Iraq Inquiry

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, I have had the pleasure of working under the chairmanship of Sir John Chilcot, admittedly on a task less monumental than this one. I was a little surprised at the amount of time the work took, but I am not at all surprised at the thoroughness, care and clear expression of criticism which we find in the Chilcot report. This is very much to his credit and to that of his team.

I voted against the Iraq war, and had clear reasons for doing so. It was illegal under international law. The intelligence, some of which I was familiar with through the work of the Intelligence and Security Committee, was in no way conclusive as to the presence of weapons of mass destruction, even if it could have been made to appear consistent with that possibility. There was no plan for the consequences: as Sir John says, the Government had,

“failed to take account of the magnitude of the task of … reconstructing Iraq”.

The Government were also unable to deflect the United States from its own catastrophic plan to dismantle most of the military and administrative infrastructure left from the Saddam regime and the Baath party, without which Iraq, at that stage, was ungovernable, which was the point made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Williams. My other reason was that there was no need—containment and inspection were still functioning.

I want to turn from those reasons to the intelligence failure. There was an inappropriate use of intelligence to bolster beliefs already held, and to make a public case for war, for which purpose it was surrounded by over-interpretation and spin. There was a fatal and inexcusable absence of challenges in the assessment process, at the level of JIC and below. The most telling example of that is that those in the Defence Intelligence Staff with the expertise to assess whether material from the so-called new source was in any way credible were not given full access, and did not have their written concerns reported to the Joint Intelligence Committee. The Ministry of Defence was so embarrassed by this that it withheld details from the Intelligence and Security Committee even when the Secretary of State and officials were questioned about it. The committee strongly criticised both the Minister and officials for this in its report, and Geoff Hoon subsequently apologised to the House of Commons.

The 2004 report by the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and his committee, which included Sir John Chilcot as a member, did a lot of the work which was needed in the intelligence area—on the intelligence failure and on its lessons. In this area, there is not a lot the Chilcot report could add to the work done by the noble Lord and his team. I am optimistic that, as a result of the Butler report, challenge processes have been built into intelligence assessment, and the role of the Joint Intelligence Committee is better understood. We now also have the National Security Council.

Incidentally, speaking of challenge, from a personal standpoint I am still puzzled that no one in the entire intelligence community seemed to have considered the possibility that Saddam Hussein thought it was in his interest, in the power rivalries of the Middle East, that other nations should continue to believe that he had or was close to having weapons of mass destruction.

Chilcot’s sections on the conduct of the war and its aftermath pose serious questions for the Ministry of Defence. Why was there inadequate preparation for the known danger of IEDs? Why was there such a failure to provide adequately armoured vehicles and what Chilcot calls an “unacceptable” failure to identify where responsibility for these things lay? My noble friend Lord Tyler reminded us that political obstacles were put in the way of prior preparation, with a resultant cost in human lives. There is surely a lesson there. Churchill went to considerable lengths during the Second World War so that he could continue to make various kinds of preparation while leading the enemy to believe that he was doing something completely different. We ought to know a little from that experience.

Is there a problem with the can-do approach which is in many ways a commendable part of the tradition of our service chiefs? It may get in the way of telling the truth to power if the truth is: “No, we cannot actually do it in this case”—at least, not in the timescale proposed or not in the way suggested. If the truth cannot be told to power, bad decisions will be made. Sometimes, very good motives may cause that to happen. Those are all issues which must now be given serious consideration.

The Chilcot report taken as a whole is a searing criticism of Tony Blair and those across the political spectrum who gave him uncritical support in this matter. It is also a severe criticism of those within the intelligence and policy-making processes of government who allow themselves to be caught up in groupthink without opposing the alternatives. I have believed all along, and Chilcot provides the evidence, that Tony Blair was motivated by a conviction that our central and vital alliance with the United States required us to be alongside it “whatever”. That seems to neglect the fact that in two important conflicts—important to each of our countries respectively—we had considerable differences. I refer to the Vietnam War and the Falklands War. In both cases, we took very different views, but our alliance survived and there was a degree of understanding between our two countries as to how each handled the conflict in which they were involved.

A leader with Tony Blair’s skills, determination and unquenchable self-belief should not have been presiding over a system which offered so little challenge. This sad story, which cost many British lives and is still costing so many Iraqi lives, has done lasting damage to public confidence in politicians and the political process. It has undermined in our country the very democratic institutions which our Armed Forces risk their lives to defend, and we owe them better.