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Iraq Inquiry

I am all in favour of the inquiry, because I should like to see Mr. Blair cross-examined on these matters. I have no doubt that after the American presidential election, when the new President takes over next January, the Democrats—if they win—will investigate all these matters, so we might as well do it ourselves. I shall return to the question of Mr. Blair in a moment, but I think we must not lose sight of the magnitude of the disaster, and of the reason given to us for going to war. One would hardly believe that some of the speakers whom I have heard tonight were present when they heard Mr. Blair's brilliant eve-of-war speech to the House of Commons, in which he made perfectly clear that regime change was not the reason why we had to go to war. The reason, we were told, was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be mobilised within 45 minutes and which might not only put our troops in Cyprus at risk, but pose a threat to Britain itself. That was the basis on which we were told that we must vote for going to war, and the basis on which the country was led into the war. A great deal of evidence about the intelligence on which Mr. Blair based that speech has been made public, and appeared in the various reports. It is perfectly clear that the evidence did not justify the terms in which he explained the position to the House. Even Lord Butler's report, in mandarin English, makes that clear. This sort of thing is not unusual in history. We need only think back to the meeting between Napoleon III and Cavour at Plombières, or Bismarck's handling of the Ems telegram—to take two of the most famous schoolboy examples, about which we were all taught at the age of 11 or 12 in the days when history was still taught in this country—to know that political leaders do periodically decide to involve themselves in skulduggery in order to achieve what they think are foreign policy aims which it is desirable to pursue. I am not just being wise after the event, as it is so easy to be, because I never believed in any of this at the time. I had known Iraq, although not as well as the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd). I had been there first when I was 19, and a number of times since then. For many years I had been an adviser to the Central Bank of Iraq on the management of its bond portfolios, and I had met every leader of Iraq from General Nuri to Saddam Hussein. I therefore had some knowledge of these matters. I know many members of the foreign service who have served in the middle east, and none of them believed the story. Moreover, they were not consulted. That was the extraordinary thing: in the run-up to all this, none of the key people in the Foreign Office with great expertise on the Arab world were consulted. Four months before the war, during a debate on resolution 1441, I said—if I may egotistically quote from Hansard—"““It seems to me that we shall get into difficulties if the inspectors are given a free and unfettered right to search for weapons of mass destruction, if that continues without interference, and if they are unable to find any such weapons. Surely we could not, at that point, say that, because we believe that those weapons were there last September, a nil return would justify an attack on Iraq. That would be difficult to explain to the British people.””—[Official Report, 25 November 2002; Vol. 395, c. 70.]" I said that in a speech on 25 November 2002—or, rather, not a speech: just an intervention. It was perfectly clear to me then that they were not going to allow Hans Blix and his inspectors to do their job properly. Indeed, they started a whispering campaign to discredit Hans Blix and the inspectors because they were frightened of his integrity. They started saying ““The man is unreliable, and all these people are absolutely inefficient.”” A month after the attack, at Prime Minister's Question Time, I put the following question to Mr. Blair:"““If it eventually transpires that at the time of our invasion Iraq no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction capable of threatening this country, and that the Prime Minister led this country into war on the basis of a false assumption, will he resign?””" Mr. Blair gave a long reply, from which I shall select two key sentences. Members can look it up if they wish. In his reply, the Prime Minister of the day said:"““I am absolutely convinced and confident about the case on weapons of mass destruction… we will produce the analysis and the results of that investigation in due course. I think that when we do so, the hon. Gentleman and others will be eating some of their words.””—[Official Report, 30 April 2003; Vol. 404, c. 296.]" Well, I never had to eat my words—and nor, I may say, has Mr. Blair, because he has never apologised for the whole thing. The situation that existed then has led to a complete collapse of the balance of power in the middle east, which depended on the triangular animosities of the secular dictatorship of Iraq, the Sunni monarchical Government of Saudi Arabia and the theocratic Shi'a Government of Iran. Those three mutually conflicting animosities between the three leading countries in the middle east kept the peace. British foreign policy at its best has always supported the balance of power for that reason. By smashing the Government of the wicked Saddam Hussein they turned Iran into the major power in the area, and that has destabilised Islam all the way from Turkey to Indonesia.