The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr Philip Hammond)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the Report of the Iraq Inquiry.
I welcome the opportunity to open this first day of debate on the report of the Iraq inquiry. I suspect that, in the circumstances, the world’s eye will not be focused on our proceedings with quite the laser-like intensity that might have been expected when the debate was originally announced.
Let me start by paying tribute to the work of Sir John Chilcot and other members of the inquiry committee, including the late Sir Martin Gilbert, who sadly passed away during the writing of the report. For anyone who has read even just part of this report—I defy anyone to say that they have read the entire thing—it will be clear that the committee has discharged what is a Herculean task thoroughly, fairly, with great rigour and a degree of frankness that will reassure those who feared a whitewash and that ensures there can be no ambiguity about the lessons that need to be learned.
I also want to signal my understanding that the publication of the Chilcot report a week ago will have been a poignant and no doubt difficult moment for the families of those who lost loved ones in Iraq. It is important, even as we examine the detail of the report and conduct this debate, that they know that this House will never forget the sacrifice of the 179 British servicemen and women, as well as the 23 British civilians, who lost their lives during the conflict and its aftermath. We will also never forget the service and the sacrifice of the thousands more who suffered life-changing injuries, and we reaffirm to them today our determination that they will get the care they need for the rest of their lives. I hope that the survivors and the relatives of the fallen alike will have taken comfort from the assiduous and detailed examination of the war to be found in this report. The sacrifice of our service people demands nothing less.
More than 13 years since the invasion of Iraq began, 10 years since the Conservative party and others first called for it, and seven years since the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown finally commissioned it, the Iraq inquiry report sets out to try to answer the crucial questions that have dominated the debate about the war in Iraq and the events that preceded and followed it. Did the United Kingdom decide to go to war on a mistaken or false premise? Were all the decisions leading up to the war and subsequently properly taken and informed by proper consideration of legal advice? Was the operation to invade Iraq properly planned and executed? Did the Government of the day foresee and prepare adequately for the aftermath? Were our armed forces adequately funded and provided with the proper protection and equipment for their task?
Digesting fully the contents of this report will take weeks rather than days. In 13 volumes and 2.6 million words, Sir John and his committee take us in painstaking detail through the decision making in Government between 2001, when the possibility of military action first arose, and 2009, when British combat troops finally departed Iraq. They set out the conclusions that they have reached on some of the central issues that have proved so controversial, including the handling, use and presentation of secret intelligence, and they identify many lessons that should be learned and implemented for the future.
Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)
Does the Foreign Secretary accept that a number of us are a bit perplexed at the speed with which this admittedly two-day debate is taking place? As he said, there are 2.6 million words to be read, and for a full understanding it seems to me that today’s debate is a little premature and might have been better left until the autumn.
Mr Hammond
I suspect that right hon. and hon. Members would have been dismayed if they had not had an opportunity to put on record their reactions to the Chilcot report, albeit necessarily initial reactions. We will no doubt hear in the course of debate whether the concerns that my right hon. Friend expresses are widely shared.
The words of the very first paragraph of the executive summary of the report spell out the enormity of the undertaking and thus the gravity that should have attended all aspects of its preparation and execution:
“In 2003, for the first time since the Second World War, the United Kingdom took part in an opposed invasion and full-scale occupation of a sovereign State–Iraq.”
A reading of Sir John’s report, however, suggests that flaws, errors and omissions abounded. If the House will allow me, I will try to summarise the key findings that he makes.
First, on the question of why the United Kingdom went to war, the two issues central to the case that Tony Blair put forward were Saddam’s failure to comply with the obligations imposed by the UN Security Council between 1991 and 1999, and the message that the international community would send if those obligations were not enforced, and the threat to international peace and security from the weapons of mass destruction that, he argued, were at Saddam’s disposal.
The report identifies an
“ingrained belief of the Government and the intelligence community that Saddam Hussein’s regime retained chemical and biological warfare capabilities, was determined to preserve and if possible enhance its capabilities . . . and was pursuing an active and successful policy of deception and concealment.”
There were good reasons for this belief, given the past actions of Saddam’s regime. His past use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians and Iranian military forces, his refusal to comply with the demands of weapons inspectors, and his refusal to comply with UN Security Council resolutions all pointed in that direction. As Sir John set out:
“As late as 17 March, Mr Blair was being advised by the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, the means to deliver them and the capacity to produce them.”
However, as Sir John also says:
“It is now clear that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments.”
He finds that
“At no stage was the proposition that Iraq might no longer have chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or programmes identified and examined”
by either the Joint Intelligence Committee or the wider intelligence community.
In the case that he set out to the House of Commons on 18 March 2003, Mr Blair also argued that there was a link between international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and that—I quote from the then Prime Minister’s statement—
“the two together constitute a fundamental assault on our way of life.”—[Official Report, 18 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 767.]
Sir John finds that
“While it was reasonable for the Government to be concerned about the fusion of proliferation and terrorism, there was no basis in the JIC Assessments to suggest that Iraq itself represented such a threat.”
When it comes to the use and presentation of intelligence, in particular the Government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction published on the day of the Commons debate on 24 September 2002, Sir John finds that
“There is no evidence that intelligence was improperly included in the dossier or that No.10 improperly influenced the text”
and that
“The JIC accepted ownership of the dossier and agreed its content.”
However, he also finds that the judgments presented in Mr Blair’s statement to the House that day and in the dossier
“were presented with a certainty that was not justified.”
The Joint Intelligence Committee, he finds, should have made it clear to Mr Blair that the assessed intelligence had not established beyond doubt either that Iraq had continued to produce chemical or biological weapons, or that efforts to develop nuclear weapons continued.
On the much debated question of the legality of the war, the inquiry has not expressed a view on whether military action was legal. As Sir John says, that could
“only be resolved by a properly constituted and internationally recognised Court.”
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
The Government are refusing to release confidential advice that Whitehall officials gave to Gordon Brown about the remit of the inquiry. This advice was what made it impossible for Sir John Chilcot to rule on whether the 2003 war was illegal. The Government’s refusal flies in the face of an Information Tribunal ruling which ordered the material’s release, and it means that the public cannot see what options were considered when deciding on the nature and the scope of the inquiry when it was established. Will the Government reconsider their refusal to release that information?
Mr Hammond
The Government, in considering this report, will look at all these matters, but that is not the answer that Sir John has primarily identified for his decision not to pass any view on whether military action was legal. He says that the inquiry was not constituted in a way, nor did it have the necessary skills or qualifications, to make that decision.
Joanna Cherry
With respect, that is precisely my question. The Information Tribunal has ordered the release of material showing why the remit of the inquiry was so refined. This is not a criticism of Chilcot; it is a criticism of the present Government for refusing to release information about why the scope of the inquiry was restricted and could not look at the legality. That is what the public want to know.
Mr Hammond
The point I am making is that Sir John himself identifies not the lack of remit, but the lack of qualifications of the members of the inquiry to reach that decision. He says that that could
“only be resolved by a properly constituted and internationally recognised Court.”
The hon. and learned Lady will know that a huge number of documents have been declassified and made available in this process, but clearly it is not possible to declassify every document.
Sir John goes on to find that, although the then Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, advised on 13 March 2003 that there was, on balance, a secure legal basis for military action,
“The circumstances in which it was ultimately decided that there was a legal basis for UK participation were far from satisfactory.”
Sir John, however, is clear that military action was not undertaken as “a last resort”— that there were further diplomatic steps that could have been taken to seek compliance by the Saddam regime—and that by moving to a military solution when the UNSC would not sanction such a development the UK, far from upholding it, was “undermining the Security Council”.
Alex Salmond (Gordon) (SNP)
The Foreign Secretary will have seen the comments of Robin Butler before publication of the Chilcot report last week. According to Robin Butler,
“The legality or illegality of the Iraq war was never a question Sir John Chilcot was asked to deal with”,
so why will not the Government release the documents which might give the public and Parliament an insight into why the Chilcot inquiry did not have the remit and was not qualified to deal with the legality question?
