Iraq Inquiry

Baroness Neville-Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)]

My Lords, this is a definitive and exceptionally valuable report, even if it has been a long time in gestation. It has not changed the overall view I had already come to about the Iraq war, but I did not expect it to, and I doubt that I am alone in that. What it does so excellently is to tell the factual narrative in compelling detail and draw conclusions which are well supported by the text. It is the very fairness of the judgments made that renders them so cogent. As the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, rightly remarked, their tone contrasts markedly with the tone of some current comments, which are beneath those who make them.

I cannot claim to have read all 12 volumes, but I have read a couple. Volume 4, which relates to the use of intelligence, is a telling narrative and I want to focus on it for a moment. It tells a sad story of professional error, exaggeration and political manipulation of information which has left a damaging legacy of suspicion and mistrust of the agencies and of government generally which we see played out in many contexts, even more than a decade later. For instance, I see expressions of it in our current debate about the investigatory powers legislation.

The initial intelligence error arose from what the report terms the “ingrained belief” that Saddam Hussein still possessed weapons of mass destruction and was still pursuing the goal of obtaining them. Such fragile assumptions—which, as other noble Lords have rightly remarked, were widely, in fact I think universally, shared in the intelligence community—were the starting point for a disastrous chain of events. That demonstrates that even if everybody believes something, it is not necessarily right.

The manipulation occurred as the result of the desire to find intelligence to support policy and to use it to make the public case for intervention. JIC material was embedded in a political document. Moreover, in the search to demonstrate that Iraq represented a direct threat to UK security, unassessed and entirely false intelligence was brought into play. The JIC assessment then became the political benchmark against which Saddam Hussein’s response was judged. An intelligence assessment became a policy document. Saddam Hussein was on to a hiding to nothing because if, as he repeatedly did, he denied possessing weapons of mass destruction, he was seen as being guilty of hiding them. On the other hand, had he acknowledged possession, he would have made the case for military action.

When one reads the story of this episode, one has the feeling that the way intelligence was used did not really matter to many, although not all, of those who were using it because the view was that even if it was subsequently criticised, that criticism would be overwhelmed by the discovery of the hidden WMD stocks: ends justifying means.

So what are the lessons? In the intelligence field, changes have been made in the way intelligence is assessed and in presentation to make clearer to Ministers the level of confidence in any given judgement. Ministers have shown they understand the perils of intelligence misuse in public. The House will recall that during the coalition Government, when it came to whether there should be a military response to Assad’s possession and use of chemical weapons, the Government released an unadorned JIC assessment. It did not make the Government’s case, and if somebody thought it would, they should not have expected it to do so.

We already know that the use of intelligence in court is fraught with difficulty and, although the problems are different, they exist with the use of intelligence in the wider public arena. I reckon it should be the exception. However, in a world of hybrid and cyber warfare, such sources may be uniquely valuable and central to a public understanding of what is happening, so we cannot not rule out the use of intelligence in public entirely. The policy for which they provide evidence has to carry conviction in its own right.

The events recounted in volume 4 of the report would have been much less likely if the centre of Mr Blair’s Government had been operating properly. At this point, I come to the issue of sofa government. The disregard for the conventional institution and processes of government had set in before the intervention in Iraq loomed, but it was greatly accelerated by that intervention. Special advisers must never again be allowed line authority over civil servants or be able to interfere in professional intelligence assessment. Circumstances must not arise in which intelligence from untested sources is handed to Ministers unassessed. Above all, Cabinet government and collective responsibility must function if trust in government is to be maintained.

When I advised David Cameron to set up a national security council, I had in mind three main considerations. The first was the need, for which the then Cabinet committee system did not adequately provide, to bring foreign policy and domestic security together in one place for decision and to increase the Government’s ability to operate across the piece. Secondly, in an era of the increasing importance of intelligence to policy-making, it made sense to create a forum for direct discussion between the agency heads and senior Ministers. The National Security Council now provides this.

My third and overriding consideration was indeed to try to prevent sofa government and instead to provide regular and inescapable time for consideration of the complex threats and challenges to the security of this country that the weekly Cabinet meeting agenda does not in reality provide. I recall my time as Deputy Cabinet Secretary. Foreign affairs came right at the end and tended to be squeezed. No system can be proof against perversion nor, as others have said, against operating on wrong information. I hope that some of the changes that have been made, and to which the Minister has alluded, will prove to have made sofa government less tempting and less likely.

Another part of the design was the proposal to create a fully fledged parliamentary committee to oversee the intelligence agencies. The heads of the agencies, to their credit, supported the need for much more credible accountability. It is certainly arguable that, had the current arrangements existed during Mr Blair’s Administration, some of what we witnessed might not have taken place and the Government as a whole might have been more resilient to American pressure.

However, there is the other side of this issue. It is a point made in the current edition of the Economist, and by a noble Lord earlier, and it is important. We must not allow this episode in our history, or the conclusions we draw from it, to prevent, deter or discourage us from continuing to play an active role in international politics.