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Iraq War Inquiry

One other person who has sadly passed away since the time of the decision to go to war and who would have made an eloquent contribution to the debate today is the late Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook. If he is looking down on us, he will be adding his voice to the argument for an inquiry on Iraq. Every speaker today has agreed that there ought to be an inquiry. The only question is exactly when it should be held. There have also been minor concerns expressed over the remit, but every single speaker has agreed that there should be an inquiry. I hope that the Government will take that on board. When we listened to the Prime Minister at the time when he was making arguments that we should go to war, he always sounded as if he knew something that we did not. His answer to many questions was, "Trust me." We heard at the time that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that 45 minutes' warning was all that it would take before they could be launched. There was a drive toward war in the media in the USA, by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and, to a large degree, in the House, but many questions were unanswered. There was no United Nations mandate. The weapons inspector, Dr. Hans Blix, was asking for more time to conclude his search for those elusive weapons of mass destruction. When a million people marched in the streets, I was proud to be one of them, but in all honesty, at that time I did not believe that we would be listened to. We were not. The justification for going to war changed from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to ridding the world of a tyrant and restoring democracy, but many in this place remember the Government saying that Saddam Hussein could stay in power if he gave up his weapons of mass destruction. What we need to do now, however, is not just look back but find out the truth of what happened—find out what took us into that nightmare—so that we never repeat the mistake. Time may be a healer, but there was a long period of time during which if either President Bush or the Prime Minister had found their nations under threat and had had to say to the public, or the House of Commons, "We are in real danger and we need to go to war again", people would not have believed them. They had lost the trust of their people that they would perform the most basic function of a Government: to keep their country safe. At the heart of the need for an inquiry into the war in Iraq is the need for an examination of the process whereby this country went to war in the first instance. We have heard today the names of 179 UK soldiers; 4,260 US personnel have also lost their lives, along with a number of civilians. When I asked the Prime Minister—the current Prime Minister—at Prime Minister's Question Time how many civilians had died, he said that it was not his job to count them. As has already been said, the financial cost has been estimated at up to £8 billion, and the United States has spent an estimated $3 trillion on this folly. The risks for the future are well known: the world is less safe now than it has ever been, and the middle east is a source of more terrorists and terrorism training. The decision to invade Iraq ranks as one of the worst foreign policy errors in recent memory. Its impact on Britain—on its international standing and domestic security—has been more significant than that of any other military act since the second world war. That being the case, I should have thought that the need for a full inquiry was obvious. However, just as we were spun into the war in Iraq, it seems that we are now being spun into a reason for delaying the argument. I suspect that both the Government and the Conservative party hope that the inquiry will absolve them of guilt and pin the guilt on the former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who will rightly be judged harshly by history for his role in the decision. However, members of the Cabinet who supported him and members of the Conservative party who backed him in the Lobby must all shoulder their share of the responsibility. While it is important to establish who did what, we do not need the inquiry just to apportion blame or responsibility; we need it to ensure that we learn lessons from the disastrous decisions that were made in the lead-up to the conflict. We committed tens of thousands of troops to the campaign, and 179 were killed. Many more were seriously injured. Thanks to the accounts of former officials and soldiers, we know that planning for a post-invasion Iraq was almost non-existent. I have heard it argued that to hold an inquiry while our troops are stationed in Iraq would undermine our soldiers and the sacrifices that they make. The far greater tragedy would be to leave Iraq with nothing learnt from the experience, and their sacrifices. It is for that reason that an inquiry today is so important.