Iraq Inquiry Report

David Davis Excerpts

Thursday 14th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House calls on the Government to conclude the National Security checking of the Iraq Inquiry report as soon as possible in order to allow publication of that report as soon as possible after 18 April 2016, and no later than two weeks after that date, in line with the undertaking on time taken for such checking by the Prime Minister in his letter to Sir John Chilcot of 29 October 2015.

As an aside, Mr Speaker, I never cease to be impressed by your short-term memory.

The second Iraq war was started to liberate the Iraqi people. Instead, it shattered their country. It was intended to stabilise the middle east. Instead, it destabilised the middle east. It was intended to remove a threat of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Instead, it exacerbated and massively increased a threat of terrorism that does exist. It was supposedly fought in defence of our values, but it has led to the erosion of civil liberties at home and the use of torture abroad. Because we were misled on the matter, Parliament voted for the war by 412 to 149. So there were very good reasons for setting up the inquiry in the first place.

The war led to the deaths of 4,800 allied soldiers, 179 of them British. The lowest estimate of Iraqi civilian casualties was 134,000, but plausible estimates put the number up to four times higher. The war immediately created 3.4 million refugees, and half of them fled the country. It cost the British taxpayer £9.6 billion, and it cost the American taxpayer $1,100 billion. It has done untold damage to the reputation of the west throughout the middle east and, indeed, among Muslim populations at home and abroad. Initiated to protect the west from terrorism, it has, in fact, destroyed the integrity of the Iraqi state and triggered a persistent civil war that has created the conditions for perhaps the worst terrorist threat yet to the west: ISIL or ISIS. The war has done huge harm to the self-confidence and unity of the west, in effect neutering our foreign policy. The war was, with hindsight, the greatest foreign policy failure of this generation, and I say that as someone who was misled into voting for it.

It has been more than six and a half years since Gordon Brown launched the Iraq inquiry and more than five years since it heard its last evidence. It has been more than a year since this House, in a similar debate, called for the Government to publish the Iraq inquiry report as soon as possible, and yet that report has still not been published. It is no surprise that one of the most pre-eminent politicians of our era, the highly respected and very civilised ex-Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, branded the delays a scandal. He is right. They are a disgrace.

In 2009, the then Leader of the Opposition, who is now Prime Minister, was scornful about the suggestion that the report would not be published before the 2010 election. In 2009, Sir John Chilcot told families that he would complete the inquiry in a year if he could, but that it would definitely not take more than two years. In fact, the evidence taking did not conclude until 2 February 2011. Nevertheless, at that time—more than five years ago—Sir John Chilcot said:

“It is going to take some months to deliver the report itself.”

It has been 62 months and counting.

Then the inquiry started the classification process. Under the inquiry protocols, there are nine different categories of reason for turning down the classification—for preventing Sir John not from seeing the information, but from publishing it. What the inquiry can publish is determined by a series of protocols that have criteria so broad that a veto on application can be applied virtually at Whitehall’s discretion.

Compare that with the Scott inquiry into the Iraqi super-gun affair. It also covered issues of incredible sensitivity in terms of national security, international relations, intelligence agency involvement, judicial propriety and ministerial decision making—the whole gamut. Sir Richard Scott was allowed to decide himself what he would release into the public domain, unfettered by Whitehall, so that whole tranche of time—that couple of years—would have been unnecessary. By contrast, Sir John Chilcot, a former permanent secretary at the Northern Ireland Office who chaired an incredibly sensitive inquiry into intercept—some Members of the House may remember that—and who is considered a responsible keeper of the Government’s secrets, is tied up in protocols subject to the whim of Whitehall.

There have been long negotiations between the inquiry and Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, and his predecessors over the disclosure of some material, most notably correspondence between ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and George W. Bush. There is no point whatsoever in the inquiry if it cannot publish the documents that show how the decision to go to war was arrived at. That is, after all, the point of half the inquiry. Chilcot wrote in a letter to the Cabinet Secretary:

“The question when and how the prime minister made commitments to the US about the UK’s involvement in military action in Iraq and subsequent decisions on the UK’s continuing involvement, is central to its considerations”.