Mr Hammond
The point that I have made already and will make again is that as I understand it Sir John has not identified lack of remit as the reason why he has given no opinion on the legality of the war. He has identified a lack of appropriate skill sets in the inquiry, and he suggested that it should be a matter that is dealt with by a properly constituted and internationally recognised court. As I have said already, the Government in looking at the report of the Iraq inquiry—it will take some time to do that—will consider all these matters, including questions that the right hon. Gentleman is raising about whether any further documents can appropriately be declassified and made available.
Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)
Obviously, John Chilcot’s report is masterful in its description of the formal records and the detail, and in the lessons he very wisely draws. However, will the Foreign Secretary, as a politician, look at the political context for a moment? Does he agree that the background was clearly that the Americans and the Blair Government wished to invade Iraq to change the regime and get rid of Saddam Hussein? However, that would have been illegal regime change, so what my right hon. Friend has just gone through—people’s desperate desire to find evidence and to persuade themselves that there were weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam was not co-operating with the inspectors, that there was a risk of terrorism and so on—was mainly, and no doubt subconsciously, motivated by a desire to give the Attorney General some basis on which he could say that this action was legal?
Mr Hammond
My reading of the inquiry report is that it does indeed identify that regime change as an objective would be illegal in UK law, but I think the suggestion is that, through a process of group-think, the people who were involved in this process came to see regime change as a means to deliver the legitimate objective, which was compliance with the UN Security Council resolutions. A fair reading of the report suggests that that is the process of mind that is being spelled out by Sir John.
Margaret Beckett (Derby South) (Lab)
I hope I may be able to assist the Foreign Secretary, although whether he will regard it like that is another matter. I perfectly understand what the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) says, and I understand that it is a view that he has held for a long time, but having had the advantage—that he did not—of being in the Cabinet room when these discussions were taking place, can I just tell the Foreign Secretary that, as we got closer and closer to decision time, the then Prime Minister, Mr Blair, stressed on repeated occasions to the Cabinet that the resolution called for Saddam Hussein to comply with the UN inspectors, and if he did so comply, there would be no military action? He pointed out that the downside of that was that this terrible man, who certainly did commit war crimes on a mass scale, would remain in power, but that that was a downside we would have to accept.
Mr Hammond
I am sure the House is grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving that insight from the frontline, as it were, of where this debate started, but one of the things that comes out very clearly from a reading of the report is the misalignment between the position of the UK Government and the position of the US Government, who clearly were pursuing regime change as an objective, as they were legally entitled to do under their own regime.
On operational planning, it is well recorded that the initial invasion and defeat of Iraqi forces proceeded rapidly. The UK’s armed forces performed extremely well—a fact of which we and they should be proud—despite the changes to the overall invasion plan as a result of the Turkish Government’s decision to refuse access to Iraq’s borders through Turkish territory. In fact, Iraq’s military turned out to be a good deal less formidable than many of us had imagined.
The task that should have been at least as big as preparing for the invasion was preparing for the aftermath. As Tony Blair said before the Liaison Committee in January 2003:
“You do not engage in military conflict that may produce regime change unless you are prepared to follow through and work in the aftermath of that regime change to ensure the country is stable and the people are properly looked after.”
However, Sir John has found that, when the invasion of Iraq began, the UK Government
“was not in a position to conclude that satisfactory plans had been drawn up and preparations made to meet known post-conflict challenges and risks in Iraq”.
Understanding what those challenges were—the need to restore broken infrastructure, administer a state and provide security, including against the threats of internecine violence, terrorism and Iranian influence—did not, as the report clearly states,
“require the benefit of hindsight”.
However, the Government assumed that the US would be responsible for preparing the post-conflict plan, that the plan would be authorised by the UN Security Council and that the UN would play a major post-conflict role, with the international community sharing the post-conflict burden.
The report finds that the Government
“expected not to have to make a substantial commitment to post-conflict administration.”
It concludes that the failure to anticipate and plan for post-conflict challenges in the short-to-medium term increased the risk that the UK would be unable to respond to the unexpected in Iraq, and, in the longer term, reduced the likelihood of achieving the UK’s strategic objectives there.
Ms Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh (Ochil and South Perthshire) (SNP)
Let me just bring the Secretary of State back for a second to the point about regime change. Does he agree that it is important that what is said in private should be reflected in Parliament, and vice versa? On 18 March 2003, Tony Blair said to Parliament:
“I have never put the justification for action as regime change.”—[Official Report, 18 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 772.]
However, in a private note to Bush just a week later, on 26 March, he said:
“That’s why, though Iraq’s WMD is the immediate justification for action, ridding Iraq of Saddam is the real prize.”
Mr Hammond
It goes without saying that Ministers—indeed, all Members—should be completely truthful in their utterances to Parliament at all times, and the ministerial code makes that clear.
Specifically on the reconstruction effort, Sir John finds that
“the UK failed to plan or prepare for the major reconstruction programme required”
and that lessons that had been learned through previous reviews of post-conflict reconstruction and stabilisation
“were not applied in Iraq”.
On the issue of de-ba’athification, Sir John finds that early decisions on the form of de-Ba’athification and its implementation
“had a significant and lasting negative impact on Iraq.”
Limiting de-Ba’athification to the top three tiers, rather than four, of the party would have had the potential to be far less damaging to Iraq’s post-invasion recovery and political stability. The UK chose not to act on its well-founded misgivings about handing over implementation of de-Ba’athification policy to the governing council.
Turning to the equipping and resourcing of British troops, Sir John finds that the Government failed to match resources to the objectives. He records that by undertaking concurrent operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Government
“knowingly exceeded the Defence Planning Assumptions.”
At least in part as a consequence, Sir John concludes that the military role ended
“a long way from success.”
Furthermore, he finds that
“delays in providing adequate medium weight Protected Patrol Vehicles and the failure to meet the needs of UK forces...for ISTAR and helicopters should not have been tolerated”
and that the
“MoD was slow in responding to the developing threat from Improvised Explosive Devices.”
At the end of this analysis, Sir John finds plainly that
“the Iraq of 2009 certainly did not meet the UK’s objectives...it fell far short of strategic success.”
These findings relate to decisions taken at that time, and the arrangements and processes in place at the time. It is, therefore, for those who were Ministers at the time to answer for their actions. This Government’s role is not to seek to apportion blame or to revisit those actions; it is to ensure that the lessons identified by Chilcot are learned, and that they have already led to changes or will lead to changes being implemented in the future.
The Government, including previous Administrations, have not stood still while waiting for the findings we have before us today. There were a number of important reviews relating to the invasion and occupation of Iraq before Chilcot, including Lord Butler’s review of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, Lord Hutton’s inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, and the inquiries of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee of both Houses. As a result of each, lessons have been identified and changes have been implemented, so a good deal of the work has already been done.
Alex Salmond
I hear what the Foreign Secretary says about processes, but does he judge that the post-war reconstruction in Libya would give us any confidence that the lessons have been learned from the post-war reconstruction of Iraq?
Mr Hammond
I think the two things are completely different. In Iraq at the end of the war, Britain was a joint occupying power and shared joint responsibility for the occupation commission. We were in control of the territory, exercising all the functions and responsibility of Government. As a result of the decisions that were taken around Libya, British boots were never on the ground, we were never in control of that country and we were never an occupying power, so we did not have it within our capability to take the actions that we should have done.
Let me summarise the most important lessons that Sir John has drawn in this report. First, taking military action should always be a last resort. Only after exhausting all credible alternatives should we consider taking the country to war. I believe—this is my personal belief—that the political price that has been paid for apparently neglecting this important principle will ensure that future Administrations are unlikely to overlook it.
