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Iraq

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Fowler for introducing this debate. He said that the price was high. It is: the public will never again believe the Prime Minister on a matter of national security I have an interest to declare. I served on Operation TELIC 1 in HQ 1 (UK) Armoured Division. I arrived in Kuwait on or about 13 March 2003. I expected to engage in about four weeks of exercises, having left your Lordships’ House with the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, ringing in my ears that war was neither imminent nor inevitable. So when I arrived in theatre, I was a little surprised when the question was, "Are we crossing the start line this week or next week?". The coalition, and the UK in particular, moved very fast. In December 2002, UK forces were planning for a very different operation, and no doubt the Iraqis were as surprised as we were. Those of us who served on that operation are very proud of our achievements. We caused the regime to collapse while taking minimal casualties ourselves, although I assure your Lordships that in the headquarters we felt for the families and friends of every serviceman who was killed or seriously injured. Every casualty hurt us deeply. All of us in the headquarters believed that we faced attack by chemical weapons of mass destruction. I shall never forget the day when I first put on my full chemical protection suit and respirator for real. I honestly believed that if my drills or those of my friends were poor, we would die, and die horribly. I well recall one night when the NBC warrant officer looked like death warmed up. When asked, he explained that the meteorological conditions were perfect for a chemical attack. We had a plan for what we would do when we found the weapons of mass destruction, especially how we would convince the rest of the world that they were not a plant. We had reward schemes for informers; we searched all likely places; we dug up fresh tarmac; we used ground-penetrating radar; and we hoped to find, say, 5,000 rounds of 155 millimetre chemical shells. However, we found absolutely nothing. By the time I left theatre in late May, weapons of mass destruction were right at the bottom of the commander’s list of priorities. It was a case of, "Oh, and if we do find any WMD …". So far as I was concerned on 1 June 2003 when I got back to the UK, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in militarily significant quantities at the time we crossed the start line. Many noble Lords have talked about the inquiry being held in secret. If it was correct that the inquiry has to be in secret, this would have been apparent five years ago; so why the delay? The fact that we still have troops in theatre is irrelevant. They are not the same troops and officers as those that planned and took part in Op TELIC 1. Very little needs to be kept secret or is sensitive. What does need to be kept secret and might be relevant to the inquiry are: future plans that are still extant; intelligence-gathering capabilities, or lack of them; weaknesses in our equipment that we have not yet resolved; or weaknesses in an opponent that they might not be aware of. What else can there be? Major General Tim Cross, who I have served under, has already stated that his evidence can be given in public, and I know that will be very useful to the inquiry when it starts looking at post-conflict planning. The noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, talked about Rumsfeld and Powell in terms of post-conflict plans. She may be right in her analysis, but I hope the committee will explore why we acquiesced to those plans, because this was a war of choice, as pointed out by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams. I also hope that the committee will look at the grand strategic issues. We started operations in Afghanistan in 2001 and caused the Taliban regime to collapse. We are now told that operations in Afghanistan are absolutely essential to our security. They are certainly essential to the credibility of NATO. In 2001-02, the MoD spent £221 million in Afghanistan and £311 million in 2002-03. In 2003-04, it had dropped to £46 million, and it was £67 million in 2004-05. But Afghanistan had very serious difficulties in 2003; so why did we start a large-scale, deliberate operation in Iraq, which would cause the UK to operate at over 100 per cent of defence planning assumptions? I well recall the publication of the Scott report. I wanted to know what, if anything, had gone wrong, but I still do not know. The report would not fit into my briefcase, and there was no summary. I hope that the committee, when it does report, will produce a summary that is short and succinct enough for all your Lordships to read.