Chilcot Inquiry

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, we are all indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, and welcome this opportunity to debate the timing of publication of the Chilcot report. It provides us with an opportunity to plead the case for a report that is comprehensive in content and fully exploits the inquiry’s original remit as set out by the Government.

Last week, on 25 June, I spoke on Iraq. I understand that my contribution was followed by an avalanche on the internet of vitriol, venom, accusation and language bordering on threat. It all followed an article in the Mail Online which, accompanied by a picture of me suitably clad in a provocative Peer’s robe, accurately reported half my contribution in which I had set out the position of those of us who had supported intervention in Iraq. What, sadly, the article did not reveal was that the thrust of my speech was to oppose further intervention and also to set out a strategy for us to pursue at the United Nations to deal with militant Islam.

I make no complaint. Indeed, in today's debate, I intend to go further and give those self-same critics a further dose of my thoughts in the context of Chilcot and further cause for them to express their anger by setting out another truth over the debate on Iraq—a truth that they conveniently ignore. It is a truth that I hope Chilcot draws on during the course of his inquiry.

In my view, the whole debate on Iraq has been dominated by ignorance of the background, misrepresentation of the facts and public attitudes to the conflict determined by totally inadequate reporting in the media. There are men and women today walking the streets of London, Paris, Washington, Amman and Istanbul who are the real criminals in the story of Iraq. There are hundreds if not thousands of them. They have built their fortunes on the back of sanctions-busting in breach of international law, but because they represented business and financial institutions, they have been left untouched. They have almost never been prosecuted because it was deemed not to be in the public interest in various countries concerned, while they have laughed all the way to their banks as politicians have taken the rap. It is they who are responsible for the war in Iraq and only they.

Blair and the nonsense of WMD divert us from the truth and if Chilcot fails to deal with their criminal activity he will, in my view, have failed. To establish the truth, we need to consider the Volcker report, a UN-sponsored report of 2005, which followed a detailed investigation over 18 months into allegations of bribery, corruption, illegal commission taking and the complete undermining of the Iraqi sanctions regime established under international law. Paul A Volcker, a former chairman of the Board of Governors of the United States Federal Reserve, led the inquiry that identified more than 2,000 cases of abuse and criminal activity. That report offers us a real insight into the scale of international criminal operations, which completely undermined the sanctions regime set in place to bring the Saddam Hussein regime to heel. But the western media gave the whole report a wide berth and scant attention as the story told was simply not sexy enough. The media needed someone to blame for what has turned out to be a qualified failure. I believe that Blair’s unfortunate and, in my view, wrong use of WMD in justification for the war gave them that person to blame.

As I explained last week, I, along with others, had repeatedly appealed to the powers that be in our visits to Washington for action on sanctions-busting. The Americans were just not interested and we could do nothing as they were calling the shots. I remember telling them that unless they acted military intervention to bring Saddam’s brutality to an end was inevitable. On one occasion I led an Anglo-American parliamentary group delegation to Washington and recall discussing sanctions-breaching with State Department officials. The noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, was there and he will remember what happened. In the critical years prior to the invasion I repeatedly raised in Parliament the issue of sanctions-busting and I understand that British civil servants had no more luck with the Americans than I did. I repeat: it was the failure to stop that criminal activity that made war inevitable. If the sanctions regime had been enforced, Saddam would have been contained.

In the many forums in which we made our case on the need to enforce the sanctions policy, particularly in the case of oil exports, we were able to draw on the extensive work that we had done in the early years of Saddam’s revenue-raising from illegal oil sales. In the 1990s, at a time when I was very closely following events in Iraq on an almost daily basis, I sent my former Commons researcher Jim Mahon to Iraq to investigate the scale of illicit oil trading with Turkey. He replied back at the time in the following words: “Trucks, bumper to bumper, in a line as far back as the eye could see, thousands of them, crossing the border into Turkey; some trucks just converted with large containers carrying oil on their backs”. It was the lack of monitoring of humanitarian imports under the UN sanctions regime, with the rake-off of commissions and Saddam’s oil revenues, that funded the whole machinery of Iraqi government and kept the upper echelons of Saddam’s murderous regime and republican guard in place.

With the failure to act on the sanctions-busters, I saw no alternatives to war, although I now believe that the war option failed for the reasons that I set out last week. I now look to Chilcot to establish the truth. At the time I challenged the Chilcot inquiry remit as being too limited. Nevertheless, they tell me that Chilcot is a wise old owl and if he deploys his wisdom, he should find a way of addressing the important issues that I am raising. Believe me, if Saddam’s revenues had been cut off, that regime would never have survived. There would have been no war in Iraq. Those who insist on attacking those of us who supported intervention as a last resort to end Saddam’s brutality would do well to consider the facts and ignore the media-generated stories that even some politicians have swallowed. I hope that Chilcot will do just that.

The irony in all this is that many of us who supported intervention in Iraq were totally opposed to intervention both in Afghanistan and Syria—unlike the Liberal Democrats. The noble Lord, Lord Dykes, mentioned the position of his party. His party supported the intervention in Afghanistan. I opposed it in Afghanistan and Syria. Perhaps on the next occasion it will be us who are on the streets of London, demonstrating for the enforcement of sanctions against the rogue regimes in an attempt to avoid some war in the future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, that is precisely the sort of thing that the inquiry will be looking at. I do not know how far it will go into the question of the evasion of sanctions in the period running up to war. Neither do I know whether the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, gave evidence to the inquiry; that is something else that might be covered.

The noble Lord, Lord Morgan, raised some large constitutional questions, which of course will be there. When the report is published, we will dive into it and draw what conclusions we can. The parliamentary vote on Syria was itself partly a reflection of the sense in Parliament that the Government were not entirely to be trusted on some of these issues.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, evidence was given on the question of sanctions. It was given by Ann Clwyd MP.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Lord for that. I hope that the inquiry may have touched in some detail on that issue.

The noble Lord, Lord Morgan, said in a very strong way that we need to expose and bring to justice the guilty men. This—as Sir John Chilcot has said on a number of occasions—is not a judicial inquiry; it is a historical inquiry intended to get at the evidence as far as possible. The question of guilt is one which perhaps a number of other people, such as the noble Lord, may wish to push once they have the evidence in front of them.

I hope that I have covered most of the issues. It is ungenerous to say that Sir John Chilcot could have been bullied by the Cabinet Secretary. He and his team have been remarkably robust on this.