Secondly, how government is conducted matters. The failures of process, of challenge, and even of proper record-keeping identified by Sir John were serious and widespread. In part to prevent such failures in the future, the Conservative-led coalition Government established the National Security Council in May 2010 to ensure that there is proper, co-ordinated, strategic decision making across the whole of Government. The NSC includes the Chief of the Defence Staff, the heads of the intelligence agencies, and the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, as well as relevant Ministers—and now the Attorney General—alongside senior officials. It is properly supported by a dedicated secretariat led by the national security adviser, ensuring that all parts of the national security apparatus are properly joined up across Whitehall and beyond.
So we now have a system that ensures that decisions on serious security issues are taken on the basis of full papers and proper challenge and discussion, with legal advice fully explained and considered, and proposals stress-tested by Departments, with decisions formally recorded. Having sat on the National Security Council for six years, first as an occasional member, as Transport Secretary, and then permanently as Defence Secretary and now Foreign Secretary, it seems to me highly improbable that the process of conduct of business in relation to this matter through 2002 and 2003, as set out by Chilcot, could be repeated now.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
I think that the Foreign Secretary’s last comment was particularly complacent. Looking at, for example, the Attorney General, why is that not an independent appointment? Why do we still allow the Attorney General to be an appointment of the Prime Minister? It should be somebody who is independent and legally qualified in this area, and that certainly was not the case during the Iraq war.
Mr Hammond
The Attorney General’s office is of course filled with expert lawyers. The Attorney General produces his advice on the basis of the advice provided to him by his expert lawyers. I have no doubt, from my extensive experience of Attorney General advice, both as Defence Secretary and as Foreign Secretary, that it is impartial, fearless, and quite often gives us advice that we perhaps do not like, and we have to change course accordingly, as is appropriate. [Interruption.] No, the hon. Lady is taking a conspiracy theory too far. If we get advice from the Attorney General that steers us away from a course of action, then we move to a different course of action. I can tell her, from my own direct experience—my right hon. Friend the Defence Secretary will have similar examples from the relatively recent past—of advice from the Attorney General causing us to think again and go in a different direction.
Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)
It is important to note, is it not, that when sofa government takes place, officials from the Government Legal Service and the Attorney General’s Office are not present to hear the conversations and to give advice where necessary?
Mr Hammond
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is one of the purposes of a more formal process of decision making. I can say from personal experience that Attorney General advice is often complex, and it is necessary to have it in advance of the meeting at which decisions will be discussed and taken so that one can absorb it and consult one’s own departmental lawyers, as a departmental Minister, to explain it, challenge it, or review it further.
The third lesson to draw from the inquiry is that a culture at the heart of Government that welcomes challenge to the conventional wisdom of “the system”, or the strongly held convictions of Ministers, is essential to avoid the sort of group-think that led to what Chilcot describes as
“the ingrained belief…that Saddam Hussein’s regime retained chemical and biological warfare capabilities”.
Inevitably, the culture at the centre of any Government is a product primarily of the climate established by the Prime Minister of the day. Ensuring that people around the NSC table feel free to speak their minds without jeopardising their careers is the greatest contribution a Prime Minister can make. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) for the way in which he has done that over the past six years.
Fourthly, proper planning for the aftermath of any intervention in another country is vital to successfully delivering the overall objective. The failure in London properly to plan for the conflict’s aftermath, fatally combined with the flawed assumption that the Americans must have a plan, when they did not, led inevitably to the chaos that we saw on the ground in Iraq. As we know will be the case in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and again, today, Iraq, when the current conflicts in each end, the challenge of rebuilding effective governance in conflict-torn countries is enormous. Under this Government, we have created the conflict, stability and stabilisation fund—CSSF—with £1 billion a year in it now, rising to £1.3 billion by the end of the spending review period. It builds on the success of the cross-Government stabilisation unit to ensure proper planning and preparedness for post-conflict situations and a capacity for rapid deployment of expert staff anywhere in the world.
The fifth lesson that we draw—one that I feel particularly keenly as a former Defence Secretary—is that our armed forces must always be properly equipped for the tasks we ask them to do. That is why we have instituted quinquennial strategic defence and security reviews to ensure that we commit the level of resources necessary to meet the ambition set out in the national security strategy. Since 2010, we have eliminated the £38 billion black hole we inherited in the defence procurement budget; we have continued to meet the NATO commitment to spend at least 2% of our GDP on defence; and we have set out a 10-year forward defence equipment programme, planning to invest at least £178 billion on new military equipment over the next decade. I am proud of these decisions. But we should be clear today that the decision to send our troops into a pre-planned engagement without the right equipment, in Iraq and later in Afghanistan, was unacceptable and something that no Government should ever allow to happen again.
There are, of course, many more lessons to be drawn from the report of the Iraq inquiry—too many to fit into a single speech—and some of them, I am sure, will be drawn out during the course of the debate today and tomorrow. However, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney said in his statement last week, there are also some lessons and conclusions that we could draw, but should avoid drawing. First, we should not dismiss the importance of solidarity with our close friends and allies, the United States, when our common security interests are threatened. As both President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have reaffirmed in their respective recent visits to London, the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom is special. We share not only culture and history, but fundamental values. America is our principal ally and partner around the world, and our partnership remains vital for our continued security and prosperity. Of course, that does not mean that we should blindly or slavishly follow US foreign policy, or fail to speak frankly and honestly, as close friends should. But we must be clear about the value of the relationship between our two countries, and clear that that value is a legitimate factor to be taken into account in British foreign policy decisions. Protecting and enhancing the special relationship, in itself, makes Britain safer.
Secondly, it would be wrong to conclude that we cannot trust the analysis and judgments of the UK intelligence community. As Foreign Secretary, I know as well as anyone the vital contribution our intelligence agencies make to keeping Britain and the British people safe, and I know the risks they sometimes have to take in order to do so. But intelligence is rarely black and white, and it always comes with a calibrated health warning as to the confidence level the user should attach to it. That places a burden of responsibility on the user when decisions or, indeed, strategic communications are based on intelligence. The reforms that were put in place following the Butler report have, quite properly, separated the process of assessing intelligence from the policy making that flows from it. I believe that our intelligence and policy making machinery today is in much better shape than it was in 2003 as a result of this and other reforms.
Thirdly, we should not conclude that our military lacks capability to intervene successfully around the world. As the Chilcot report highlights, the military invasion of Iraq, despite the problems of planning, was successfully and swiftly completed. It was the failure of policy makers to plan for the aftermath that led to the subsequent deterioration in the security situation.
Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, we must not conclude that military intervention in another country is always wrong. As the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999, the British intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 and the French-led intervention in Mali in 2014 have shown, there are circumstances in which it is absolutely right and appropriate to intervene. Having commemorated just two days ago the 21st anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, we must also acknowledge that there have been times in our recent history when the international community should have intervened but did not, with Srebrenica and Rwanda being the most prominent examples.
Despite the risks of action and the failures of the past, Britain must not and will not shrink from military intervention as a last resort when our security is threatened; nor will it resile from its proper role on the world stage. Our commitment to the campaign against Daesh in Iraq and Syria is testament to that resolve. Today the United Kingdom stands united with Iraq in the face of continued terrorism. We will continue to help the Iraqi people as they defeat Daesh, reassert the territorial integrity of their country and seek to build a better future for their children.
There is no greater decision that a Prime Minister and a Cabinet can take than to commit this country to war, to ask our troops to put themselves in harm’s way on our behalf. The decision to invade Iraq and topple its Government in 2003 was among the most controversial in our nation’s recent history. It is right, therefore, that we should seek to learn the lessons from the mistakes that were made, to ensure that they are not repeated in the future.
The report of the Iraq inquiry has been a long time coming, but I think that most agree that it is a thorough, independent and exhaustive piece of work. It does not pull its punches in its analysis, and its conclusions and lessons are clearly drawn and unambiguous. As I set out earlier, I am confident that many of the most important lessons identified in the report have already been learned and the necessary responses already implemented, but in the weeks and months ahead, as we examine the report in greater detail, the Government will look further at whether any additional steps are required.
