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Iraq Inquiry

I want to follow the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples) by saying something about Parliament, because he is on to something extremely important, and we should not give away to other people Parliament’s ability to do things that Parliament should do. First, however, I shall return to a remark by the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), who said that what had happened in Iraq was, in his words, predicted and predictable. I could not help but think, when I listened to him, that that was not something that the Conservative party—the official Opposition—knew at the time. If so, the massed ranks of Her Majesty's Opposition would not have been urging action on the Government. Indeed, the then leader of the party was irritated whenever Labour Members raised questions about the basis on which the strategy was being conducted. Therefore, a certain amount of humility and contrition is required on the Conservative Benches. As it happened, Conservative Members had it within their power to prevent the action from taking place. It has to be said that the questions were being asked entirely from the Labour Benches, and the people who dissented—although there were some honourable exceptions—were overwhelmingly to be found on the Labour Benches. The reason why the right hon. and learned Gentleman, who was one of those exceptions, was right to use the words ““predicted and predictable”” is that many of us, even when we wanted to—I was certainly in that category—could not find a way to make the story and the narrative that were being given to us about the basis for taking military action stack up. I wanted it to stack up. I have felt guilty since about not supporting action to take the world's worst tyrant out of the picture, but the fact is that I could not find a way of telling the story which made it add up. I could not see a way of telling the story that altered the fact that Iraq was a regime contained. It was extremely vile, but it was not threatening us or the security of the world. We knew that it was not connected to al-Qaeda. In fact we knew that it was important in suppressing al-Qaeda. We thought that there was an agenda on the American right that was pushing military action as part of a wider plan for the middle east and the world, but we could not understand why we wanted to attach ourselves to it. Probably most importantly of all, we also thought that the action was likely to increase terrorism rather than to diminish it. The huge tragedy is that in the wake of 9/11 the world, with very few exceptions, turned in solidarity to the United States, yet within two years that solidarity was blown away by what happened next. That is why the situation was predicted and predictable. It was pretty obvious, if we explored the story that was being given, that that was a likely consequence. Indeed, we discovered afterwards that the Intelligence and Security Committee had said in terms that terrorism was likely to be increased by the action that was taken.