---

Iraq

My Lords, I also pay tribute to our brave service men and women who have done their duty in very difficult circumstances. I hope and pray, with everyone else, that Iraq, which is still the most dangerous place on earth, may yet turn out to be better than we feared. I intend to focus on only one aspect of the invasion of Iraq: the intellectual and moral framework in which the original decision to invade was made. The intellectual framework for decisions about military intervention, which has been developed in the West through the Christian Church and now forms the basis for UN thinking about intervention, sets out a number of questions that have to be addressed before an intervention can be morally justified. The first question is: is there lawful authority? In the Christian tradition, that means the highest authority available for resolving disputes. In the international sphere, in most circumstances, it means the United Nations. Here, a very important distinction arises between what is legal and what may be ethical. They usually overlap but they are not always coterminous. As we know, a debate continues to rage about whether the invasion was legal. Already today the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, has said that she believes it was legal while the noble and learned Lord, Lord Steyn, has argued that it was not. My point is that what is legal may not be enough. The fact is that there was no significant international consensus, and those opposed were not just the usual suspects but serious heavyweight players such as Germany and France. A useful comparison may be made with the intervention in Kosovo. That did not have a specific authorisation from the Security Council but, as Michael Quinlan, whom we honoured this morning at his memorial service at Westminster, pointed out, it differed from Iraq in at least four pertinent respects: the intervention was directed to halting an immediate and manifest humanitarian outrage in full swing; it was not a regime-changing invasion; it was supported by the great majority of countries in the region and a wide international grouping of major countries; and it was validated soon afterwards by the United Nations itself. Not long before, the UN Secretary-General had publicly recognised that the Kosovo situation was a threat to international peace and security. The second question concerns just cause. The original stated reason, as we know, was the possession of WMD by Saddam Hussein. In my opinion, it was a very reasonable belief at the time that he had such weapons, even though up to that point the inspectors had not been able to locate them. Taken by itself, though, this was not a good enough reason for intervention. Other criteria had to be met as well and other, perhaps less destructive, possibilities might have worked out to be intellectually and morally better. There was an alternative to intervention: deterrence and containment, which had been working well. Very often, in a world where there is a choice of evils, we have to put up with a less than perfect solution. We have to live with a problem, containing it rather than solving it, because trying to solve it in one fell swoop would unleash even greater evils. The third question is whether every possible step to achieve a resolution by peaceful means had been tried first and found to fail. I think perhaps that had actually been met. The fourth question is about the very difficult political and military judgment over whether the evils unleashed by the war would outweigh the good that might be achieved. That is very closely linked to the fifth and last criterion which is so crucial: how do we define success in these kinds of terms? If it is purely in terms of a military victory, then that indeed was very speedily gained. However, political leaders in the USA and the UK have only very recently woken up to the fact that ought to have been in the forefront of their minds right from the outset, that the struggle in the modern world is primarily one against terrorism and success in that strategy means ensuring that terrorists do not gain and hold the hearts and minds of those in whose name they say they carry out acts of terror. Counterterrorism is primarily a battle of hearts and minds in which military force has an important but subservient place. That was very far from the thinking of those who took us into the conflict in the first place and is one of the reasons for what I continue to regard as a very tragic misjudgment. So my focus in this debate has been on the continuing relevance of the intellectual framework for considering the morality of military interventions, which very much needs to be borne in mind whenever such interventions are considered in the future. I believe that, judged by those criteria, the legal and ethical implications, which are not always coterminous, were not thought through significantly, while the actual meaning of success in the battle against terrorism was not thought through at all.