Iraq Inquiry

Lord Wright of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wright of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, having looked again at my interventions in the House on 24 September 2002 and 18 March 2003, warning, as many noble Lords did, against the military invasion of Iraq, I shall resist the temptation to claim the obvious. Sadly, there is no sign in the Chilcot report that any of the powerful interventions in this House—many of them spoken with much greater authority than mine, and some of which have been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Morgan—were ever brought to the attention of the Prime Minister at that time.

Two of the conclusions of the Chilcot inquiry were, first, the failure to use the machinery of the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee to consider the case for going to war—a criticism already emphasised in the Franks report on the Falklands War some 22 years earlier. The second concerns the conflict between the Government’s decision to remove Saddam Hussein—if only as a means of disarming Iraq—and the repeated assurance which I and others received, in reply to our questions in this House, that regime change was no part of the Government’s policy. Indeed, the Foreign Secretary was specifically on record as saying that we should not be in the business of changing other people’s Governments.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, referred to lessons for the future. I would like to ask a few questions about lessons for the present. In the light of the inquiry’s criticisms, I ask the Minister two questions. First, how often has our policy towards Syria been discussed in the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, or is it now the National Security Council? Secondly, what is now the Government’s stated policy towards regime change?

In the light of the likely consequences of changing the Syrian regime, can the Minister assure the House that we are no longer giving active support, let alone supplying weapons—most of which fall into the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra or Daesh—to the so-called moderate rebels who are trying to remove President Assad from power? It appears that President Obama is still under strong pressure in Washington, receiving an appeal from 51 so-called “Syrian experts” to launch a full-scale military attack against the Syrian regime, but has so far withstood the pressure. There are also voices in the press here that the House of Commons was wrong to refuse an attack to punish Assad for his use of chemical weapons, a refusal echoed in what was virtually a 10:1 view in this House on 29 August three years ago.

Can the Minister confirm that Her Majesty’s Government are no longer actively trying to remove President Assad and his regime? Have they listened to the repeated warnings in this House of the likely alternative? And if President Obama should be persuaded to change his view, can the Minister assure us that the Government have learned at least one of the lessons of Chilcot—namely, that in following United States policies, we need to examine very closely not only its motives, but also the likely consequences of its policies?

Finally, the report reminds us that Mr Blair concluded the Cabinet meeting on 7 March 2002 by saying that it was,

“critically important to reinvigorate the Middle East Peace Process”.

Here we are, more than 14 years later, with the combined efforts of Secretary Kerry and his predecessors, and of Mr Blair himself, as the quartet’s representative, having achieved absolutely nothing in persuading the Israeli Government under Mr Netanyahu either to enter into meaningful discussions with the Palestinian leadership, or to reverse his illegal settlement policies on the West Bank and in east Jerusalem.