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Iraq Inquiry

I do believe that. Certainly we were not able to get to the bottom of the situation. The dossier of September 2002 was full of holes, and we picked up quite a lot of them. I think that the intelligence information was misrepresented, to put it at its most neutral. I suspect that, as someone suggested earlier, the decision was made six or nine months earlier, and the document was used merely to support a decision that had already been made. What lessons might we learn from an inquiry at least into how we got into this position? There are a series of questions to be asked about how we can get out of it and where we can go from here in the middle east, and I think that we will feel the repercussions for a long time. However, there is one serious lesson that I believe most of us have learnt. It is important because of the position in relation to Iran and the possible, indeed almost certain, development of nuclear weapons, which I believe will confront us with a much more serious strategic and security threat than we ever faced in Iraq, or in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda’s bases there. It goes back to the Prime Minister's philosophy of intervention. I have always been dubious about the concept of humanitarian intervention. I do not believe that it exists in international law otherwise than through a resolution of the United Nations Security Council. In fact, in the mid-1990s, the Foreign Office published a quite lengthy refutation of the concept, saying that it did not exist. The Prime Minister elevated that to a doctrine, and took it rather further in his famous Chicago speech. We got away with it in Sierra Leone. It was a little place and we could deal with it with one naval warship. We achieved some good; I concede that. We were jolly lucky in Kosovo. We got away with that by the skin of Martti Ahtisaari’s teeth. I do not know what he said to Milosevic to make him change his mind, but we were very lucky that we did not have to make a ground invasion of that country and make good our promise. I would thought that someone who really thought about such things would have said at that moment, ““Gosh. Hang on. That was almost the one too far,”” but no, we had to test that concept again. We have now realised that there is a limit to what we can achieve with that sort of intervention, and it is pretty close to home. If our security is not at stake, there has to be an overwhelming humanitarian case—genocide or a situation on the verge of genocide—and it has to be clear that we can make a difference by intervening. If we intervene because we do not like the look of a Government, there is a long list. There must be 100 whom we do not like the look of—starting, as someone said, with Zimbabwe perhaps. There are many others around the world. Therefore, the limits to the concept of intervention have been clearly brought home to us. We should reserve the huge punch that we have with our armed forces for situations where it is vital, and where we can succeed. The main point that I want to come back to is that the inquiry should start in this House. It has Select Committees to do these things, and those Select Committees can do them—if they are given the powers, and if the Government do not obstruct them.