The negotiations between Chilcot and Jeremy Heywood concluded only in May 2014, when it was announced that an agreement had been reached. The process was clearly frustrating for Sir John. He queried why it was that

“individuals may disclose privileged information (without sanction) whilst a committee of privy counsellors established by a former prime minister to review the issues, cannot”.

He was of course referring to Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell’s respective diaries, which quoted such information, again without Whitehall veto.

Then came the excruciatingly long process of Maxwellisation. This is meant to be a process of notifying any people criticised in the report so they can correct factual errors and be ready to respond to those criticisms when they become public. It is not intended to allow protected negotiation between the commission and teams of expensive lawyers—incidentally, those expensive lawyers are paid for by the taxpayer—who negotiate ad nauseam, at any cost, to protect their client’s reputation, even over and above the national interest. That is what is happening.

We know that finally, after all that, the Iraq inquiry is now due to submit its report to the Government next week. The next stage will be security clearance before publication. The Prime Minister stated last October that he fully expected security clearance to take less than two weeks, the time taken by the equally enormous Saville inquiry. Let us remember that the Saville inquiry took decades to come to its conclusion, but it was cleared in two weeks. I cannot believe that clearance will take any longer than that, given, as we already know, that every single piece of this report has already been negotiated with Whitehall, presumably on the basis of security considerations.

Given that, and the Prime Minister’s declaration that he is as exasperated as anyone by the delays to publication, the public ought to expect the report to be published in the first week of May. That should be the reasonable conclusion, but that is not the case. There are now reports that the publication of the report will be postponed until after the EU referendum at the end of June. This is frankly outrageous. It is for this reason that I, together with right hon. and hon. Members from all parties in this House, have called for this debate. We demand that the Government publish the report as soon as security clearance is complete, and certainly no more than two weeks after its receipt.

While this inquiry has lumbered on, there have been at least three significant foreign policy decisions that could have been dramatically different had we had the benefit of the Iraq inquiry’s findings. The decision to intervene in Libya was intended to prevent a massacre, but since then, partly because we changed the aim to regime change, the country has descended into civil war and miserable, fractured chaos. On the question of regime change, when the Prime Minister first asked this House to support military action against the Assad regime in Syria in 2013, the House turned him down. Had the House not blocked military intervention, we could have ended up as military supporters of our now sworn enemies, IS. In Iraq, the UK is of course involved in the ongoing civil war that has raged since the invasion in 2003.

There are lessons to learn from the Iraq war about our foreign policy, our political decisions to go to war and our military operations. The longer we leave it, the less useful these lessons will be, and the more likely it is that we will make the same mistakes. When decisions such as those that were made in Libya, Syria and Iraq are made without knowledge of the facts, mistakes are made and sometimes people die as a result. Therefore, it is not hyperbole to say that the delay to the Iraq inquiry could cost lives because bad decisions may be made. I would go further and say that it probably has cost lives because bad decisions were made. Indeed, many of the revelations in the report will come too late to be useful in relation to decisions that have already been taken. This is the irrecoverable harm that has been caused by the delays—the unconscionable delays—in this inquiry.

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that the Iraq war was the most appalling miscalculation and the most idiotic way of conducting foreign policy in living memory. As he is looking to the future, does he accept that the fracture within Islam that the war exacerbated and the Pandora’s box that was then opened of violence and extremism within Islam, both in the middle east and internationally, are sadly the gift of the Iraq war that will keep on giving, and that there may be decades’ worth of interventions from extreme Islamic elements across the globe?

[Mr Davis]

I do not think it is a question of “may be”; I think there will be the continued disruption of international affairs and the continued threat of terrorism. Europol’s assessment that there are 5,000 jihadists in Europe implies an arrival rate of 1,000 a year, and the rate is going up, not down. It is clear that the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right.

That brings us to a significant point. When the individual Prime Ministers involved in each of the decisions I mentioned made their decision, I am sure that in their own mind they were doing the right thing—they were trying to save lives, to save a civilisation or to intervene to prevent further terrorism. The trouble is that every single one of them made simplistic decisions, without detailed understanding. The complexity of the issues they were reaching into was beyond their knowledge. It is correcting, enhancing and improving that knowledge that the inquiry report is all about.

