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Iraq Inquiry

I shall make a little progress, if the hon. Gentleman will allow me. From a sedentary position, the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) said, in reference to Iraq and Afghanistan, that the situation was different altogether. I could not disagree more strongly. I shall come to the direct parallels that exist—particularly in respect of the overlap between our policies towards the police and the army in Iraq. We have totally failed to provide proper training for the police in Iraq; I shall come to that, and to what is happening in Afghanistan now, later in my remarks. The saddest speech that we have witnessed in this debate was the Foreign Secretary's. To say that the events today in Basra are an example of why we should not be having an inquiry now is to say the opposite of the truth. In Basra at the moment, what the Iraqi army is having to mete out to the militias—and, to a degree, to the Basra police, who are completely infiltrated by the militias—is a precise example of what I am talking about, because it all flows from British policy and action, in Basra in particular, in the past five years. The most amusing part of the Foreign Secretary's response came when my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) made clear that the Mesopotamia inquiry entirely destroyed his arguments about the Dardanelles inquiry; the Foreign Secretary's defence was that the shadow Foreign Secretary had not mentioned the Dardanelles in his argument in chief. The Foreign Secretary went on to say that the wisdom of the Foreign Office would always be taken into account. In the light of what happened in 2003, that statement is pretty amazing: the legal adviser to the Foreign Office resigned; a previous Foreign Secretary resigned from the Government; my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), the Foreign Secretary previous to Robin Cook, was against the war; and scores of retired ambassadors with experience in the region made public their opposition to the war.