europe had been speaking with one voice. But it was speaking withtwo voices; it was weak and ineffectual—yet it is only 10 years after we pleaded with the United States to come in and use military force on our behalf in Europe. We have fallen into a double standard in that regard. As someone who supported the war, I accept thatit has not gone as planned, to put it mildly, but I actually believe that it could have done. The question is not whether you would have voted for it if you had known the outcome; the answer to that is no, because the loss of blood and life is too great. The real question is whether the intervention could have been done in a more unified and effective way, especially with regard to the post-conflict planning. The answer to that must be that it not only could and should have been done in that way, but we need to do it more effectively in future. I am always struck that when people say that we should not have intervened in Iraq, in another conversation sometimes the same people—particularly if they come from a Conservative perspective—say that we should do something about Zimbabwe and take action to put Mugabe out of office. Other people, particularly on the left, will say that we have to do something about Darfur, remove the Janjaweed and stop the massacres and ethnic cleansing that is going on there. That goes back to what the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, would say when he was Foreign Secretary—people say that something should be done, but what should be done? The ““what should be done”” bit is the issue not so much for an inquiry but for an inspired and ongoing policy debate about when and how we intervene. That is the key question; the issue is not whether it was right or wrong to intervene to remove Saddam Hussein—as far as I am concerned, it was right. The issue is essentially how you manage that process. The United Nations has to come away from the idea that you should never remove a despot. We should remember that most despots that have been removed have been removed without the consent of the United Nations. Pol Pot, Idi Amin and the East Pakistan Government before that region became Bangladesh were all removed by neighbouring states with force without the consent of the United Nations. That is also true of Kosovo. One of my primary reasons for supporting the action was not that of weapons of mass destruction. If you read the debate of 18 March 2003 in the House of Commons, in which I took part, you will see that most of us did not argue about the issue of WMD—the noble Lord, Lord Butler, was right about that; we argued about the United Nations becoming increasingly like the League of Nations, where it could not and would not act, the problem of bringing stability to the Middle East while you had someone like Saddam Hussein sitting in the middle of it all, and other issues. I do not pretend that WMD was not part of it, but it was not the key part of the debate. The debate now needs to move on to the crucial issue of when and how we intervene. I am not in the business of plugging otherpeople’s books, but if the book of the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, is anything like what he described yesterday, he is right. He comes to this matter with the experience of Bosnia and Kosovo. It is a matter that we all ought to consider carefully because this issue of intervention in failed and despotic states will not go away and will become profoundly more dangerous the easier it is to acquire weapons of mass destruction.