Iraq Inquiry

Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

I opposed the Iraq War and in my speech of 26 February 2003, at col. 260 in Hansard, I set out the reasons why, in my judgment, it failed three of the just war criteria for a morally justified military intervention.

However, I begin by saying that I believe the decision to go to war taken by the Prime Minister and Parliament at the time was an honourable one and was honourably made. It was in my view a tragic misjudgment, but it was not criminal. Mr Blair is now being pilloried in the press, but I suspect that if the intervention had turned out to be a long-term success rather than a very short-lived military one, some of those now vilifying him would have been praising him as a successful war leader. Tragically, instead of stability, we have had sectarian strife, massive displacement of people and terrible casualties. It is only fair, however, to note that there was no easy way in which the situation in Iraq was going to be resolved and what is happening in Syria is a literally deadly reminder of what can happen when matters are left just to take their course without an external invasion by major powers.

That said, however, the worst aspect of the Iraqi intervention for me has always been the failure to prepare properly for the aftermath of the military victory, as highlighted so powerfully in the Chilcot report. A Roman emperor on his deathbed was alleged to have given his sons three pieces of advice: “Don’t quarrel among yourselves, pay your soldiers well and despise everyone else”. Leaving aside the last point, the invasion failed dismally on the first two counts. There were entirely contradictory signals coming from those in charge in the United States, not least on the troop levels that would be necessary. Then there was the disastrous decision to let 400,000 Iraqi soldiers loose into the community, many with access to weapons, leaving the country in a state of virtual anarchy. A more properly realistic policy would have been to offer to double the pay of those in the Iraqi Army, leaving the process of de-Baathification to take place over a much longer period.

I would now like to look much more closely at how some of the just war criteria apply in the light of the Chilcot judgments. I do so because of future lessons that might be learned about the application to modern warfare. First, as Chilcot says:

“We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort”.

What is important to spell out for the future, however, is that last resort is very much a matter of judgment and it cannot mean waiting for ever. In fact, a malevolent enemy will use every delaying trick in the book to retain and strengthen their position, with time usually being on their side. In theory, you can always go on negotiating, but that could be fatal. In practice, if an enemy is to be confronted, action has to be taken when it has the maximum chance of success.

For that reason, I am not altogether easy about the phrase in the Chilcot report,

“before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted”,

because with Saddam Hussein, there was never going to be a peaceful means of disarming him. Like the intelligence community that advised the Government, I believed it likely that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although they had not been found at the time; and that, in any case, he certainly intended to develop them if he possibly could. Although I believed that to be the case, I still took the view that the less hazardous course in 2003 was to continue the policy of containment with its no-fly zones, which was working very well. I did so in part because I did not believe that at that point there was sufficient significant international consensus for military action. This leads on to the whole question of legality.

Chilcot declined to comment on the legality of the war—wisely, in my view. In fact, there was reputable neutral opinion at the time which said that military intervention was justified under Resolution 1441, even without a second UN resolution. The point I wish to make is that legality may not be enough. The relevant just war criterion here is that there must be proper authority. In the modern world, we rightly look to the Security Council of the UN to provide that authority but, as the late, lamented Sir Michael Quinlan showed so persuasively at the time in his contrast of the intervention in Kosovo with that in Iraq, although the former had no UN resolution to justify it, it had the kind of international consensus which morally authorised it in a way that the Iraq invasion did not. In the case of Iraq, although a case could be made out for its legality, it lacked the authority of a true international consensus. That is the lesson we need to bear in mind for the future. That is why my view then was that we should have continued the successful policy of containment, working towards greater consensus and, as we see in retrospect, much more thorough planning for the period following a military victory.

The other just war criteria that I wish to discuss very briefly is that there must be a reasonable chance of success. This poses a sharp question as to what counts as success. The military campaign was highly successful but, as Chilcot emphasises, the wider goal of a just and ordered Iraq has been for the most part a terrible failure.

However, the question of success goes much further even than that. The Iraq invasion took place in a world in which the main threat—then, as now—was terrorism. The struggle against terrorism is not just a matter of military victories or even achieving ordered government: it is a struggle of hearts and minds against a twisted ideology. This means that every action must be judged as to whether it is going to further or frustrate that goal—that kind of success. An invasion led by a US-led coalition in a deeply suspicious Middle East was problematic from the first in its capacity to arouse and reinforce that ideology—and, as we have seen, to reinforce its strength around the world. This did not rule invasion out but ought to have been much more in the minds of the planners.

There are many lessons to be learnt from what has gone so badly wrong. My concern, then and now, is the application of traditional just war criteria, which I still think are highly relevant to every possible conflict in the modern world. With all due respect to the noble and very scholarly Lord, Lord Morgan, they actually go back to St Augustine. They are highly applicable in the modern world but need to be applied with a proper sensitivity to the conditions of modern warfare, as I have tried to suggest in one or two places.