Iraq Inquiry

Debate between Pete Wishart and Rory Stewart

Thursday 29th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart]

I am very grateful to the hon. Lady, who makes such a powerful and potent point about something as important as going to war. I was just a new Member, having been in the House for just a year; I was a young whippersnapper barely out of my shorts, yet I was listening to a Prime Minister making this case. I thought, “Surely, there must be something in it,” but I realise now, along with many other Members, that an issue as important as going to war should not have been whipped on this basis.

The House passed the vote on Iraq by 412 to 149. I was among the 149; my right hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) was among the 149; I see two Liberal Democrat Members in their places —the right hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Sir Andrew Stunell) and the right hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker)—who were among the 149. This was the proudest vote of my 14 years in this House. It was a vote that defined the Parliament between 2001 to 2005. It was a vote, I now believe, that characterised the Labour Government. It was a vote that is now personally associated with Tony Blair, and it will follow him to the grave and be on his tombstone. Such is his association with it that he might as well have it tattooed on his forehead. The Iraq war will for ever be bound up with the last Labour Government and the personality of the last but one Prime Minister.

[Rory Stewart]

Is there not a danger of this debate becoming an opportunity for self-congratulation or self-laceration on the part of Members of Parliament rather than focusing on the real lessons for how Britain acts in the world?

[Pete Wishart]

I want to come on to that; it is so important because this House was misled. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman agrees with that, but I am sure that, as someone who looks at and understands these issues, he knows that this was a total fabrication. I see him shaking his head. The case for war was non-existent. We have got to understand why a majority of Members voted for it. We have to start to get to the bottom of why this was allowed to happen.

We are still feeling the implications and repercussions: half a million presumed dead; a region destabilised; a country divided; international diplomacy discredited. A point that the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway) made was that we have alienated a generation of young Muslims—here and around the world—dangerously radicalising many of them, giving them a grievance for some of the perverted causes that have been picked up to justify what they see as their perverted agenda. These are things that we now have to deal with for our own security. That is what Iraq bequeathed us. We have got to find out how this happened and why this set of conditions was allowed, enabling us to pursue this particular course of action.

I remember the almost ingenious lengths to which the Labour Government went to try to invent this case. I remember that the House was recalled. It was not just that day in March; we were recalled in September of the previous year. We were told to come down and find in our pigeon-holes the document that subsequently became known as “the dodgy dossier”—100-odd pages of utter drivel, manufactured fabrications and plagiarised sources. We found that most of it came from the post-doctoral work of some student called Ibrahim al-Marashi. It almost seemed like a script for a comedy sketch, yet this was the UK getting prepared to go to war in the 21st century!

We now know, of course, that there were never any weapons of mass destruction—still less any that could be deployed in 45 minutes. There was no collusion with al-Qaeda, even though jihadists now wander at will in the IS forces across Iraq. There was no evidence of any uranium project, and nothing whatsoever could be found relating to any nuclear programme. We were misled; this House was misled.

There are several Members in the House who understand and realise that they were duped, but there are still some who believe that it was right to go to war. I am very fond of the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), but he must at some point say that this was a total fabrication, that the House was misled, and that a case was fabricated to go to war. The sooner the right hon. Gentleman does that, the sooner he will get himself off the hook, because this will pursue him, and the others who made the case for war, to the very end of their careers.

I do not think that the issue will end with the publication of the Chilcot report. We seen had four whitewashes—there have been four attempts to put this to bed—but it is not going to end. We will have the Chilcot report, but I do not think that it will get us there; I think it will be another generation before we get to the truth of Iraq. It is possible that there will be a judge-led inquiry, and that might help to get us there, but this is going to go all the way. I foresee that significant people will eventually be taken to The Hague, because this is such an important issue which has redefined so much contemporary foreign history. People say that it was a disaster bigger than Suez—of course it was. This was the biggest single foreign policy blunder and disaster ever made by any Government in modern history.

