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Iraq Inquiry

A number of right hon. and hon. Members were not in the House on 18 March 2003, when we were able to debate an amendment that would have meant resolving that the case for a war on Iraq had not yet been established. In retrospect, I suspect that even more Members wish that they had not been in the House at that time, because many of them were taken in by the arguments with which they were being bombarded by the Government—and the Prime Minister in particular—about the inevitability of a case for war. Debates among Labour Members in the Tea Room and in the Corridors of the House legitimately addressed many of the claims that were being made about the necessity for a war: the threat to Britain of a 45-minute strike from Iraq, the weapons of mass destruction, the threat that Iraq posed to the United Kingdom, the importation of uranium cake, and the prospect of a restarted nuclear programme and a concealed chemical weapons programme. All those issues were of legitimate concern to Labour Members, yet they were consistently shrouded in claims that have proved to be utterly groundless, and which at the time must have been known to be untrue. The question is: to whom do we owe an inquiry? There is a long list of people. We owe it to the families of the 175 British soldiers who have died in Iraq. We owe it to the 4,000 troops who have been injured, and their families. We owe it to the military generals who came to the House before the war and expressed to Members of Parliament their concerns about the legality of going into Iraq and the logistics of getting out. We also owe it to the families of the anything between 250,000 and 500,000 Iraqis who have died as a result of the war, and to the 2 million Iraqis who are now refugees, primarily in countries surrounding Iraq. But most of all we owe it to ourselves, because although several million people in Britain were opposed to the war on any terms, tens of millions made the same judgment, which was that, with reluctance, they believed what the Government were saying because the Prime Minister had consistently said, ““If you only knew what I know from the intelligence briefings, you would understand why there is a compelling case for a war.”” Those tens of millions of people have a right to say to us, ““So now that we know there was not a shred of truth in that, where do you stand on insisting that you hold yourselves accountable so that we learn the lessons from the last war folly in order that you do not mislead us into the next war folly?”” I want to remind Labour Members that, in the days before that debate, those of us who formed Labour Against the War took the liberty of circulating to every Labour Member our counter-dossier to the dodgy dossier that was to come out a day later. We did so with great trepidation, because all of us were hugely fearful that we might have somehow missed something that the weapons inspectors or the International Atomic Energy Agency had said that was not part of the international evidence base of the case against a war, and that at the last minute the Government would pull out a smoking gun and there would be something in their report. It was therefore with a sense of perverse relief that we read the dodgy dossier on the morning of its release and realised that there was nothing there. We circulated all that evidence and those arguments to our colleagues at the time, and we have to take responsibility for the decisions we made in which we knowingly chose not to believe evidence that was internationally available to us; we owe it to ourselves to ask how we were misled. There are different issues in terms of the Conservatives' position. I have heard it argued that the objections to having this inquiry now are threefold. The first of them is that it would be a gift to the friends of al-Qaeda. The answer to that is that the greatest gift to al-Qaeda was the war itself. The second objection is that an inquiry would endanger our troops. The reality is that 4,000 British troops are now stationed in a base 8 miles outside Basra at the airport: it is a bunker. They do not do any training outside the base; people have to go in. The idea that more missiles will be fired at the base because there is an inquiry seems ludicrous. If there is an issue to do with opportunism, we must address it. That is my principal reason for voting for the motion tonight—I want to put the Conservatives on the spot. In the months leading up to the war, I toured the television stations arguing the case against it, but invariably I was preceded or followed by Conservative Front-Bench spokesmen who said, ““We would declare our allegiance to the US war initiative a week before Labour. So it is not a question about whether there is evidence. We would prove our credentials earlier than you guys would.”” I want to put the Conservatives on the block over this inquiry. People who ask what led us into that war need only look at the voting record from the debate on 18 March 2003 to find out. Some 245 Labour Members voted for the war—the Government were provided with a majority of 179—but 140 Conservatives also did so. [Interruption.] Some 16 extremely honourable Conservative Members voted against, but we ended up in the war because the principal Opposition refused to be an Opposition. Their loyalty was to the President of the United States and to being on the front line, or to having other people there, a week before Labour. So let us put the Conservatives on the block. I welcome the prospect of the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) being able to give evidence to an inquiry. I wish he could give evidence in his own defence before an inquiry at The Hague, because those who knowingly voted for that war and continue to try to justify that illegal act ought to be required to answer before an international criminal court. That is not within our jurisdiction, but being able to set up an inquiry of our own is. We should not be afraid to say that in a catastrophic experience for the British Government we have led ourselves into a disastrous, dishonest, destabilising and downright illegal war. We owe it to our credibility with our own people and our own armed forces to address the questions of why and at what point people signed up to a war that was a betrayal of the interest of the UK rather than an honouring of it.