A decision to wage war is not easily reversible, so it must be carefully and diligently made with proper regard to due process and legal obligations. War itself is, of course, intrinsically dangerous, so it must be properly prepared for and the people fighting it must be properly equipped and protected. The aftermath of war is unpredictable but usually ugly, so it must be meticulously planned for and systematically executed. But, subject to those conditions, we should be clear as a nation that we will not resile from the use of military force to protect our security where all other options have failed.
Sir John has done the nation a great service in pointing the way to ensure the proper, safe and legal use of military force. The rest is up to us.
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
If this is the Foreign Secretary’s last appearance at the Dispatch Box in his current role, he has made a typically serious and thoughtful speech for his farewell. It behoves all of us to reflect seriously and thoughtfully on the Chilcot report, and the Labour party has a duty to apologise for the mistakes made to all the families of the British servicemen and women and civilian personnel who lost their lives, to all those who suffered life-changing injuries, and to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have died and are still dying today. The Leader of the Opposition has rightly done that.
If there is one grave danger that we face, it is that we will assume that all the lessons of Chilcot have been learned. I listened carefully to the Foreign Secretary, and I am concerned about some of his statements. One draws from them that he assumes that the mistakes made in Iraq cannot be made again. Indeed, the outgoing Prime Minister, in his statement last week, seemed to pick out the same five lessons that the Foreign Secretary mentioned today and said that he felt the lessons had been learned. He seemed to say that the actions that have already been taken, such as the setting up of the National Security Council and the creation of the conflict, stability and security fund, had effectively fixed the problems that arose from the Iraq war.
Mr Philip Hammond
I will repeat what I actually said. I am confident that many of the most important lessons identified in the report have already been learned and the necessary responses implemented, but in the weeks and months ahead, as we examine the report in greater detail, the Government will look further at whether any additional steps are required.
Emily Thornberry
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that, because it is important to emphasise that further lessons need to be learned, some of which I hope to address. I will not spend time repeating any of Chilcot’s factual findings, because, looking to the future, we need to consider the lessons and make sure that we do not make any of the same mistakes again. The Secretary of State for Defence will speak later about operational lessons that the military must learn, and it seems to me that there are more lessons than the five that Ministers have outlined so far.
I want to outline some of the points that jump out at us from the report. It seems to me that we have continued to make mistakes during the current Prime Minister’s time in office, and I will explain why.
On the flawed intelligence, although Chilcot finds that no deliberate attempt was made to mislead people, the intelligence on which the war was based was clearly flawed and did not justify the certainty attached to it by the Government. Has that lesson been learned? Last year, the Government asked this House to authorise military action in Syria. By contrast with Iraq in 2003, the military action did not include the deployment of ground troops.
Emily Thornberry
It is important that we look to tomorrow’s problems. Special forces are likely to be used increasingly. On the idea that we will send, for example, special forces into Libya in a training capacity, I agree with the hon. Gentleman about how that might end up a quasi-combat role. Presumably, if the training forces are in Libya, they will be in a camp. They may be in a part of Libya that is allegedly safe, but they will need to be guarded. Who will guard them? We can see how it is possible to slide down a slippery slope. At the moment, although it would be inappropriate in the case of a decision to send special forces or trainers into an area, if we can have parliamentary scrutiny of our secret service—if the behaviour of MI5 and MI6 is at least answerable to a Committee of this House—it is not beyond our wit to allow there to be similar accountability over special forces. I have written about this issue.
Mr Philip Hammond
It is important to point out that the oversight that the Intelligence and Security Committee, prominent members of which are present, exercises over the intelligence community is always post the fact. The only kind of meaningful oversight over special force deployment of the type that the hon. Lady is talking about would have to be before the fact. That would be a very different proposition.
Emily Thornberry
I am grateful to the Foreign Secretary for making that point. I do not expect special forces, before they are used, to have to go before a Committee of Parliament and get permission, but I do think that there should be some form of accountability and some explanation. It was embarrassing, and it demonstrated the democratic deficit in relation to hybrid warfare, to read in the papers that the King of Jordan was gossiping with Congressmen in America about our special forces, when nobody in this House had officially been told about it. That highlights the democratic deficit in this country. We should learn lessons from Chilcot. We should learn lessons about accountability and about not simply trusting the Executive to get a decision right. We should make sure that there is more accountability, and that we are on our toes. We must be prepared to modernise our structures as necessary to reflect the changing nature of warfare in the 21st century.
Let me go back to my speech. I talked about the development of hybrid warfare and new mechanisms for holding the Executive to account, and I believe that all parties should work together on that. Another point was raised about American-British relations. Chilcot made it clear that American-British relations would not have been harmed had the UK not joined the US-led coalition. Chilcot argues that that was not a basis for joining the invasion. In my view, that is another lesson that we have not learned. In 2013, pressure from the United States played a major role in the Government’s rush to intervene in Syria. It became obvious that the US Administration’s efforts to persuade Congress to back intervention hinged on the Prime Minister’s success in persuading Parliament to do so. Speaking after our House declined to support the action in Syria, the then Defence Secretary—now the Foreign Secretary—said that the vote would “certainly” damage the Anglo-American relationship. In my view, the relationship has endured. We have got over it without any adverse consequences, and it serves as a reminder that our alliance with the United States rests on stronger foundations than an expectation of unquestioning British compliance with American wishes.
Emily Thornberry
I am sorry but the hon. Gentleman has already intervened twice. I am taking a very long time, and I ought to get on with it.
Chilcot says that Tony Blair ignored warnings about the sectarian violence that would sweep Iraq after Saddam fell, and after the appalling loss of life that has followed in Iraq and surrounding countries, we are still very much living with that mistake. Again, has that lesson been learned? If we consider the intervention in Libya, it is clear that it has not been. During the uprising against Gaddafi, armed militias across the country focused their attention on toppling the regime, and the British Government later seemed almost surprised that once that goal had been achieved, those militias turned their fire on each other. Although divisions in Libya were always more tribal than the sectarian divisions in Iraq, the result has been the same. The belief that democratic elections would help to fill the power vacuum proved hopelessly optimistic, when factions that found themselves in the minority simply refused to accept that the result was legitimate.
Had those with knowledge of the country been directly consulted at the time, they would have warned the Government that such things would happen. Had informed and impartial advice been sought out, such warnings were readily available and in the public domain. It was also clear to many experts in the region that if Gaddafi was toppled there was a huge risk of knock-on instability when well-armed, highly trained mercenaries returned to their native countries such as Mali, Niger and Chad. Again, the warnings were there, but such advice was either not heard or not listened to until it was too late. Again, a parallel can be drawn between our intervention in Libya and our understanding of what would happen next and listening to experts, and what happened in our first intervention in Iraq when we did not listen to expertise or pay attention to what was said.
Mr Philip Hammond
First, the intervention in Libya was at the request of the Arab League, which I suggest would have had an insight into the region and would count as people who knew what was going on. Secondly, although I understand the hon. Lady’s analysis, does that lead to the conclusion that toppling any despot always runs the risk of creating chaos and confusion? That is the nature of despotism. We are five years down the line from ending a 40-year brutal dictatorship in Libya. The game is not over yet, but I predict that Libya will end up a better place than it was under Gaddafi.
Emily Thornberry
It is interesting to hear what the right hon. Gentleman says, but that issue is one of speculation. In my view it is not legal to intervene in a country to topple a regime, and morally we should not intervene in a country unless we have some form of strategy to ensure that the country we leave is in a better state than when we first arrived.
Mr Clarke
Mr Speaker, I have already spent more time than I intended to on Tony Blair. Members who wish to argue about the French veto in 2003 can do so between themselves.