So we need the Chilcot report. Do I believe that it we will get us to the heart of this with the Chilcot report? No, I do not, but I think it will go a long way towards describing and explaining some of the things that happened. It will be another generation before we arrive at the absolute truth. There are too many big reputations to be tarnished—again, I say that to the right hon. Member for Blackburn. There are people who will be in a position to try to ensure that this is kicked into the long grass. The only reason I have any confidence in the Chilcot report is that the establishment is trying to prevent us from seeing it, so there must be something good in it. I hope that that means that we may get a glimpse into the workings of this Government.

We are where we are. We hope that we shall see the Chilcot report soon. We should have demanded its publication in this debate, and I am disappointed that we have not been given an opportunity to do so. However, I do not think that the report will be the end of the process. I believe that this will go all the way to The Hague. We engaged in an illegal war on the basis of a fabrication and a downright lie, and we deserve to know the truth. Some day we will get the truth, but I do not believe that we will get it from Chilcot.

Iraq War (10th Anniversary)

Debate between Pete Wishart and Rory Stewart

Thursday 13th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

That is a very good point, and perhaps it is a way for me to wrap up my analysis of the Foreign Office. Of course, this is not a uniquely American problem. Within any British civil service Department, there is no great incentive to admit failure. When I look back at the reports I wrote stuck in al-Amara and Nasiriyah, I find it extraordinary how every week, I claimed great success. Every week, I would write, “We’ve hired another 300 people into the police. We’ve held a new sub-district election. I’ve just created 3,000 jobs. We’ve just refurbished another set of clinics and schools.” To read report after report, week after week, it looks as if the whole thing is getting better and better. In retrospect, I know differently, of course. When I began, I could go into the bazaar to get an ice cream, but by the end, I was stuck in my compound with 140 rocket and mortar-propelled grenades flying at the compound, and we had to abandon it and retreat back to a military base, essentially surrendering Nasiriyah, a city of 600,000 people, to the insurgents.

The situation is not helped by the way we talk about it in Britain today. We do not really think very much about Iraq. We do not think very much about what exactly Iraq is doing with Iran or Syria at the moment, why exactly Iraq got involved in dubious banking transactions to bust sanctions on behalf of the Iranian Government or why exactly our great ally, al-Maliki, appears to have been allowing trans-shipment of weapons from Iran into Syria. Why do we not think about these things? It is because we are not very serious. At some level, this country is no longer being as serious as it should be about foreign policy. Our newspapers are not writing enough about Iraq. The Foreign Office is not thinking enough about the failure. The military is not thinking enough about these things. Unless we acknowledge that something went wrong in Iraq and that something went deeply wrong in Afghanistan, we will get ourselves stuck again.

What do we do about it? We need to reform. It cannot be business as usual. We cannot just go around pretending it was all fine. We cannot simply blame Blair and Bush.

[Pete Wishart]

Is not the reason for us going to war in Iraq actually quite simple? Prime Minister Tony Blair had some perverse obligation to George Bush, and that is why we went in.

[Rory Stewart]

The hon. Gentleman has raised exactly the point that we need to talk about. We believe that somehow it is all the fault of Blair and Bush—this is the myth that has entered the national consciousness. My experience as someone inside the system is that we have to look much more deeply at ourselves. We need to look at the Foreign Office, the military, the intelligence services and Parliament. These people, Blair and Bush, do not operate in a vacuum; they operate in a culture that did not challenge and shape the debate sufficiently. It is not realistic for Blair or Bush to know deeply about these situations and it is simply a constitutional convention, of course, that the people who make the decision are the Blairs and the Bushes. However, if we look at what got us trapped on the ground in Iraq—at why, for example, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) found it difficult to get out of Iraq or why President Obama found it difficult to say no to the surge—it is because these people are part of a much bigger system.

The reform of that system is threefold. First, we need radically to reform the way in which the Foreign Office operates. The Foreign Secretary has begun; we need to go much further, thinking all the time about the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. We need to focus on people with deep linguistic and cultural expertise. We need to ensure that we change all the bureaucratic mechanisms. The core competency framework for promotion in the Foreign Office needs to be changed. The amount that people are paid for learning languages in the Foreign Office needs to be changed. The posting lengths need to be changed. The security conditions for the Foreign Office need to be changed, because unless we begin to understand deeply and rigorously what is happening on the ground, it is difficult to challenge the Blairs and the Bushes.