I am no pacifist, but I find myself horrified at the thoughtless, aggressive and unnecessary interventions by the west in areas that it does not understand. I did not like the Gaddafi regime; I did not like the Saddam Hussein regime; I do not particularly like the Bashar Assad regime, but ripping them out has led to something even worse. The hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) is therefore absolutely right in his analysis, which demonstrates why this report and its speed of preparation are so important.

[Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making an immensely compelling point. Does he agree that when the report is published, which, I like him, hope will be as soon as possible, although the tendency in the British media will be to use it as a trial of the former Prime Minister—Blair guilty or innocent—the great gain of the report will be in showing how the whole mechanism of government worked in the run-up to the decision to go to war? A Prime Minister is not Dr Strangelove; this is about how the whole machine in Whitehall works.

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not follow him down his comparison between Dr Strangelove and past Prime Ministers, but he is right in one respect: the most important element of this is what we learn from our mistakes. However, there are also issues of accountability and closure, which I will return to in a moment.

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

I am reluctant to interrupt, because I am very much enjoying the powerful case that the right hon. Gentleman is making, but I invite him to ignore the representations of his colleague, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), because this war is bound up with one key individual: Tony Blair. For ever and a day, he will be associated with this particular war. It was personalised around the personality of that Prime Minister. As far as I am concerned, he could have a tattoo across his forehead reading “Iraq”, such is his legacy. This will be a comment and a statement about his day. I was in this House when we voted to go to war, as was the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), and I had to listen to the nonsense and drivel that was that former Prime Minister’s case for war. Please let us make sure that where blame is to be apportioned, it is apportioned rightly.

[Mr Davis]

I will come back to this issue in the latter part of my speech. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) and I have a very dear common friend who thinks that Mr Blair should be at The Hague, so there is a range of opinion on this, but to come to that conclusion today would be to pre-empt the report. I do not intend to do that, but I do intend to turn to the issue of accountability in a minute.

[Mr Graham Allen]

Just to get the balance correct, if we go back to the time of the vote, a majority of the non-payroll vote in the Labour party—122 Members, and I was proud to be one of the organisers—actually rebelled against their own Government. Had the Conservative party supported us we would not have gone to war. Those are historical matters, but it is important to place on the record that the biggest ever parliamentary rebellion within a governing party was by the Labour party on the issue of taking us to war. Many of us at the time realised that it would be a disaster, but none of us realised what an appalling disaster it would be—one that would carry on for decades and influence us domestically as well as in the middle east.

[Mr Davis]

The hon. Gentleman has made his point well, but one of the issues that the report will face up to, one hopes, is the veracity of what was told to the House that day. That will be one of the key issues, which is why the argument between Sir John Chilcot and Whitehall is very important. Reading between the lines of his letters, that argument was very much about what decisions were taken before the House made its decision and after—what was told to the House, whether it was accurate, whether it was based on impartial briefings and whether, indeed, the politics of the issue coloured the views of important components of the state. I am not going to attempt to answer those questions today, but I would be incredibly disappointed if the commission’s report did not actually answer them in plain English. That is why I would not be drawn by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield, who is a very great friend of mine. The report has to answer those questions; what the tabloid and other press do with the report the day after publication is not for me.

I will press on, briefly, with the lessons to learn not just about the war but about how we should conduct these inquiries. The Government now intend to review the Maxwellisation process, in which those who have been criticised in a report are given the chance to respond. That is to be welcomed, as Maxwellisation has been responsible for half the delays here. It is clear that strict time controls are needed for future inquiries. It cannot be right that those who are to be criticised can delay publication for their own interests, so I hope that strict time controls will arise as a result.

There is no reason for further delay. It has been suggested that the delay between the report being security cleared and its publication is because it needs to be proof-read and typeset. That would be unacceptable if true. The report is already in electronic format. It has already been repeatedly checked for accuracy, and will be checked again by the security services. It will have been read by more people than some newspapers. The fact is that the report has been pored over by many people for five years. We are in the 21st century, not the era of hot lead typesetting. Someone said to me this morning that I might have summarised the rather long motion rather more crisply by saying, “This House instructs Sir John Chilcot simply to press ‘send’.”

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman agrees that the public at large, and bereaved families in particular, deserve answers, so redactions must be kept to an absolute minimum. Those families should not have to endure any further suggestions of a cover-up.

