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Iraq Inquiry

I warmly congratulate those on the official Opposition Front Bench for bringing back to the table the call for a comprehensive inquiry into the Iraq war, which was first tabled last autumn. The motion is not about apportioning blame. It is about the House taking responsibility. To echo the point made by the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews), it is about this House recognising our collective responsibility— notwithstanding that a minority of us voted against the motion before the House four years ago—and signalling our collective determination to put right the colossal wrong that was inflicted on the people of Iraq and this country by that vote. We cannot bring back the dead, but we can honour their memory in our sincere commitment to learn the painful lessons of these last four years. Only then can we rebuild a relationship of trust between the Government and the governed in this country, and between this country and the countries of the rest of the world. As we have heard in this debate, the cost of this war has been immense in human terms: 150 British servicemen and women, more than 3,500 Americans and more than half a million Iraqi civilians. Two million people have left Iraq and a further 2 million have been displaced internally. Millions more, especially the young, as we heard from the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short), are scarred by hate, hostility and a passive acceptance of, or even positive support for, continued violence. The war has galvanised Islamic extremism, destroyed Iraq’s basic infrastructure, turned it into a fertile ground for recruiting terrorists, exacerbated the divisions within Iraq and fomented a civil war. It has diverted our attention from the very real threat of al-Qaeda, weakened our standing in the world, and undermined the United Nations and the rule of international law. All in all, it has made the world a far less safe and hospitable place for decades to come. This is the worst foreign policy disaster in more than half a century, and it would be a dereliction of our duty in this place were we not to hold an inquiry into this terrible debacle. As has already been said, the damage done is not just the denting of public confidence in this Government; confidence in democracy itself, in any Government of any hue who will be faced in future with matters of peace and war, has been undermined. Indeed, on looking at the facts, the picture of manipulation and distortion and the absence of accountability in any real or meaningful sense is troubling to all of us—of any party and of none—who are concerned for the integrity of our democratic system. The Prime Minister developed more than ever before not a collegiate but a presidential style of Government, with no effective input from the Cabinet or from Parliament because it and we were not in full possession of the facts. As it happens, I do not doubt that the Prime Minister genuinely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and the same is probably true of the Bush Administration. Why else were hundreds of millions of dollars budgeted for the destruction of weapons of mass destruction that never actually materialised? The question is: what was the basis for the Prime Minister’s belief? In a sense, it was belief itself—faith itself. As a former director of strategic proliferation in the US State Department, Greg Thielmann, said in July 2003:"““this administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude: we know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers””." The Prime Minister subtly shifted his position from saying that Iraq had the potential to develop WMD—in the same way that Iran has now—to saying that it actually possessed them, when there was no basis for that shift in the information emanating from the intelligence services. What was a potential became an article of faith, and then became an established fact. He told journalists that Iraq had"““actually acquired weapons of mass destruction””" and that the threat was"““not in any doubt at all””." He said that Iraq was in possession of"““major amounts of chemical and biological weapons””," yet there was no concrete evidence for any of this. It was assertion, which we now know to be entirely false. The intelligence at the time in both the United Kingdom and the United States was heavily qualified and non-committal, but the facts were fixed around the policy. As far as the dodgy dossier is concerned, the serious charge levelled by the Butler report is not that the Government fabricated intelligence, but that they distorted it by leaving out the qualifications and the caveats. As Hans Blix so eloquently put it, the Government put exclamation marks where there should have been question marks, in effect misleading the Cabinet, Parliament, the Labour party, the public and the international community. It is our duty now in this place to find out how and why that course of action was pursued. The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood was absolutely right in saying that the poor judgment and lack of candour that characterised the run-up to the war have also featured heavily in its disastrous aftermath. As we have heard, the most fateful decision of all was coalition provisional authority order No. 2, on the dissolution of the Iraqi army and the police force. Simply sacking close to three quarters of a million people—many of them armed, as we now know—and turning them into a vast army of the unemployed, alienated, humiliated and angry, was a monumental misjudgment from which Iraq has still not recovered. The policy of privatising the state-owned enterprises had the same effect on the middle classes in Iraq, many of whom were employed by those companies. Interestingly enough, the only pre-invasion, Saddam era economic legislation that remained in place was a law restricting trade unions and collective bargaining. It would be interesting to hear what the Government’s view on that was at the time. The inevitable result of the wave of economic insecurity that engulfed Iraq was insurgency, civil war and political instability.