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Iraq Inquiry

The hon. Gentleman reminds me that it was Lady Eden who said that, and I am grateful to him for once again correcting an historical inaccuracy. There was a time in the run-up to the war when I felt that Iraq was dominating my life. In the months leading up to the conflict, I made three visits to the Gulf, two to the US and one to NATO. Since the war, I have been privileged enough to visit Iraq on four occasions. I want to share with the House what happened on my visit to US Central Command in Tampa on 21 August 2002. I was told by the then Defence Secretary that I was the only member of the Opposition who had asked—and been allowed—to go to Tampa to meet Tommy Franks and his team as they prepared the invasion. General ““Rifle”” P. DeLong gave me a medal that I still carry, and he told me in great detail what was about to unfold in the middle east. I had made a deal with the then Defence Secretary that I have always honoured. It was that I would never discuss what I was told that day at CENTCOM, before the action started. I reported my experiences to my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr. Kennedy), and I shall share with the House this evening my two overriding memories from my meeting with General DeLong. Also present was a British general who I know, because I have discussed this matter with him since, is known to the hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson). The meeting took place in August 2002, and two overriding points were made to me. The first was that there would be a war. It was made clear that the US would invade Iraq in March or April of 2003—of that there was no doubt. The US wanted British troops to be involved, and American planning assumed that they would be. I was shown in candid and considerable detail what the role of the British troops would be, and one element of it was that Royal Marines would lead assaults that included US marines—something almost unheard of then. From that point, I had no doubts at all that war was coming, but I was also told something else that was equally interesting—that all the US planning was predicated on the assumption that it would be a US-UK war. No thought was given to the possibility that Saudi, French or Syrian troops, in the sort of alliance that was built up to liberate Kuwait, would be used. The view of the US military, supported by their political masters, was that they did not want other troops involved—and that the UN was therefore totally pointless. What I find incredible is that all the talk of attempting to get another resolution from the UN was irrelevant to the US military in Tampa, Florida, planning that assault; the war was going to happen in March or April 2003, and it would include only British and American troops. That gives the lie to some of the things that we were told in the run-up to the war—that we could possibly somehow avoid the catastrophe, and that somehow we wanted the international community to be involved. That simply was not going to be the case. When I visited troops massing in Kuwait and Bahrain, and warships in the Gulf, there was a strong belief among our armed forces that war would happen in March or April 2003. Of course, as we all now know, that was indeed the case. The first result of the war was to make another war, Afghanistan, much more difficult. It has not so far been mentioned tonight that in the run-up to the Iraq war, urgent operational requirement orders—the emergency purchasing of kit—all related to Iraq. I firmly believe that the attempt to bolster, for understandable reasons, our forces preparing to go to Iraq damaged our actions and performance in Afghanistan, and it has continued to damage our performance there ever since. The reality is that we could not take on two such engagements, as the strategic defence review suggested we ought. That is perhaps the reason why we have failed, or have not yet achieved success, in both those engagements. The lasting legacy of the war was the fact that the great coalition of the international community, built up to fight international terrorism since 2001—when even the front page of Paris newspapers said, ““We are all Americans now, after the tragic events of 2001””—was thrown asunder. Suddenly it was not the world versus terrorism; it was large parts of the world against America, and large parts of the world against Britain. Those two consequences of the war—first our continued failure in Afghanistan and secondly the rift in the international community that has still not yet been settled—are legacies of the vote that took place on 18 March.