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Iraq

My Lords, perhaps noble Lords will permit me to say that this is the 18th anniversary of my maiden speech in your Lordships’ House. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, for allowing us an opportunity to debate this question. I was, and continue to be, supportive of the decision made by the Government to invade Iraq. Many of the reasons have already been described by my noble friends Lady Ramsay and Lord Soley. Let me start by saying this: I am absolutely in favour of a very open inquiry. It should be like the Bloody Sunday inquiry. Let it take seven or eight years, or whatever; but at the end of it people will not be satisfied that an answer has been obtained. They are not satisfied with the Hutton or Butler inquiries, because the point is that people know the answer they want and if they do not get the answer they want they will not be satisfied. On the question of law, we had a debate in your Lordships’ House that the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, opened. I spoke in that debate and carefully examined books on international law. I came to the conclusion that there was no clear and decisive opinion either way—nor was there in that debate. Lawyers are worse than economists. There are many views on either side; economists do not get paid for holding opposite views, but lawyers do and they have an incentive to hold opposite views; but that is another question. The issue of legality will not be settled, no matter how many lawyers we consult. I pay tribute to the 179 soldiers who died. What they did will be rewarded by a liberated Iraq. More soldiers died in the Falklands War, which lasted seven weeks; 179 died in Iraq in five years. Millions of Iraqis today and tomorrow will be grateful that Iraq is now at last a democracy. Iraq will be the first Shia-majority Arab democracy in the Middle East. We must not forget that Saddam was not just a secular leader but was viciously partisan. He was not only in favour of Sunnis against Shias but in favour of his own regional Sunnis. Saddam Hussein was a genocidal dictator, and I was against him in the 1990s when my honourable friend Ann Clwyd in another place started a campaign against him. I have described myself as a humanitarian warmonger. I would again go to war to save people who are being tortured and brutally oppressed by their own ruler. I do not believe that the fact that the ruler is of the same skin colour—