---

Iraq

My Lords, I apologise to the House that a pressing engagement with an amendment to the Welfare Reform Bill meant that I could not hear all the speeches that have preceded me. Coming at the end of some remarkable tours de force around the House, to concentrate very much on the Armed Forces may perhaps be happy timing at the end rather than at the beginning of the debate. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on obtaining this debate. He must be thinking that it was fortunate that the timing coincided with the announcement of the inquiry. It is therefore hardly surprising that there have been many references to the inquiry, how it should be conducted and by whom. I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Butler about parliamentary endorsement, not least because of the families the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, mentioned who are looking for something public to endorse what they have been through, particularly inquests which they have gone to hoping to learn more of the truth of why something happened than inquests can actually provide. I have absolute confidence in Sir John Chilcot as the chairman, knowing him as I do, but as I said after the announcement, I still feel very strongly that whether it is Sir John inviting somebody to be an adviser or not, it is absolutely essential that there should be military representation somewhere in this inquiry because of the military implications of what has happened. I was going to declare a slight interest as a council member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies at the time and mention the dossier we published on 9 September 2002, which as my noble friend Lord Butler knows was proved to be absolutely correct after the war. It having been put in the hands of both Mr Blair and Mr Bush before they had their discussions later in September that year, I have often wondered how the truth as presented by the IISS became so distorted in subsequent dossiers for different reasons. I do not want to concentrate on that; I want to concentrate on another document that has been produced since the invasion. It is a remarkable American document—the Counterinsurgency field manual—which was produced as the result of close work orchestrated by General David Petraeus, the orchestrator of the surge. In typical United States fashion, it agreed that the air-land battle—on which the Cold War had been fought and for which many organisations, including the British Armed Forces, had equipped themselves—while a perfectly satisfactory model for carrying out the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of the Iraqi army, was wholly and utterly unsuitable for the operations that followed. The preface to the manual starts: ""When an insurgency began in Iraq in the late summer of 2003, the Army was unprepared to fight it. The American Army of 2003 was organized, designed, trained, and equipped to defeat another conventional army … It was … unprepared for an enemy who … chose to wage war against America from the shadows"." We have found exactly the same. Of some sadness to me since 2003 has been the fact that, because our Armed Forces were similarly unprepared to take part in the proper reconstruction of Iraq, our standing, particularly with our allies the United States, has gone down. In no way has the United States lost its admiration for the courage and performance of individuals; the issue is the overall contribution that we have been able to make. It is therefore hugely important that this inquiry should get to the bottom of why the Armed Forces were still structured for a Cold War setting rather than for the sort of operation that we are geared for in Iraq. Why was there an absence of things such as flak jackets? Why do we have an armoury that contains weapons such as the Eurofighter when we do not have the sort of vehicles that we need to fight the sort of combat that we need to fight in Iraq? I beg the inquiry to pay close attention to the remarks of Major-General Brims, the commander of the division responsible for the invasion, who told me when I asked him what the battle-winning factor was: "It was the American marine air wing which was put under my command, because it had everything that we needed, none of which the Royal Air Force could provide". That is why I hope there will be a serious military examination not only of the past but particularly for the future, because these are the operations in which we will be involved and we must make certain that future Armed Forces are properly equipped to carry out the tasks required of them.