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Iraq

My Lords, I offer warm thanks to my noble friend Lord Fowler for initiating this debate with exceptionally good timing. I share the views of others that there are no words to express our pride in the military forces and the way they have performed over the past few years, or indeed words to express the sadness at those who did not return. One of those who did return, from Basra, was my own son, who served in the early days before the terrible policy errors began to accumulate which created a downward path from the early promise. As to the inquiry, let me make it clear at the outset that we wanted, have asked for, and therefore in a sense welcome the decision that there should be one, but are far from happy about the form proposed. We agree with practically all noble Lords this afternoon that where possible it should be held in public. That is what military leaders have argued for very vigorously and it is what the noble Lord, Lord Butler, has argued for with devastating force in this debate. I would be surprised if there is any reasonable answer at all. I very much hope that the Government will now change their position and ensure that the presumption is that hearings should be held in public except in cases of clear and obvious national security. It is not true that the Opposition agreed the form of this report, as the Foreign Secretary claimed on the radio the other morning. We were consulted at a late stage, but we disagreed with the membership and the proposal that it should be conducted entirely in private. The membership that was presented to us was that there would be four men, it so happens, on the panel and we argued that it would be right for a lady to be included. Then, of course, it was decided that the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, should be included. She is a very distinguished and respected Member of this House, and that is excellent, although I notice that at present she is a non-executive director of the Cabinet Office. She might want to consider whether that impedes her role as a member of a completely independent inquiry. But even so, that still leaves the membership with no one of military experience, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and others have pointed out, and yet we need desperately to know what went wrong and how we cope with asymmetric warfare in the coming phases, as there are bound to be around the world. We need to learn from the inquiry on that matter. There is no one on the committee with legal experience, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Steyn, and my noble and learned friend Lord Lyell pointed out. That is incredible, because major legal issues arose in the move towards the invasion which remain to this day. There is no one on the committee with political experience. That is in great contrast to the Franks committee, which was supposed to be a model. It is not a model at all. The invasion was a highly political issue and a highly political decision, and yet on Franks there were senior politicians from all parties but in this case there are none. I am reminded that when the Franks inquiry was set up, my noble friend Lady Thatcher negotiated personally with the other party leaders to ensure who should be members of that committee. This time, I gather, the Cabinet Secretary simply informed the leader of my party. I am not sure about the Liberal Democrat Party, but I gather it too lacked any serious consultation. We think all that is deplorable. It is also deplorable that the report will take a full year—the inquiry should have started earlier, of course—and it is very unsatisfactory that no responsibility for major errors is to be apportioned. I hope what I have said does not leave anything in the Minister’s mind to the effect that we think this is being handled in the right way, because it is not. I turn now to the focus of the inquiry. I think it was originally Mr Brzezinski and Richard Haass who said, but many others have repeated, that this was a war of choice, not of necessity. The original Kuwait war was of necessity and had to be fought; this one was a policy decision. In my view, like Suez, in a way, the Iraq venture marked a turning point in international affairs when the hegemony of the western powers finally had to yield to new realities, which are only just dawning now as power shifts away from the West, as many noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Soley, observed. We need to examine how that war of choice came to be made, as well as the consequences and the violent aftermath in the years following the invasion. With hindsight, we can see that the project was based on flawed ideas—not only the obvious one that there were no weapons of mass destruction when we were all briefed to the eyeballs that there were, but the even deeper error that democracy is a kind of western artefact that can be exported in our form to other cultures. I hope the historians who are members of the panel will realise that the idea of democracy and self-government began in the area now covered by Iraq and Syria. As my noble friend Lord Sheikh reminded us, it began a thousand years before it came to Athens and several thousand more before it reached the West, let alone America. It is a particular irony that we should be talking about bringing democracy to the Middle East region and to Iraq just when our own democracies might be sleepwalking into deep trouble themselves. The Butler report certainly went deep into intelligence failures and it had some sharp criticisms of the Government’s behaviour, although frankly, in the public and media comment on that excellent report this did not come over as sharply as it should have. I wonder why. It was the Butler report that exposed the absurdity of the 45-minute claim and the misleading nature of the dodgy dossier, which Mr Jack Straw described as, "a complete horlicks". That sentiment was echoed by such leading figures as Lady Kinnock, who we look forward to seeing as our Minister for Europe in a few weeks’ time. She said in an article last year that, ""there is the sense that Iraq was ‘Bush and Blair’s war’ and that it was built on a lie"." That is a terrible indictment. The Butler report pointed out the disastrous impression created by Tony Blair in telling the Commons that the "intelligence picture" presented was "extensive, detailed and authoritative" when it was none of those things. It also highlighted—in discreet language, of course—the truly terrible bypassing of Cabinet government when it spoke of the reduction in, ""the scope for informed collective … judgement"." The Foreign Affairs Committee—we have heard wise words today from the noble Lord, Lord Anderson—pointed out that it was "fundamentally wrong" to allow the dossier to be presented to Parliament in the way that it was. As to the future, the occupation and the next stage in UK/Iraq relations, we have to look at the disastrous decisions that were taken, at the way in which Iran was given a free run once Iraq was removed from the map and at why Iraqi forces were disbanded by our American friends, and we have to look hard at how our relations with the USA evolved. It is important, as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, said, that we do not become a lap-dog; we must remain a friend of our great American allies but not be their poodle. We have to look at the refugee issue, which my noble friend Lord Fowler mentioned, and at whether we got value for the enormous amount of money we spent. Britain has spent anything up to £5 billion on military operations. I agree that that is trivial compared with the $3 trillion to $5 trillion that America may have spent, but it is still an enormous amount of resources. The news from Iraq is still bad. Murders and bombings continue, and Prime Minister al-Maliki has said that worse may be to come. We in Britain may say, "never again", but the truth is that bad leaders will always make bad mistakes. At the moment all our journalists are busy blaming the so-called "political class" as though they come from outer space, but I wonder whether society is prepared to recognise that it is people themselves who choose their politicians or, by inertia, let them be chosen, and therefore, I am afraid, they get the politicians that they deserve. All one can say is that a wiser society ought to pick wiser guides and leaders in future, which is the best guarantee against future catastrophic mistakes. The Government’s approach has had almost no defenders today. Light is clearly needed on many aspects of what has gone disastrously wrong. An open inquiry is essential, and the Government have made a complete misjudgment in proposing the inquiry in the form that they have. They must now think again.