The political background to what was being decided and what the politicians wanted to do was key. I was a Back-Bench Opposition Member at the time, but I followed the events with some care. I had one advantage: I did not have access to what was going on inside the Government, but I knew a lot of American, as well as British, politicians. At various political gatherings—Bilderberg, Davos and so on—I knew and was on friendly terms with quite a few of the key American neo-cons. I was arguing against the merits of the invasion of Iraq before the debate ever even started here.
That is important background. In the Bush Administration, the key policy makers wanted to invade Iraq immediately after 9/11. By 2001, there was not the slightest doubt but that they would invade. They had a rather naive, idealistic approach that faintly shocked me: they thought the previous Administration had not used American military power for all the benefits it could produce in the world, but they were going to use it for good, and they thought they would be treated as liberating heroes when they arrived in Baghdad and set up a better regime.
They thought that a man called Chalabi would win the election held thereafter. I met Chalabi once or twice. He once got about 2% in an Iraqi election. They thought he would be in charge but that he would need supervision, so there was going to be a US general—constant comparisons were made with General MacArthur turning Imperial Japan into a democracy after the war. Much was also made of the importance of denazification following Hitler’s fall, hence there was going to be de-Ba’athification in Iraq to get rid of all these people in the army and the security services and so on. The House will be reassured to know that I fiercely disagreed. I liked these people, but my thought, during such a discussion, was always, “One of us isn’t on the same planet.” I formed a fairly hostile view, therefore, long before it arrived here.
If I knew in 2001 that the Bush Administration was going to invade Iraq, I am quite certain that Tony Blair and the British military knew, and that they had a long time to work out how they were going to join in. That explains a lot. Why did the Americans want the British to join in? They did not need us for military purposes. They could defeat the Iraqis without our military assistance. They did not rate our military that highly—although they thought our special forces and intelligences were very good—but we were a very valuable political ally. They thought that the presentation would be greatly improved if the British, of all people, were at the heart of the alliance, and as I have said, Tony Blair was very keen to join them. I doubt he bought all the neo-con theories, but he clearly thought that getting rid of Saddam Hussein’s regime was one of the best contributions he could make to the future of the Iraqi people and he was determined to join in.
Reading these mysteries, one must ask, “What was the snag for Tony Blair and the Government?” I am confident I knew enough, through my contacts, to know that the snag for Tony Blair, who wanted to take part and who—it seems—had already told George W. Bush that he wanted to take part, was that it was not legal for the UK to take part in a war being launched for the purpose of changing the regime in another country. When he received that advice, with which I think every lawyer in the place agreed, it was undoubtedly right.
As somebody said, however, that was not the view the Americans took. American neo-cons are not so impressed with international law. Their constitution does not constrain them. I once had a key American official tell me, “We have all the legal authority we need to invade: we have a large majority in both Houses of Congress.” And that was it. But they were so keen to have the British that they were prepared to give Tony Blair some time to tackle this problem of whether it was lawful for him to take part, and to work out a basis upon which the British could join.
At this point, I think, these people’s motives were virtuous. They believed all this. They were making the world a better place by removing a tyrant and installing a pro-American, pro-western, pro-Israeli, democratic Government in a liberal society. They were going to change the regime, and we were going to do it lawfully, so we had to turn to the question of the dreadful weapons that Saddam Hussein undoubtedly had used against his own people years before, and whether they had all been disposed of or whether we could demonstrate that he was a continuing threat. If we could demonstrate that he had weapons of mass destruction, that they were a threat to British interests and our neighbours, and that he was not co-operating with weapons inspections and so on, and if we could get a UN resolution, then we had a legal basis for invading.
Once one realises that that was the—perfectly worthy and well-intentioned—mindset of most of the British people taking part in the process to intervene, one can understand why some of these extraordinary processes happened. I personally believe that the American Administration delayed the invasion for a month or few—
Mr Clarke
Two months, says my right hon. Friend. They delayed the invasion to give the British more time to get through this convoluted legal stuff—I use sarcastic words of the kind the occasional impatient American used at the time—before they could join in. The problem was that the Americans, although they went to the UN and got resolution 1441 and all the rest of it, began to lose patience, seeing that this could go on forever, and it reached the stage where they were going to invade in March 2003. They could not wait any longer. The Blair Government—those who knew what was going on—had to speed the thing up a bit, realising that if they were not careful, they would fail to get there in time.
One thing that surprises me in the Chilcot report concerns the advice the Government got from the Joint Intelligence Committee, which eventually produced enough intelligence that was plausible and no doubt believed by those putting it in the reports for the Attorney General to be persuaded—obviously quite reluctantly—that there probably was a basis for going ahead. The urgent debates then took place in this House, the last one being about two days before the date when everyone knew the troops, already in battle positions in the middle east, were about to go ahead with the operation.
We should learn the political lessons from all that. One of the first lessons relates to the ever-increasing rush to get into the position of being able to invade lawfully, so that everybody wanted to be persuaded that various things were correct and that various steps had been taken. If they had submitted themselves to slower, more challenged and more careful consideration, however, it would have led to a different conclusion.
What, then, is the outline of the main political lessons to be learned from all this? First, the American alliance should not be entered into blindly. Let me say briefly that I am as passionate a believer as Tony Blair that our alliance with the United States is crucial to this country’s future security and role in the world. There is not a trace of anti-Americanism in what I am saying; our alliance is one of the most valuable features of our foreign policy. That does not mean, however, that we should allow ourselves to go along blindly and always—right or wrong—with what the American President of the day wishes to do. I take that no further, but we might have a President Trump, so it is a question worth bearing in mind. I agree with the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) that the American alliance will not be destroyed—it might be damaged for a month or two—if we do not absolutely go along with what the American President wants us to do.
Let me move on to something that is clear in Chilcot—though I have not made the point much myself—and was plain to see in how the Ministry of Defence behaved at the time. The advice of our defence chiefs is hugely important, and I share the support for and pride in them that keeps being expressed in these debates. Yet—subconsciously, I am sure—they always want to take part in any military activity that the Americans want them to join. It might be considered advice, but it always comes down to “We must ask the Americans to let us make as big a contribution as we can”. A trained military man is trained for the purpose of using military force in the national interest and further worthwhile objectives, and cannot help thinking, “This is our moment; this is the great action in which we must take part.”
It is the same with the intelligence services. They prize their relationship with the Americans above all other relationships they have with the outside world. They are dependent on co-operation in some ways, but they are anxious to please and to do what they think their American colleagues wish them to do. In this particular case, we had a Prime Minister and a Government who wanted to enter the war, so everybody was extremely anxious to find the facts, to be convinced of the situation and to enable the Prime Minister to go ahead and do what he wanted. That is an essential point, but it requires a simple politician like me to make it; it does not appear in the pages of the Chilcot report. When one is raising one’s eyebrows at what happened, I think that that answers a lot.
Particularly at the time we are talking about—and sometimes still today—there were not enough diplomats involved. There was not enough looking at the expertise of the Foreign Office. We had a lot of Arabists. The Americans had some, but they got rid of most of theirs and brought people in who had been involved in the Nicaraguan episode because they were seen as being ideologically more sound. Americans did not like the Arabists we had in the Foreign Office because they kept complicating things by talking about tribes and different sorts of Muslim, which the policy makers in Washington thought were irrelevant to the new era of western democracy in which they thought they were going to take the country.
Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke). There is no doubt that they have two very clear advantages over me in this debate, in that both of them opposed the motion in the House in 2003, which initiated our military action in Iraq. I, on the other hand, supported it—something that I have come very much to regret. I supported it at the time because I was persuaded by the arguments eloquently put forward by the Prime Minister, Mr Blair. He said that, in his view, Saddam Hussein was a real and present danger in the immediate context and that that justified taking military action against him, even without going back for a further resolution of the United Nations Security Council, but relying on the previous resolutions, which, as considerable evidence showed, had been serially breached by Saddam Hussein, certainly in his non co-operation. On that basis, I voted for the motion, as did many others who are still Members and present in this House today.
