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Iraq Inquiry

That is a matter for him; I cannot speak for the Prime Minister. What I have done and will do is pursue him to come to my inquiry—that is the best I can do and I will continue to do it. What we have to realise in this place is that whatever decisions have been taken and whatever has happened needs to be addressed. As hon. Members have said before, an inquiry will have to look at the whole build-up of arms in Iraq. We would have to go back to the Matrix Churchill affair and other issues that have come after it. We would need to see how Iraq was allowed to get itself into the position that it did, and we would need to examine the way in which all these things have happened. All those things will need to be in the terms of reference for an inquiry. I am sure that there will be a huge amount of debate and a huge inquiry in that respect. Most of us will agree with one or other aspect of an inquiry, but not all of it. That is what happens with public inquiries: we never always agree on all the final conclusions because they do not always suit our own particular ends or reflect what we wanted to see. The real issue for us today, though, is not that, but how we move forward. Until we start to look into how our foreign policy can address the issue of lives being lost—day in, day out—in Iraq, we will not achieve that. How do we actively involve and engage other Islamic countries in order to deliver a peaceful settlement for those people who moved away from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein—someone who was prepared to take lives at any cost and did so, and sometimes with the help of the west? We need to move on and give confidence to Muslim opinion around the world that we are going to look into the issues that affect ordinary people who just want a decent quality of life—education and health, for example.