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Iraq

My Lords, I very much agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said about neo-conservatism. Of course, proper Conservatives do not have a hyphen in their conservatism. I should like to add my thanks to the many who have thanked my noble friend Lord Fowler for this debate and for his excellent speech in introducing it. He pointed out that it is nearly five years since the invasion of Iraq but it is also almost four years since Ministers from the Dispatch Box were telling us that it was time to move on; the war was over and therefore the debate was over. Sadly, the debate was no more over than the violence was over. If a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, had produced deaths and injuries on the scale that we have seen in the Iraq war, there would have been an outpouring of sympathy, appeals for money on television, and endless debates in this House. I am somewhat staggered by the equanimity with which questions about the scale of casualties in Iraq have been received. My noble friend Lord Fowler referred to a figure of 100,000 dead since the invasion. There are many other estimates, many of them far higher. Johns Hopkins estimates more than half a million dead and the New England Journal of Medicine estimates between 100,000 to 200,000 dead with a mid point of 150,000. There are many estimates but I would go along with my noble friend that a figure of 100,000 seems about right, judged on the wide range of different estimates there are. The vast majority of deaths have been at the hands of non-western forces but the West has considerable responsibility for the context in which those deaths happened. We need to recognise and acknowledge our role in creating the conditions for violence and instability. It is that reluctance to acknowledge that responsibility that has fuelled so much of the criticism and hatred of western action. All this stems from a war that was based on a false premise. This was an optional war, a war we did not have to fight. If we had known the costs, both human and financial, surely we would have opted for a policy of continued containment of Saddam Hussein. I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, that that policy had demonstrably failed. No one is entitled to make a mistake of this magnitude. It is no justification for these deaths to say that 100,000 people would probably have died anyway under Saddam Hussein. We simply do not know that. The Secretary-General of the UN described this war as an ““illegal war””. The Minister speaking for the Government today was working for the Secretary-General at that time. It would be interesting to know what his view was on that pronouncement. Whether or not the war was illegal, there can be no doubt that the intelligence was handled in a particularly shoddy way. I agree with what was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, and the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, about the difficulty and the undesirability of publishing so much intelligence material, but what was astonishing was not the publication just of intelligence material but the publication of some material in support of the Government’s case that was not intelligence at all. I find it utterly bewildering that the Government should have thought it right to publish under the Government’s name a paper that had been written by an academic and publish it without his permission, without his acknowledgement and without his approval. It was like the conduct of a third-rate cheat during a university exam. This Government, who led us into this war, were the same Government who passed the legislation in this House that set up the International Criminal Court, to which the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, referred. As those who participated in the debates on that legislation will remember, it provides that commanders, including politicians in charge of forces, can be prosecuted for what they did not know but which the court judged they should have known. There are plenty of things that the Government should have known about Iraq. They should have known that there was no firm evidence of WMD. They should have known that there were no significant links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. They should have known that it was naïve to think that democracy could take root quickly in a country such as Iraq. They should have known that the intelligence that it takes about 45 minutes to activate certain lethal weapons applied only to battlefield weapons and not to strategic weapons—a question that the Prime Minister never seems to have asked. On the position in Iraq today, I agree with noble Lords who have pointed out that the surge seems to have brought some improvement in security. It would be churlish not to recognise that and to give praise to General Petraeus, but it is also right to point out that factors other than the extra 30,000 troops have also helped to produce this situation. There is first the ceasefire that Moqtada al-Sadr ordered his militia to implement. There is the ethnic cleansing, which means that fewer Shias and Sunnis are now living side by side in Baghdad. Then, as has been mentioned, there are the deals done in Anbar Province by the United States—the same country that refuses to deal with Hamas on the ground that it is a terrorist organisation but which has at the same time supplied arms and money to Sunni militia and vigilantes, many of whom have the blood of American soldiers and Iraqis on their hands. It has done a deal with them to stop them attacking US troops and to police their own zones. The position is an improvement, but Mr Maliki’s anxiety over this arrangement and his fears that these troops should not be incorporated into the main Iraqi forces show that it may be temporary and that we should not rely too strongly on it. What are the lessons that we need to learn from this disastrous episode? First, we need to learn that the whole concepts of pre-emption, the promotion of democracy and nation building need to be rethought. Our language in these matters also needs to be rethought. Democracy can be built only slowly in societies where family and tribe are the first loyalties. Secondly, this war has tragically encouraged the growth of al-Qaeda’s threat and influence. It has assisted extremist organisations in recruiting British Muslims even in this country, as was illustrated by the chilling import from Baghdad of the technique of packing petrol and gas canisters into cars. Thirdly, the phrase ““the war on terror”” should be completely banned. Greater emphasis should be placed on the police, intelligence and diplomatic efforts. We are facing not an ideological threat to our way of life or a global insurgency but criminal threats from a lot of different disparate groups, many of them opportunistic groups who attach themselves to nationalistic movements, as al-Qaeda has done with the Sunni resistance movement in Iraq. Lastly, we need to recognise that military occupations nearly always end up being unpopular. Opinion polls show that the occupation is strongly opposed by a majority of Iraqi citizens. A recent poll showed that 70 per cent of Iraqi forces want US forces to leave the country immediately. The noble Lord, Lord Owen, made a powerful case for not making a precipitous withdrawal, but the risks of a prolonged, large-scale occupation outweigh those of a gradual withdrawal of the sort that is being advocated by some of the candidates in the US presidential election. It is in our interests that the Iraqis should assume responsibility for their own destiny, and in that way make the accommodation that is necessary for political stability.