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Iraq

My Lords, we on these Benches join in offering our condolences regarding those recently killed in Afghanistan and in remembering the important sacrifices made by the 400 people killed or seriously wounded in the course of the intervention in Iraq. We remember also the enormous cost of invasion and occupation; the impact on our Armed Forces; the opportunity costs for domestic spending that the costs of Iraq over the past several years have involved; and the extent to which British support for the Bush Administration was crucial in the American decision to go ahead with the invasion. We have here a major failure of British foreign policy that aroused immense disquiet among the British electorate as a whole. I and my family were among those who marched before the invasion took place. I recall getting off the train at Waterloo with my wife, and the first two people we recognised on our way to the march were a consultant from Guy’s and St Thomas’s, and a City banker we had known for years—not your average marchers. It was a very widespread, popular movement of disquiet among middle class and working class, old and young. This inquiry must answer that disquiet. We are all conscious of the extent of popular distrust of the political elite. The inquiry must begin to rebuild popular confidence in what the Government and political elite are doing. There are constitutional implications, as we talk about constitutional renewal, in the nature and structure of this inquiry. The crucial issue is the approach to war—the 12 months ahead of the invasion in March 2003. The lessons of post-war reconstruction, by comparison, are secondary. There are many byways that one could go down in such an inquiry. One could look at the extent to which the United States consulted Her Majesty’s Government in responding to the Iranian initiative of the spring of 2003, which was a major missed opportunity in the immediate post-war period. One could look at the whole balance of Middle East policy over the past five years—but that would take an enormous amount of time. The crucial questions are: why did we go to war, were we misled, and what options were available to the Government? The Franks report is not a comfortable model. I remember it well. I was a researcher at Chatham House at the time and reviewed it at length for International Affairs. It was a very successful distraction, written in Civil Service language, which enabled the Government to spin the line that basic mistakes were made by the intelligence services and the embassy in Buenos Aires, thus distracting attention from the extent to which the crucial failures were within the Government—I refer to the recognition by the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, and others in the Foreign Office, that you could not get the Prime Minister to agree to negotiations with Argentina when she had finally accepted that she had to negotiate on Zimbabwe, or Rhodesia as it then was. That was the political failure at the heart of why we drifted into the Falkland Islands conflict, together with the failure to co-ordinate the defence review in which John Nott cut the Navy, including the Falklands guard ship, giving a clear but unintended signal to the Argentines that we did not regard the islands as important. This is not a good model 25 years later—here I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde—when the age of deference has left us even further behind, and when people expect as far as possible to have public accounting. Much of the material is already in the public domain. More ought to be. Perhaps the Leader of the House will tell us whether Sir Jeremy Greenstock’s memoirs—an important contribution to understanding what happened during that period—which have been blocked from publication, will now be published as a matter of urgency as part of the background to the inquiry. The members of the committee are a very respectable, creditable and expert group; but again, I regret that there was not fuller consultation about the composition of the committee. It would have increased public confidence if there were senior politicians from other parties on the committee, and it would have been appropriate, as we are talking about constitutional renewal, to have had clearer parliamentary involvement in the establishment and membership of the committee. Lastly, I echo what the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said on timing. It is possible to take minutes and years. In this respect, what one wants is, clearly, a quick response. Is the committee intended to report before the next election or is it intended to kick the issue into the grass until after the next election? We on these Benches expect it to report well within the next 12 months. If we are told that it is going to take a great deal of time, we will be extremely unhappy.