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Iraq Inquiry

It is a pleasure to speak at the end of this important debate. Right hon. and hon. Members have made some powerful arguments, to which I hope the Government have listened. I wish to place on record my concern about what the outcome of the inquiry will be, because some basic schoolboy errors have been made in Iraq that we could learn from. We do not need an inquiry to understand where mistakes have been made, but we are now leaning on one to tell us that. I wonder why the Government are not learning some of the lessons that could already have been put into effect in other theatres of operation. For example, we know that the justification for going to war in the first place was based on what the Americans wanted to do. General Tommy Franks was told by President Bush to make preparations for a potential war in Iraq back in November 2001, when he was in charge of the United States Central Command, having just succeeded in launching the invasion in Afghanistan. We know that the evidence of weapons of mass destruction was based on a single source, an Iraqi chemical officer who went into a German refugee camp. That was never authorised or seconded, but it ended up being translated into the claim of the existence of tactical weapons that could be used in 45 minutes and possibly hit Cyprus. Hon. Members voted on resolution 1441, which did not allow the invasion of Iraq. It allowed us to return to a previous resolution, resolution 678, written 11 years earlier in 1990, to allow the use of force. Huge mistakes were made, and I hope that the inquiry will pull them out. We walked blindly into a war with Iraq, which turned out to be a massive distraction from another operation that had already started, in Afghanistan, which is still ongoing. Everybody has repeated the need to learn lessons. That is the point of an inquiry, but my argument is that we know some of the lessons already, yet we are failing to recognise them. Once the decision to go to Iraq was made, I was astonished to learn—but pleased with the honesty of the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short) for admitting it—that there was no plan by the Department for International Development about what to do once the war fighting started. The invasion took place in March 2003, and of course there was huge euphoria, particularly about the liberation of Basra considering what had happened under Saddam Hussein. I have had a discussion with General Robin Brims, the commander of 1 (UK) Armoured Division, who said that in April 2003 he went into the middle of Basra when the dust had settled and knew straight away that things were going to go pear-shaped. He knew that gangs would be formed and militias created, simply because there was a massive vacuum as there was no plan. He did not know what to do except watch very sadly as the security situation deteriorated.