Chilcot Inquiry

Baroness Williams of Crosby Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Crosby (LD)]

My Lords, I agree with almost everything that the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, said. He is absolutely right that getting the truth about this very complex and troubling story is more important than having a particular deadline in mind. An attempt to have an interim report would be very dangerous; it would lead to Maxwellisation and counter-Maxwellisation in an endless effort to find out the truth.

One difficulty of the whole report is that we were still getting substantial chunks of serious evidence as late as last weekend. The discovery of the Powell memorandum that went to the President of the United States, which explicitly set out in terms that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was willing to consider military action, is of the first importance, not just because of the issue itself—many of us would disagree about military action; others would support it—but on an another issue that is equally important. It was March 2002 when the Powell memorandum was sent to the President, shortly before the summit meeting that took place at the ranch of the President in Crawford, Texas, in March 2002.

One of the crucial aspects of this was illuminated by the fact that, in February 2003, I asked the then Leader of the House, the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, whether there was any prospect of military action. I repeat the date: March 2003. The noble Baroness said: “I repeat that there is no prospect of military action at the present time”. The statement about Mr Blair’s view, dated March 2002, and the question that I asked the Leader of the House in February 2003, raise key constitutional questions. The immediate question which needs to be pursued by the Chilcot commission is whether the British Cabinet knew anything about the proceedings and negotiations between the Prime Minister and the President of the United States.

Mr Blair was a great believer in presidential leadership. One of his views was that something called “sofa diplomacy” was central to getting serious outcomes discussed and agreed. The difficulty with sofa government is that it excludes something which is critical to our way of doing politics, in which collective decisions are made by the Cabinet of the United Kingdom, not just by the Prime Minister. That has major implications. Presidential decisions—at least in theory—can be made by the President on his own. It is up to him whether he consults advisers or not. That is not the situation in the United Kingdom, and many of us would not wish to see it become the situation. The concept of Cabinet responsibility is deeply bound up with that of parliamentary responsibility.

What was the Chilcot commission asked to do? It has been harshly criticised on grounds it could not have avoided. First, as the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, correctly said, it was given an almost impossible mandate of exploring the period from 2001 all the way through to 2009: eight years of endless negotiation and discussion. The report is intended to cover not just the run-up to the war and the invasion of Iraq but also the issues of what the aftermath should be, what the exit strategy was and what steps should be taken to protect Iraq during the reconstruction. We now find that very little of that was ever openly discussed in Parliament or even in the US Congress.

I will take a moment to look at what was discussed in the US Congress. In September 2002, still well before the invasion, Congressmen asked Mr Powell and—perhaps more significantly—the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, where the money was going to come from for the reconstruction of Iraq. This reconstruction would be crucial to the prospects for peace in the Middle East and the surrounding area. Donald Rumsfeld answered that he did not know. He was asked if it was suggested that the money should come from the United States. The question was: “Will it be dollars for the reconstruction?”. His brutal reply was: “I do not think it will be dollars and I do not think it is likely to involve us”. In other words, he buried the issue of expenditure on reconstruction without the matter being discussed by Congress, which was crucially involved in giving support for any budgetary demand of that kind.

I will not go on—but, before I touch briefly on a couple of other matters, I will say that the Chilcot commission was confronted with an awful problem. The commission consists of five privy counsellors, selected not only for their long experience in international affairs but also, bluntly, for their outstanding reputation as people of integrity. I suspect that the issue of integrity was central for Sir John Chilcot and, as the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, implied, he is determined to find out the truth, however difficult that may be. We then roll on to the long, terrible story about the aftermath, in which it is increasingly clear that the British Government were hardly involved at all and that the issue was treated as a unilateral issue by the then Government of the United States.

I conclude by saying that we need desperately to have the truest possible account of this, which I think is the second-gravest mistake ever made in the history of the United Kingdom’s foreign policy after the end of the Second World War. It is on rather the same scale as the effects of Suez. Today, when we look at what has been tragically not only an attempt to try to invade Iraq but, perhaps more crucially, an attempt to see the Middle East fade away into a situation where there is almost no legally available support, let us not forget that an invasion based on the argument that you need regime change has no place in international law and no place in the United Nations.

Last of all, and perhaps most important, there is the straightforward fact that when we went along with the proposals for the aftermath, one issue that was never discussed with us was whether the Baathists should be completely expelled at the level of the police, the level of the army and the level of the civil service from a country which was then left in a desperate vacuum from which it has not to this day recovered. With peace in the Middle East very much in doubt today and very much sweeping towards a kind of nihilism, having a serious look at the truth of this report is probably the most important thing we can do to avoid anything like that happening in the future.