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Iraq Dossier (September 2002)

I will come to that in a moment if the hon. Gentleman will allow me. The sequence is important, and we need to get it absolutely right. He said that the war goes on and that men and women are still dying in Iraq. As a frequent visitor to Iraq, I know what the situation is like and I know the gravity of our military involvement. That is why it is important that we separate the conspiracy theories from the facts, so I will continue, if I may. The threat posed by Saddam’s regime was real. It had waged a long and bloody war against Iran, occupied Kuwait and violently suppressed its own people—notably the Shi’a and Kurds. Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iran and his own people. The threat went further, into the international arena, where the regime’s flagrant disregard for the numerous Security Council resolutions that followed the first Gulf war was a running sore for more than a decade. Saddam’s serial flouting of international conventions and his determination to abuse programmes put in place to help the Iraqi people, such as the UN oil for food programme, not only added to the suffering of the Iraqi people but threatened to undermine international relations and the rule of law. We also had to take seriously the threat posed by Saddam’s determination to develop weapons of mass destruction, coupled with his proven willingness to use them against other states and his own people. Through the UN’s inspection regimes, intelligence gathering and subsequent examination of Iraqi archives, we now know a lot more about the extent of Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programmes and Saddam’s determination to maintain or resurrect them up to and beyond the inspection regime. Despite exhaustive attempts to establish the facts, not least by the Iraq survey group, it remains unclear exactly which of Iraq’s WMD programmes were ended, or when. The fact that those programmes existed, and that Saddam had shown a readiness to use WMD, is beyond doubt. It was against that background that the Government’s dossier on WMD was conceived. It was designed to help explain, within the limits of our knowledge at the time, the extent of the threat that Saddam’s regime posed. As the hon. Gentleman has told us, concern about the dossier has centred on two issues: first, the accuracy of the intelligence that informed it, and secondly, the drafting process—specifically whether it was modified in its tone and content to have more public impact. Both of those issues were extensively covered by the four inquiries that have already been conducted on Iraq. All found that the Government had acted in good faith and that the assessment of Iraq’s WMD presented in the September 2002 dossier was consistent with the Joint Intelligence Committee assessments on which it drew. The hon. Gentleman has claimed that he has new evidence, and I shall try to deal with that. The inquiries, however, also made important criticisms of the Government dossier. They found that key intelligence used in drafting the dossier had been ““unreliable”” and that some intelligence—particularly that relating to the claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes—had been presented, as the hon. Gentleman has told us, without adequate context. Following the Butler review, the then Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw), announced in a written statement to the House on 12 October 2004 the withdrawal of some of the intelligence that had formed the basis of the Government’s dossier. The Government further accepted that by March 2003 it was unlikely that Iraq possessed actual stockpiles of WMD; and the Prime Minister accepted full responsibility for mistakes made with intelligence. Lord Butler’s committee said that some of the intelligence included in the dossier should have been better validated. The Government accepted that, and the Secret Intelligence Service has taken steps to improve the validation of intelligence, as the 2006 annual report of the Intelligence and Security Committee acknowledged. The ISC annual report also noted that the Government have introduced measures to ensure greater awareness and understanding of the limitations of intelligence among Ministers and other senior officials, including a confidential guide covering the nature and use of intelligence circulated to readers of intelligence across Government. The inquiries confirmed that in drafting the dossier the Joint Intelligence Committee had not been subjected to political pressures; nor had its impartiality been compromised. That, I understand, is what the hon. Gentleman is saying. Yet some people continue to see conspiracies despite the work and findings of Lords Hutton and Butler, the Intelligence and Security Committee and the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs.