Operation Telic

Adam Holloway Excerpts

Monday 20th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Adam Holloway (Gravesham) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to do so. It is a great pleasure to follow my thoughtful and distinguished friend’s speech—the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) is a proper professional soldier, who does not feel the need to gob-off about his military service in this place. I also thank the Minister, who currently serves as a royal naval reservist on the active list.

I was in Iraq for both Gulf wars—in 1991 as a soldier, and 20 years ago as a correspondent. As my distinguished friend says, today we remember the 179 servicemen and women who died in Iraq, and we pay tribute to their bravery and professionalism. They have always given such service, seeking to protect our constituents, but they were committed to it and the subsequent almost two decades of war by people here and in Ministries immediately around us. I regret that, over these years, our forces have too often been let down by the decisions of those near here and in this place.

At Sandhurst, as my friends here will recall, virtually the first point we were told was that we use violence—extreme violence—only in support of a clear set of political objectives. In Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11, those political objectives were never clear, and through our negligence and indeed ignorance we have often cast many millions of people in these places into frankly unimaginable insecurity, because we would rip down structures that pre-existed and that held these places together.

I remember very well the early morning that Mosul fell. American jets were coming down low and there were bodies in the streets—retribution was taking place. I remember a mob wheeling incubators out of the hospital, looting—just looting everywhere. It was the only place as a correspondent that I ever armed my team. It was that dangerous.

I went to the police headquarters and there were all these Saddam Hussein lookalikes. I was staggered when the Mosul police chief said to me, because he knew I was going to see the small American contingent at an airfield, “Will you please get them to come up and see me, because I want my instructions about what they want us to do?” That was astonishing, frankly. Mosul had just fallen and he was prepared to co-operate with the Americans to do the right thing.

I went to the airfield and I did my business with this American colonel. I said, “Look, the Iraqi general is very keen that you go up and see him and tell him what you want.” He said, “You can go right up there yourself and you can tell him to eff himself.” At that point I thought, “Yeah, you know, we haven’t really thought this through. Where are we going with this?”

Anyway, the rest is history in Iraq, and to a degree that tragedy plays on today. I do not have time to go through the disaster that followed in Afghanistan, where, again, our troops did magnificently but, through poor planning by us, basically, we again tore down existing structures thinking that somehow we knew better. Well, we have been here before. Back in 1851, John Kaye said of an earlier war in Afghanistan:

“A strange moral blindness clouded the vision of our statesmen: they saw only the natural, the inevitable results of their own measures, and forgot that those measures were the dragon’s teeth from which sprang up armed men.”

We pay tribute tonight to the veterans, and we remember all those who died in these wars, especially those from our own armed forces. But we should also hope that in the future people in this House and surrounding Ministries honour the risks that they take by having a proper plan for what comes next. That is the least we can promise our troops.