Sir John Chilcot’s report highlights how the decision-making processes of government can become distorted under pressure of events. I should like to think that I am always a bit wary of that. The distortions highlighted in the report are so considerable that it highlights a dysfunctionality at the heart of Mr Blair’s Government that I hope may have been exceptional to him. For all that, there are plenty of cautionary tales for us in this House today that we can look at in the current context just as much as they would have been considered at the time.
This point seems to have been rather well made already that, and I will not repeat it, because Mr Blair had formed in his view a very strong resolution that we should support the United States, including in removing Saddam Hussein and effecting regime change, the entirety of the processes of government and of Whitehall were then skewed in order to achieve that aim and had the mischief of disregarding all the evidence that might be available to contradict the belief that that was the right course of action to take—whether it was intelligence information or the thorny problem of legality, both of which I wish to touch on briefly this afternoon.
On the question of the intelligence, those of us who have been in government, or who have served on the National Security Council as I have—indeed it is also true of my current role as Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee—know perfectly well that intelligence, often obtained at great risk and which is with difficulty, can only be what it is, a tool in decision making. The intelligence may be mistaken. One cannot prevent that in a human society, and one cannot guarantee that its interpretation will be correct. My impression during my time in government was that the intelligence agencies and the Joint Intelligence Committee now go to very considerable lengths to point out the limits of the use to which intelligence can properly be put—a lesson which, I suspect, they derived from this experience.
Reading Sir John Chilcot’s report, one can only conclude that the way in which intelligence was handled during the run-up to the Iraq war is, in some cases, truly breathtaking. It makes very troublesome reading. I hope very much—I am not going to say anything more about this—that those within the agencies who now do the work will read and reread Sir John’s report in order to remind themselves of how perfectly reasonable intelligence was skewed and, I have to say, misused for the purposes of justifying a theory, and then, I am afraid, misused by Mr Blair when he came to address this House in the defining moment before the war was sanctioned by this Parliament.
The certainties that were engendered were never present. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) made a very good intervention about this last week when he said that if we had taken the time and trouble to read some of the background information available, we might have doubted some of the certainties that were being expressed. I think he was absolutely right about that, and that is another burden that Members of this House who participated in that debate will have to bear.
So much for the intelligence. What about the process of legal advice? I was at the heart of trying to provide legal advice to Government when I was a Law Officer. My hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor General is on the Front Bench and he, too, has been involved in those processes. As Law Officers know, legal advice is often advice which cannot in any way be certain. Legal advice is exactly what it says it is. In some cases, particularly when one is dealing with international law, the question whether one is on the right side or the wrong side of international law is an intensely grey area, precisely because there is no ultimate tribunal to determine those issues. Yet at the heart of the British Government’s doctrine and ethics is the principle that we have to act lawfully at all times. It is for the Law Officers to try to steer that course.
What shines through to me, reading the Chilcot inquiry report, is not, as some critics have said, that Lord Goldsmith as Attorney General abandoned legal objectivity. Now that I have read the Chilcot inquiry report and looked at these passages very carefully, it seems to me that he fulfilled those criteria as best he possibly could, but that he was drawn into a process which in itself was utterly flawed, because it cherry-picked whatever bit of the advice that he provided suited those who wanted to present it, and then sold it in that way both to the Cabinet, who never properly inquired or scrutinised it at all, and ultimately to the public.
Mr David Davis
Does my right hon. and learned Friend really think that the Attorney General met all his duties? The report refers to the final question to Tony Blair, which it says was answered perfunctorily, about whether the conditions had been met. Surely he should have been a little more pressing, rather than accepting a perfunctory reply before changing his view.
Mr Grieve
I simply quote from paragraph 810 of the executive summary:
“It is an essential part of the legal basis for military action”—
this was written by an official in the Attorney General’s Department—
“without a further resolution of the Security Council that there is strong evidence that Iraq has failed to comply with and co-operate fully in the implementation of resolution 1441 and has thus failed to take the final opportunity offered by the Security Council in that resolution. The Attorney General understands that it is unequivocally the Prime Minister’s view that Iraq has committed further material breaches as specified in [operative] paragraph 4 of resolution 1441, but as this is a judgment for the Prime Minister, the Attorney would be grateful for confirmation that this is the case.”
It is important to understand one of the big changes that has probably taken place between 2003 and today in the way in which a Law Officer’s advice is secured. My impression from reading Chilcot—I hope I have got this right—is that, in practice, the Attorney General was provided with only sketched backgrounds of the factual analysis on which his legal opinion was being sought. The big difference now, and I can tell the House this without giving away state secrets, is that if Law Officers are asked to advise on a factual basis that involves a serious or complex problem of international law, they will receive briefing that is as good as, and—if they demand it—potentially better than, that which would be provided to the Prime Minister himself as to the intelligence and factual base that justifies it, so they have to make their own independent assessment. However, it is quite clear that, in 2003, and, I suspect, even before then—I do not think this was peculiar to 2003—that was not the practice that was adopted; it was not how Government worked. In practice, the Law Officer, Lord Goldsmith, was placed in a position where he had, reasonably, to take on trust the factual assessments made by others, and particularly the Prime Minister.
I want to make it clear that I cannot make a judgment on whether Lord Goldsmith’s advice of 7 March was right or not, but he set out—correctly, in my view—the alternative interpretations available for resolution 1441. I simply make the point, as I did in my intervention, that there are areas of international law that raise massive difficulties of interpretation. If, for example, we stuck, as some jurists would argue, to the principle that no military intervention can take place without UN Security Council authorisation, the well-established United Kingdom doctrine of intervening on the basis of humanitarian necessity, which is what led us to be able to take action in Kosovo, would never have come about. I simply chuck that into the pool of the debate the House has had in trying to understand some of the complexities.
Of course, none of that gets away from the fact that the debate would likely have been very different in Cabinet if Lord Goldsmith’s advice in its original form had been properly presented, circulated and discussed. As any of us who have been in government know, the process by which we moderate each other’s opinions is by challenging them. If we do not have a process of challenge, we should not be surprised that, at the end of the day, people simply end up rubber-stamping decisions because it appears convenient to do so. One of the interesting features, I might add, of being in coalition was that one quickly realised that because some members of, for example, the National Security Council or the Cabinet were not beholden to the Prime Minister, the level of challenge was raised in a manner that one might not necessarily have found in a single-party Government, which is an interesting reflection on some of the problems that flow from it. Of course, when one has a Prime Minister who is utterly dominant after four or five years in government and receiving a triumphant second mandate, these things become even harder.
Those, then, are my thoughts on those two principal issues. There are lots of other issues in the report, which is one of the most compelling reads I have had. I am not sure I am going to be able to get through the whole lot, but I will certainly try to read much more of it.
Let me just make two final points. First, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) expressed the desire that accountability should lead to somebody being held at least in contempt of this House if Mr Blair did act improperly. I simply say to him that, just as some people were talking about impeachment, which was last used in 1806, contempt proceedings in Parliament—unless they are based on findings made in an external tribunal that meets article 6 compliance —will, in practice, be very difficult. I would strongly argue that, tempting as such a route might suggest itself to be, the practical difficulties are likely to make it impossible to follow. I say that in all sincerity.
Margaret Beckett (Derby South) (Lab)
I want to begin where the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), who has just spoken very eloquently, ended. I entirely agree that there is much to learn from the Chilcot report. One of the things that I am most concerned about—I know that it is very early to say this—is that it is far from clear to me that we are actually going to learn the things that we should.
On the morning of the publication of the Chilcot report, I listened to the radio and heard a number of commentators and, indeed, Members of this House, including, I think the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), saying one after another, “Of course, we all know what happened.” The script was simple and familiar: “Tony Blair knew there were no weapons of mass destruction. He deliberately lied to the House of Commons about whether there was intelligence to suggest that there were such weapons. He made a secret pact with George Bush long before the war, committing us to it in all circumstances, so everything that happened in between was irrelevant, and the war itself was illegal because there was no second United Nations resolution.”
