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Iraq

My Lords, I join in congratulating my noble friend Lord Fowler on initiating this debate. Perhaps I may say to the noble Lord, Lord Steyn, that his comments, which I listened to with great interest, may be the reason why the former Attorney-General, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, had such difficulty at the time giving a legal opinion to justify the war. It is one of the issues that I hope will come out in the inquiry. My noble friend Lord Fowler rightly started by paying tribute to those whose lives have either been lost or shattered as a result of the Iraq war. We certainly owe them and their families, who will bear the scars for the rest of their lives—some 400 have made the ultimate sacrifice or have been very seriously wounded—a proper inquiry into the events. There is no doubt that in both Houses this is a deeply controversial matter. Very serious allegations have been made at every stage of these proceedings and at the moment we have not set up in quite the best possible way an inquiry to meet the various proper requirements that I know the House has in mind. The Prime Minister has clearly got into a big mess about it, and the news today is that he has now written to Sir John Chilcott suggesting that he can invite public hearings as well, which means that he is adjusting the position. I see that the Conservative Party has said that if it is not satisfied, it will table a debate in the House of Commons next week. I think that that would be a great pity because I would much rather see this resolved in the proper way. The Prime Minister said the day before yesterday that he has clung closely to the Franks banner, and Franks is what we have got. What we certainly have not had from the start is the way in which Franks was set up, and the noble Lord, Lord Butler, with his diplomacy and technique, will know something about that. Moreover, there is a complete absence of cross-party consultation. The Franks inquiry was set up in response to two Questions for Written Answer, one tabled by Michael Foot, the Leader of the Opposition, and the other by Joe Grimond, emphasising the fact that there had been close cross-party consultation before it was set up. It is tragic that that was not done here. The Prime Minister said rather lamely that that was because they were Written Answers and that he was making an oral Statement, but what he did not point out was that there was then a full day’s debate on the Floor of the House on the setting-up of the inquiry. I accept that the people the Prime Minister has proposed are very distinguished public servants, but whether the balance between academics and public servants fully meets the need for non-partisan public figures is open to question. The Prime Minister said that it would be impossible for anyone in the House of Lords actually to serve on the committee. I notice that four Members of this House—Lord Watkinson, Lord Barber, Lord Lever and Lord Merlyn-Rees—served under Lord Franks and I do not think for a moment that they were too partisan in their approach to the responsibilities they took on as full Privy Counsellors. If this is to be a proper inquiry, the Prime Minister’s lack of consultation has done no service to the people who have been asked to take part. The Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Commons said that they looked like a hand-picked group that the Prime Minister had privately chosen for his own purposes. I make no allegations against these distinguished people, but they have not been helped by the way in which this has been embarked on. As to the suggestion that if it were held in public it would be impossible to be candid, perhaps some of your Lordships heard Major General Tim Cross today making it absolutely clear that he would regard it as his duty, having commanded troops in Iraq, to be fully candid and in public about the shortcomings that he saw. Sir John Walker, the former chief of defence intelligence, was yesterday quoted in the Evening Standard as making clear that, on the present basis, it seems the inquiry is to be in private only to protect the past and present members of the Government, and that every member of the Armed Forces would feel it their duty to be fully candid and in public. On the timing, the Prime Minister said he was advised that it would take about year. Who on earth advised him? Who on earth knows how long it can possibly take? The advice was that the Bloody Sunday inquiry would take six months. As it is now in its eighth year, that has not proved very accurate. My only recommendation—there are a range of issues that other noble Lords will wish to address and I do not wish to delay the House—is that it is absolutely essential that the inquiry is split up in some way, perhaps through interim reports dealing with the separate issues. They are quite separate issues so why not start with the terms of reference for the Franks inquiry and how responsibility was exercised in the period up to the start of the war. That would be a good subject for the first interim report before we get into the issues around the appallingly inadequate resources deployed in the war. They were a fraction of what we used for the much more limited objective of liberating Kuwait. A fifth of the forces deployed to liberate Kuwait were used to try to occupy the whole of Iraq and overthrow the regime. Very serious allegations arose over the decision about going to war, including that delays were made in procurement of equipment because we did not wish to give any signal that we intended to go to war when in fact the decision had already been taken. A whole range of issues need addressing and a proper inquiry, conducted as far as possible in public, is absolutely essential if they are to be properly dealt with.