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Iraq

My Lords, I join with others in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on bringing forward this debate and the way he did it. I have never had a problem in principle with an inquiry, but have rather more difficulty with what that inquiry should focus on. My preference by far would be to focus on the post-conflict failure, because it is this which now makes it difficult to justify the initial decision, which I supported and would support again. On the point of my noble—and very good—friend Lord Smith, we have to be careful about the balance we attribute to the United Nations here. Strong supporter of the UN as I am, a number of brutal dictators would still be in power if we had waited for them to act. Two of the most obvious examples are Idi Amin and Pol Pot, both of whom were removed not by western powers but by local ones. At the time I was strongly in favour of that. My other problem with a wider-scale inquiry is that, frankly, it would need to go back to 1991. That is where one of the mistakes was made; we failed to remove Saddam Hussein then. I understand the argument against, but importantly we would have had far greater international support and—of particular importance—more regional support had we done it at that time. I know there was opposition to it, particularly in the region because of the uncertainty about the stability of Iraq afterwards, but there would have been far greater support than now and Iran would have been less of a problem. It is bizarre that we took no action then—a time when Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. We would have had a far stronger position generally, and far greater help in dealing with the post-conflict situation. A wider inquiry would also have to acknowledge the failure of the sanctions regime. People often forget that particularly brutal dictators will often use the sanctions regime to punish their own internal opposition. Kurds, Shias and others will suffer while those on the side of the dictator, those who live in his home town and so on, will be protected. I often remind people of the years when you saw demonstrations on the television set of well dressed, well fed Iraqis demonstrating in favour of Saddam Hussein and against the sanctions, and the same clip would show you a starving baby in a hospital. It is the curious power of propaganda that people do not ask why the baby is starving if the people doing the demonstrating are well fed and well clothed. The post-conflict plan was severely flawed. Yet it is important that there was a plan and it was being worked on. A lot of it was being worked on here; there were frequent meetings at Wilton Park. There was a warning sign at Wilton Park in that it was getting difficult to get agreement between the Iraqis present about the future government of Iraq. That was a warning sign but, let us face it, we had had that situation before, going right back to the Second World War and what to do with Germany after the collapse of Hitler. The real failure in this area involved the divisions within the United States Administration. This an important point and often underestimated. It involved the struggle between Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on the one side and Colin Powell on the other. Unfortunately—in my view—Donald Rumsfeld won that struggle and the Defense Department took over from the State Department on general post-war planning. Colin Powell, along with the generals, warned of the acute dangers of having too few troops in Iraq to maintain order after the removal of Saddam Hussein. That was absolutely right. It has always interested and struck me that Tony Blair’s influence on George Bush was great in a one-to-one relationship. The failing then came because Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz’s influence on George Bush was greater than Colin Powell and Tony Blair put together. That is a painful reality, but it is the reality. They said that the issue involved the beliefs that ““democracy will flower””, ““everybody will be happy””, ““they will greet us with flowers”” and so on, which of course was not quite the case. That disfunctionality at the heart of the US Administration was part of the problem, but we could not deal with it. That does not excuse us for our mistakes, nor does it excuse us for the general failure of the post-conflict plan, but it is a mistake to say that the post-conflict plan was not there. A lot of good people worked on it on both sides of the Atlantic, but it failed. There are other reasons why, as well as those I have just given. I will not drag on for too long, but another reason has been referred to on a number of occasions: the decision by Paul Bremer to disband the police, army and other aspects of the state in May 2003, particularly the army. The army was of course the one organisation you could have used to maintain power; that is not dissimilar to the way in which we used Japanese armed forces to police areas with British or American officers and NCOs in 1945. It was not as though we had not done this before. For some reason that only Paul Bremer will know, the decision was made rapidly to abandon that. I often wonder how much influence we had on this, and it is one area where we could ask legitimate questions. The other area touched on by a number of people, such as my noble friend Lord Smith, is that of promoting democracy. I am a great fan of promoting democracy but—this is important—you should normally promote security and the rule of law first, and it is often better to promote local democracy before you promote national democracy. That is not always the case but it is certainly true for Iraq. I was in Iraq a few weeks ago, and it is clear that the local democracy bid is working much better than national democracy, partly because of the tribal splits and a voting system that tends to reinforce those splits rather than heal or bridge them. The response by many political leaders in Iraq was one of cautious optimism, not least because it is working from the bottom upwards. There will be other occasions when we have to intervene, and it is important in the new world, post-Cold War, that we cannot walk away from these brutal dictators; nor should we. I find it offensive when some rather academic lawyers say that this was against the law. They ought to stand in front of the mirror and say to themselves, ““It is and ought to be unlawful to remove the Saddam Husseins, Adolf Hitlers””—or any of the others—““from power””. Of course it is not unlawful. The problem is whether you can do it, and whether you make the situation better or worse by doing it. Finally, an important point on the failures is the hubris of the United States. The United States is in a similar position to that of Britain 100 years ago: it involves losing overall power and tending to over-estimate the power it has. That hubris—whether displayed on the aircraft carrier at the end of the operations, as referred to previously, or when capturing Saddam Hussein and showing him having his teeth inspected on television—said to the Arab world generally that we were triumphant and they were defeated. The loss of support not just for the United States but the West generally, through that sort of image of hubris and dominance, is profoundly damaging. A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, referred to the feeling in the region of the dominance of the West. It is an important point, and the United States has got to address it as it comes to terms with the position that we came to terms with at the beginning of the 20th century.