It seems to me that this is the right moment to point out that this is, I think, the fifth inquiry into what happened in 2003 and before and after the invasion, and, as far as I recall, none of them has verified that incredibly simply script. Nor does it seem to me that the Chilcot report confirms it.
The inquiry team accepts, as have the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and the former Attorney General, the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield, that when the Prime Minister told this House that he believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he believed it implicitly to be true. He was not making up the intelligence or telling this House anything other than what he believed to be true, let alone inventing a lie, which seems to be being implied. Indeed, the report points out that the basic case that Saddam Hussein had retained weapons of mass destruction and that he had the intent to develop more, given the opportunity, was what the Joint Intelligence Committee itself believed.
It seems to me that one of the most important things that comes out of Chilcot—the former Attorney General touched on this—is the degree to which whole swathes of people whose professional judgment was involved were mistaken, and that continued to be the case right up to and, indeed, beyond the invasion. Chilcot makes it clear that that is what the Joint Intelligence Committee had continually reported both to the then Prime Minister and to the Cabinet. The report states:
“There is no evidence that intelligence was improperly included in the dossier or that No. 10 improperly influenced the text…The Inquiry is not questioning Mr Blair’s belief, which he consistently reiterated…or his legitimate role in advocating Government policy.”
It is really important to bear that in mind, especially as one listens to some of the detailed and very determined attempts to create a different impression.
Sir John Chilcot also pointed out that, along with the dangers that the intelligence community believed that Saddam Hussein presented, it believed that,
“Saddam Hussein could not be removed without an invasion.”
That was also thought to be relevant.
Of course, with the benefit of hindsight we all know that the intelligence community and the then Prime Minister were wrong, but we did not know it then. What is more, what our intelligence services believed was believed by almost every other intelligence service in the world, including the French and the Russians, and there is no doubt that that is why Security Council resolution 1441 was carried unanimously.
Mr David Davis
The right hon. Lady said that we did not know at the time. However, on 15 March 2002, the JIC said that the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programmes was sporadic and patchy. Three weeks later, in Texas, Tony Blair said:
“We know he has been developing these weapons. We know that those weapons constitute a threat”.
How did we not know at the time, and how is that consistent?
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
It is a privilege to follow the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett), although I felt that at the end she destroyed her own argument by attributing to other people views that nobody holds: that somehow IS is allowed off the hook of blame because of the weaknesses and failures of the British Government.
Let us be clear what those failures are: 150,000 deaths by violence, a large majority of them innocent civilians; over 1 million deaths, on medical estimates, as a result of this war; and a destroyed country. Iraq was a nasty dictatorship, but containment—sanctions, inspections when they were allowed, and no-fly zones—was broadly working. There was damage to the stability of the middle east. Of course it is not the entire story, but let us not forget that IS started in an American prisoner-of-war camp in Iraq. That is where its high command comes from, so let us not put that to one side either. There has been a significantly increased terrorist threat worldwide, something that was known and warned about before we took this action. That is what we are talking about. That is what the worst foreign policy mistake in our modern history means for many, many innocent people in the world.
In the 1990s, before that happened, I had responsibility for counter-proliferation in the Conservative Government of the time. I accept that the behaviour of the Saddam Hussein regime was peculiar to say the least. As far as we could tell from inspections and our intelligence, it did not have WMD or a workable WMD programme but was deliberately trying to create confusion about that, by not co-operating from time to time, by moving trucks from one site to another before inspectors arrived, and so on. It was probably doing that to keep Iran convinced that it had a WMD programme. That was what it was worried about—not us, but its next-door neighbour against which it had fought a massive war shortly before. That explains some of the strange behaviour of the regime.
At that time and—I guess—up until just before 2001, the general belief was that this was a moderate and controllable threat. Indeed, Carne Ross, the middle east specialist among our delegation to the UN, said that when he first took the job he was briefed:
“Basically we don’t think there’s anything there. We are justifying sanctions on the basis that Iraq has not answered questions about its past stocks”.
Since then, all the JIC, SIS and GCHQ reports have corroborated that. It was considered a moderate and controllable threat at that point.
Then what happened? We had 9/11, which, quite properly, shocked the world: 3,000 deaths in a hideous terrorist spectacular. Of course, Tony Blair justifies his actions on that basis, but I have to say to him that this was a reason for getting it right, not an excuse for getting it wrong. There was understandable paranoia that something like it might happen again, either here or somewhere else, but then there came a dangerous and simplistic conflation of the real, present and continuing threat from al-Qaeda and Iraq—the axis of evil nonsense that President Bush generated at the time. This fiction was reinforced in February 2002, when the Americans rendered to Egypt somebody called Sheikh al-Libi, who was tortured on the question of whether there was a chemical and biological weapons relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Essentially, he was tortured until he said yes, and that was the evidence that Colin Powell cited at the United Nations—the House might remember—when he talked about having “substantial evidence”. Of course, it was a fiction obtained under torture.
I am quite sure that that intelligence was shared with Mr Blair, who, not knowing the source, would have found it persuasive, as something told to the Americans by an al-Qaeda commander. It seems from the Chilcot report that, at some point between December 2001 and possibly March 2002 but certainly by July 2002, Mr Blair effectively signed Britain up to the American military effort. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) said, the issue was not our soldiers but our reputation. It was our involvement that legitimised the American action.
This, however, produced a problem for our Prime Minister. Under American law, to go to war on the basis of regime change is entirely legal. They do not recognise the international laws that render it otherwise, so for them regime change is a perfectly legitimate casus belli. From comments made and the items to which the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) referred, it seems that Tony Blair agreed, but he had a problem, because our law and international law did not allow it. He therefore saw his role as building a coalition to support the Americans.
There was nothing dishonourable in that, if Tony Blair believed the aim, but to do it he had to achieve a number of things. He had to create a casus belli under international law, and for that he needed proof of weapons of mass destruction and of a terrorist threat, and a UN resolution and thereby proof of legality. The result was UN resolution 1441, the thrust of which was that it was the final opportunity for Iraq to comply with its disarmament obligations. The vote was 15:0 in favour. As the right hon. Member for Derby South said, it did not include a deliberate trigger to war; it required a further resolution. The UN inspectorate went in and did 700 inspections of over 500 sites. Interestingly, it went to three dozen sites given to it by the CIA and MI6, who thought that was where the weapons were located. The inspectorate found not a thing—over three and a half months, it found nothing whatsoever.
Then the American President set a timetable, creating a real problem over and above the United Nations—war by March. That is why Chilcot said that going to war was not the last resort. It was not. It gave Mr Blair a problem. What should he do? Many other countries, including France and Russia, viewed the inspection process as incomplete—and, of course, it was. The UN vote was then lost by 11 to four, so when Blair returned to the UK, he had to win a debate and vote in the House of Commons. He made what some people think was the greatest speech of his life, but in order to persuade us, he had to say five things that were a clear misrepresentation.
Mr Blair accused France of saying that it would never vote for war. That was simply not true, and he knew it was not true. I refer to an interview given on Radio 4 in the last year by Sir Stephen Wall. As a Foreign Office adviser in No. 10, he was privy to what was going on and clarified what was really said, which was that, effectively, “As of now, France will vote against”. When he was asked whether Downing Street deliberately lied about Chirac’s statement, he said yes, it deliberately lied.
The next two misrepresentations were quotations from the UN inspectors’ reports. Time is short, so let me read briefly what was said by Hans Blix, the head of the inspectorate. Speaking of the British Government, he said:
“If they had gone to the British Parliament in 2003 and said that we have a lot of things unaccounted for here, and we suspect there may be something, and we think it is safer to invade them, would the British Parliament have dreamt of saying yes to such a thing? I don’t think so. I think in order to go ahead they needed to make the allegations which they made and which were not sustainable…In substance yes they misrepresented what we did and they did so in order to get the authorisation they shouldn’t have had.”
