Iraq Inquiry

Baroness Hilton of Eggardon Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hilton of Eggardon (Lab)]

My Lords, I intend to concentrate on a matter that has been referred to by other noble Lords, which is the so-called special relationship with the United States, and the seductive assumption that we all share the same values. It was the perceived need to preserve the special relationship that in my view was an important element in leading to our disastrous involvement in the invasion of Iraq.

I took part in the House of Lords debate 12 months before the invasion, when almost all noble Lords spoke against the folly of this tragic venture and presaged the consequences that have been detailed in the Chilcot report. I was also a member of the House of Lords Select Committee, chaired so expertly by the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, that visited Washington two months before the invasion. We were horrified first by the gung-ho attitude of the Pentagon; secondly by the total lack of planning for the aftermath; and thirdly by the attitude of the Heritage Foundation, which accused us of cowardice and of having no experience of terrorism, and said they would be giving democracy to Iraq.

The idea that we have a special relationship with that great country the United States is very seductive but dangerous. We do of course share what appears to be a common language, we have been in a defensive alliance—NATO—with the United States since the Second World War, and we have important trading relationships. However, our values, like those of most of our European colleagues, favour dialogue and soft power, whereas the United States has favoured military force as the primary and universal solution to most international problems. This has implications now for the functioning of NATO.

I have now monitored more than 20 elections in the republics that were once part of the Soviet Union, in company with parliamentarians from across Europe. The countries that I have visited include Russia, several times, the Caucasus and Ukraine, which I have now been to nine times. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO—which had been a very effective defensive alliance during the Cold War—sought a new role. Driven, I believe, largely by the Americans, NATO began to adopt a more expansionary stance, not only taking in the Baltic states and Poland, but also putting out encouraging feelers to Georgia and Ukraine. These were needlessly provocative of Russia. The consequence was that the naive President of Georgia, Saakashvili—who was a New York-educated lawyer—was led to believe that NATO would support him against Russia over the secession of South Ossetia.

When I was in Ukraine two years ago, every politician who spoke to us said that the policy of their party was to join NATO: a complete fantasy, of course. More realistically perhaps, they also wanted to join the EU. It continues to be worrying that both Georgia and Ukraine have been having military exercises recently, apparently encouraged by NATO. However, it is more encouraging that at the NATO summit last week in Warsaw, there was talk about constructive dialogue with Russia, and the rhetoric on both sides has cooled both there and at last week’s meeting of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Tbilisi, which I attended.

The outcome of the American presidential elections will be critical for our relationship with the United States. If—disastrously—they elect Donald Trump, I hope we will remember that our roots lie in Europe, and that we have more in common with our European neighbours than with the great country across the Atlantic. In this tragically post-Brexit era, and with our detachment from Europe, we must avoid romantic illusions about our closeness to the United States.