Iraq Inquiry

Baroness Tonge Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tonge (Ind LD)]

My Lords, I am no expert on defence or foreign affairs but the invasion of Iraq has had so many consequences and raised so many issues that I feel I must get a few things off my chest and into Hansard.

I well remember a meeting of our weekly parliamentary party in the Commons to discuss whether or not we would support the call for the invasion of Iraq. Conditions in Iraq at that time were pretty bad because sanctions had been used by Saddam Hussein to half-starve his people and limit what had been good medical services. That was all blamed on the West, of course. There was enough from the amount of oil he was allowed to sell to get by but his people did not get that benefit.

As international development spokesperson at the time, I was very concerned that going to war in Iraq would make the humanitarian situation far worse. I went to the Library and asked for the latest publication on the evidence of weapons of mass destruction, known ever since as the dodgy dossier. Some of my colleagues may remember me coming back from the Library and waving it about, saying that it looked a bit like a student’s A-level dissertation and did not contain much evidence. That was actually not far from the truth because, as my noble friend Lord Campbell reminded us, it was in fact taken from the thesis of a PhD student from somewhere in California. Our instincts were right. It was not impressive or convincing and I am proud to remember that my party, led by Charles Kennedy—against the jeers and mockery of a lot of people in other parties—opposed military action at that time. We wanted to see a second UN resolution and Hans Blix and his team given time to finish their work. Those were heady days and I am proud to remember them.

What struck me when reading the summary of the report, and even more so the Prime Minister’s Statement this week, was the frequent use of the words “belief” and “believed”. They were constantly recurring: in only two pages of the Statement, they were mentioned five times. Tony Blair “believed” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to us as well as the wider Middle East, but would a surgeon operate on a patient who he “believed” had a cancerous tumour? No, of course he would not. He would weigh up the facts revealed by investigations and conclude that surgery was necessary. I am glad that Tony Blair was never a surgeon. He went to war because of his beliefs, and I find that very chilling.

I also pay tribute to those people who constantly warned that no plans had been made for the aftermath once Saddam Hussein was defeated. It seems a common problem nowadays. What do you do? “Lessons will be learned”, they say. How many times have I heard “Lessons will be learned” in this Chamber today? Are they ever learned? Do our children ever learn from the lessons we learned? No, we have to learn for ourselves. I despair of the phrase “Lessons will be learned” because I do not think that they are.

We have heard tributes to Robin Cook, who was honest, extremely honourable and resigned from the Government at the time. I also pay tribute to Clare Short, who warned consistently of lack of planning and eventually resigned at the end of that period. In particular, I would like to mention Caroline Spelman MP, who was the shadow Secretary of State for International Development and had several meetings with us on the international development teams. She asked many times of the Government where the plan was for the reconstruction of Iraq, and who was going to take charge when it was over. Answer came there none. Those people should be remembered.

During the discussions with the then President of the United States, and in return for supporting his invasion of Iraq in the absence of a second resolution, Tony Blair asked that we would make progress on the Israel/Palestine peace process, which had been “quiescent”, to use the term of the Chilcot report and as Tony Blair described it, since the Oslo accord in 1993. That word is a sick joke if you are a Palestinian—nothing was ever quiescent.

Much has been said about the invasion of Iraq leading to the rise of Islamic fundamentalists and the so-called Islamic State or Daesh—I call them barbarians still. Anyone who has travelled in the Middle East knows that the causes lie much deeper and longer ago. The justified angst of the Arabs started after the First World War with the Sykes-Picot agreement. A major cause of this angst continuing is the increasingly appalling policies and brutality of the Israeli Government and the lack of any solution to that problem. Israel is allowed to break international law and the Geneva Convention with impunity. Together with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the other Gulf states, they abuse the human rights of people in their countries. If we in the West could stop this totally hypocritical foreign policy and treat all nations equally and fairly according to international law, we maybe would have more peace in the world.