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Iraq

My Lords, in my brief intervention after the Statement three days ago, I asked for an assurance that the inquiry would look into what I described as the "genuine considerations" which led to the American decision to invade Iraq. Unfortunately, most of the evidence establishing the genuineness or otherwise of those considerations could be satisfactorily provided only if the inquiry were able to secure the personal evidence of President George W Bush, Vice-President Cheney and Defence Secretary Rumsfeld. I hope that the inquiry will at least be able to establish from Mr Tony Blair what he was told by his interlocutors in the White House and how he responded. Was their objective to remove Saddam Hussein? If so, did Mr Blair make it clear to our American allies, as Ministers did repeatedly to this House at the time, that it was no part of HMG’s policy to achieve regime change, whether in Iraq or elsewhere? Was it to punish the Iraqis for their supposed involvement in 9/11, or for their involvement with al-Qaeda? If so, Mr Blair was presumably aware, from our shared intelligence resources, that there was no evidence at all of either involvement. Furthermore, was Mr Blair aware of the extent to which the White House was not only ignoring the advice of the many American experts with a deep knowledge of Iraq and the wider Middle East, both in the State Department and in academia, but had taken active steps to exclude them from the chain of advice? Finally, will the inquiry attempt to reveal the extent to which, if at all, the British Government availed themselves of the similar British diplomatic, military and academic experience available to them, warning them of the dangers inherent in an invasion of Iraq? If so, were these warnings discussed with our American allies? One of the lessons which should be learnt from this tragedy is that, if Ministers are too busy to study history themselves, they should at least have been ready to learn the many lessons from Britain’s troubled history of involvement in Mesopotamia and Iraq. Perhaps I may add two postscripts on the Franks report, because there have been several mentions of it. The first relates to transparency. Your Lordships may be interested to know that I gave extensive evidence to the Franks committee. If you read volume 2 of the Franks report in the Library, you will not find one word of what I said. The reason is not that my evidence was particularly sensitive; it was that I was chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, a job that did not exist at that time—it was not avowed. More seriously, I draw your Lordships’ attention to one of the criticisms of the Franks report, which was that Ministers had failed to meet in committee for six weeks, I think, before the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands. One recommendation of Lord Franks was that the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, or whatever it is called nowadays, should meet often when dangers are coming over the horizon. Your Lordships may remember that immediately after the invasion of Iraq, I asked Questions in this House about how often the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee had met in the run-up to the invasion. I received extremely woolly replies that Ministers had had a lot of discussion. That was it. I hope that the inquiry will be able to look at the extent of ministerial and Cabinet consultation in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.