That was Hans Blix’s view of what Tony Blair did in the House of Commons. Mr Blair also misrepresented what Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, had told the allies about the WMD programme.
Mr Clarke
I had it in mind that my right hon. Friend would get a bit more time.
Does my right hon. Friend think, with hindsight, that given that Hans Blix was perfectly willing to carry on with inspections, if the Americans could have been persuaded to delay for another month, all this could have been avoided? The Americans dismissed Blix, however, and regarded him as a waste of time; they were trying to get him out of the way.
Mr Davis
That is exactly right. That should have been the stance that Mr Blair took, but he did not. He chose instead to come to Parliament to misrepresent the case.
Mr Blair also misrepresented the line put forward by Mr Hussein Kamel, who was later killed by Saddam Hussein, to claim that the WMD programme was continuing. What was, in fact, said in an interview with the inspectorate, was that the WMD had all been destroyed by 1991.
Finally, Mr Blair was asked by Tam Dalyell about the risks of terrorism arising from the war, but the Prime Minister did not give him an answer—despite having been told by the JIC and by MI5 that it would increase both the international and domestic risk of terrorism and would destabilise the states in the area.
On five counts, then, Mr Blair misrepresented to this House the substantive aspects of the argument for the war. If this House is to contribute to decisions on war in the future, it must be able to rely on being told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth by our Prime Minister.
Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
For those of us who took that fateful decision on 18 March 2003, the Chilcot report makes difficult and uncomfortable reading. Our thoughts today should, above all, be with the families, Iraqi and British, who lost loved ones in the conflict; but Members who voted for war—and I was one—did so in good faith.
I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett); I do not think that we were misled or lied to. Nor, more importantly, does the Chilcot report reach such a conclusion. However, we must all take our full share of the responsibility for that decision. As we now know, the intelligence was wrong, although, as my right hon. Friend said, many countries and many people—including Iraq’s neighbours, some of its own military, and the United Nations—thought that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Had we known the truth at the time, the House would never have voted for war, and nor would I. For that we should apologise, and I certainly do, but at the time we could decide only on the basis of what we thought we knew. Let me also say this, however. If I am asked whether I regret the fact that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power, my reply is “No, I do not”, because he was a brutal dictator who had killed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, and had used chemical weapons against them.
I want to reflect, very briefly, on three issues: the task of reconstruction that we faced, why Iraq was as it was, and some of the wider lessons. The problem faced by the Department for International Development in Basra and the surrounding provinces in 2003 was not the humanitarian crisis that we had anticipated, but a different set of circumstances altogether. There was the dysfunctional nature of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. There were the problems of the coalition provisional authority, caused by a failure to plan. There was the legacy of Saddam’s dictatorship—when we tried to persuade the authorities in the south to talk to Baghdad, that was the last thing that they wanted to do, because they remembered what dealing with Baghdad had been like in the past. There was the legacy of the repression of the Shi’a, there was the malign neglect of infrastructure, and there was the absence of the United Nations, which no one has mentioned so far this afternoon. The bomb that killed Sérgio Vieira de Mello and 23 of his staff in August 2003 in the Canal Hotel was, in truth, the beginning of an insurgency that grew stronger with each passing month.
The problem facing reconstruction was not money. The Chilcot report itself concludes:
“There are no indications that DFID’s activities in Iraq were constrained by a lack of resources.”
Iraq was, and is still, a middle-income country with oil. In fact, the problem was spending money, including money from the World Bank, because of rapidly deteriorating security. No sooner did we manage to fix something—we made a real contribution to improving the water and electricity supply in the south of the country—than people would try to blow it up.
I want to place on record my thanks for the huge contribution that was made by many courageous individuals with whom I had the privilege of working—people from DFID and other Departments, British and Iraqi, military and civilian, non-governmental organisation staff and humanitarian staff—who tried to help the people of Iraq in the most difficult and dangerous circumstances. They all acted in the best traditions of public service, and we should thank them for what they did.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Julian Brazier)
I endorse 100% the thanks and the tribute that the right hon. Gentleman has just paid to DFID officials, but he has passed rather rapidly over the subsequent months during which there appeared to be no planning for reconstruction at all.
Hilary Benn
I freely acknowledge that one of the failures, which is set out clearly in the report, was the failure to plan in advance of the decision taken on 18 March 2003. Indeed, there are lessons that we must learn from that. The truth is, however, that Iraq was a suppressed, repressed and brutalised society in which Saddam was the lid on the pressure cooker, and when he left, the lid came off. We have seen that in other countries, too—Libya has already been mentioned.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Derby South rightly said that those who seek to blame the decision to invade for all the subsequent events miss the responsibility that others have for what has gone on. We must take our share of the responsibility, and disbanding the Iraqi army—which meant that thousands of men had no salary and no income, but had a gun and a grievance—was a profound mistake. But Iraqi politicians also have to bear a responsibility for the sectarian policies they have pursued, and those who still engage in suicide bombing cannot turn to us and say, “Look what you made me do”. They must bear responsibility for what they themselves have chosen to do to their fellow citizens.
The best evidence for the difference that good politics and good governance can make in Iraq is shown by the Kurdish region, which, let us not forget, was as it was partly because of the support we had given it through the no-fly zone. As a result, it is now the most stable and relatively prosperous part of Iraq. I pay tribute, as others have, to the peshmerga for the role that they have played, and still play, in trying to defeat Daesh.
The Kurds regard the 2003 invasion as a liberation. Karwan Jamal Tahir, the Kurdistan Regional Government representative to the UK, wrote this week about the Chilcot report that
“there was an Iraq before the 2003 invasion, an Iraq that, for millions, was a concentration camp on the surface and a mass grave beneath.”
We only have to read the reports of Human Rights Watch to see what it had to say at the time about the mass executions, the mass disappearances, the use of chemical weapons, the suppression of the Shi’a majority, particularly after the 1991 uprising, and the attempt by Saddam to eradicate the population and culture of the Marsh Arabs, who had resided continuously in the marshlands for more than 5,000 years. That was what life was like, and we should not forget it.
At least today Iraq has a fragile democracy, and whatever our views on the decision 13 years ago, we have a continuing responsibility to assist, especially when the democratically elected Government ask for our help. That is why this House was right in 2014 to provide support in helping them defeat Daesh, and we have seen the benefit of that support in the progress made in the months since. We have also discovered more about what Daesh does as towns have been liberated. That is why this House was right to vote unanimously to describe what is being done to the Yazidis, Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq and Syria as
“genocide at the hands of Daesh.”
I wish the Government would do what the House asked and take that to the UN Security Council so that it can be passed on to the International Criminal Court.
Finally, I turn to the wider lessons. For too long in foreign affairs, Governments have argued, “Better the strong man we know than the chaos we fear”, even when that strong man is a brutal murdering dictator. Yet look at what happens when the strong man falls in Libya, in Egypt and, indeed, in Iraq.
Three years after the end of the second world war, the UN General Assembly adopted and proclaimed the universal declaration of human rights. Article 3 states:
“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”
Article 28 states:
“Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realised.”
Yet for millions of people in the world those rights, so nobly expressed, have remained just words on paper, and they were certainly just words on paper during Saddam’s rule. Surely that will not do. Having created the UN, why do we not have the responsibility to ensure that the principles of the universal declaration of human rights are given universal expression internationally, exactly as we have managed to achieve, for example, in our own country over many years? It is the responsibility of the UN Security Council to do that. That was why we created the UN, which has a moral responsibility and a legitimacy to act, and it is why I am a strong supporter of the Responsibility to Protect. That principle says that state sovereignty is not absolute and the international community has a responsibility to act in certain circumstances.
Finally, even though this is unspoken in the report, I think Chilcot forces us to consider that while there are consequences to taking action—we meet here today to discuss them and their legacy—there are also always consequences of not doing so. For me, that is the most important lesson of Iraq, both before and after 2003.