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Iraq

My Lords, I put my name down to speak because, when we went to war in Iraq, regardless of the legality—and I am with my noble friend in thinking that the legal position was extremely tenuous—the fact that we did it in a hurry and did not prepare properly exposed the troops whom we sent into combat to unacceptable risk, and gave them an almost unachievable job. We sent British troops into a foreign country, which we had starved for 10 years, having already attacked. We then hit it with a massive bombardment—or rather, our allies did most of that. We then said, "We bring you democracy and freedom because you are really just like us". Apparently they did not want to be just like us—or like the version that was on offer—and we then wondered why we were badly received. We then put on the ground troops who were not properly trained or prepared for the situation and said, "Deal with it". A duty of care was missed to the entire Armed Forces, people who are prepared to put their lives at risk to carry out the wishes of the politicians who send them into these situations. What happened was that, for reasons that I do not think anybody will understand fully in the short term, the British Government told the troops to go in and do something primarily because our allies were doing it. We went in to take on a second-rate Stalin—brutal and unpleasant, but hamstrung and contained—on tenuous grounds; we sent our young men to do the job. Why? Making the assumption that things could get a little better, we sent in people to risk their lives. I have always felt that one of my party’s finest hours was when Charles Kennedy said that we would not play along with this. Can we have an assurance from the Government that any future mass deployment of troops, for any level of occupation—it was clear in Iraq that there would have to be a long occupation—will be accompanied by a doctrine that says what happens if we have to be there for three years, five years or whatever? It should say, "Long-term deployment is always going to be an option and we will always support it". These are wars of choice, to use the expression of my much missed friend Lord Garden. We did not have to go. We were not stopping Saddam Hussein from storming up Brighton beach. We went to him; we carried the war to him. We did not have to be there—that is clear. The regime, unpleasant as it was, was contained and controlled. We went in and effectively let the genie out of the bottle. There was a low-level civil war and we placed our troops in the middle of it. Will we ever allow this to happen again? If we do, I suggest that we have learned nothing from this, and that would be probably the biggest failure of the whole process.