[Mr Davis]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right, but, to be honest with her, I will be astonished if there are any redactions in the report. I remember that once, when I was Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, a report was given to me about the overrun of MI5 and MI6 on their buildings. It had four chapters: the introduction, the chapter on MI6, the chapter on MI5 and the conclusion. The chapters on MI5 and MI6 were virtually identical, except that all the redactions were different. We rang up MI5 and said, “MI6 has agreed to all these,” then we rang up MI6 and said, “MI5 has agreed to all these,” and then we removed nearly all the redactions. They were political—they were redactions to preserve the interests of the bureaucracy involved, not the national interest. The simple truth is that the facts in the report have already been cleared. That is what two years of the argument was about. If there is a single redaction, I and others will be looking at it very closely and asking why it was not redacted years ago instead of now. The hon. Lady is absolutely right about the rights of the families in this affair.

There is no doubt that the whole country is fed up with waiting for the final report, but none more so than the families of those 179 British soldiers who died fighting for their country in Iraq. The families have suffered for years as this inquiry has dragged on and on, and it would be disgraceful to make them wait for months longer, just because the Government are worried about what effect—if any—the report will have on the referendum. I cannot imagine what impact that might be, given that there is no party political advantage in this to either side.

The Conservatives and Labour both supported the war. As the hon. Member for Nottingham North said, half the Labour party stood back or voted against it, and there is no advantage either way. The inquiry was started by Labour and supported by the Prime Minister. It is therefore inconceivable that the Government should seek to wait until after the June referendum to publish the report, and I hope that when the Minister replies to the debate, he will make it clear that that will not happen—I am sure he will address that point directly.

Let us put this issue in context. If the report waits until June, it will be seven years since the inquiry started, and some parents of the dead soldiers will have been waiting 10 or 12 years for an answer. To give the House a simple comparison, the Israeli Government appointed the Winograd commission in 2006 to investigate the war with Lebanon. It produced its interim report not in seven years but in seven months, and it was highly critical of the existing Government that had set it up. The final report was produced after 17 months. Any argument for delay on grounds of political sensitivity or national security would be far more pressing in Israel, where that is a matter of daily life and death to all its citizens. Because of that, it is also a matter of very high and extremely important politics. If Israel can produce a report in seven and 17 months, we should be able to do it in a lot less than seven years.

Some people will, of course, be held to account in this report; otherwise it will properly be dismissed as a whitewash. That is to be expected and must be right. However, this is principally about learning from mistakes that we made as a nation, and ensuring that we do not make the same mistakes again. It is also about remembering those who have suffered great loss, and giving them some measure of solace in the truth and some degree of closure. This is about doing the honourable thing by those who have made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of their nation, and to delay any further for no good reason would be an insult to those brave soldiers who died in the Iraq war, and a cruel insult to their families who have waited more than six years for a proper answer.

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[Sir Gerald Howarth]

Indeed. I could not possibly disagree. That is entirely right.

Secondly, we felt the inquiry was necessary

“to consider how we should adjust our whole military posture to the new type of military operations we face, including at the tactical level: whether our soldiers, sailors and airmen are getting the right training package for that type of warfare; whether…we have the right equipment for the task; whether we have the correct balance of forces, and what needs to be done so that we do not become disproportionately reliant on urgent operational requirements—a kind of panic-buying formula—to make up the shortfall in equipment.”—[Official Report, 11 June 2007; Vol. 461, c. 583.]

Thirdly and finally, there had already been several Select Committee inquiries, and there was a real need for a comprehensive inquiry by an independent committee established by the Government. We suggested there was real urgency. In introducing today’s debate, my right hon. Friend mentioned the effect of the time lag. At the time, I said:

“The reason for the relative urgency is that, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks”—

now Lord Hague—

“said, while the events are fresh in people’s minds and the e-mails have not been destroyed, we need to learn whatever lessons we can from the background to operations in Iraq so far, and to apply them to Afghanistan before it is too late.”—[Official Report, 11 June 2007; Vol. 461, c. 585.]

So there was an imperative, and a great disservice has been done to everybody, in that the inquiry was not established in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war but indeed was six years late. As I said, the bereaved are owed an explanation.

[Mr David Davis]

My hon. Friend has been a Defence Minister and shadow Defence Minister. What is his opinion of the argument put at the time that, whenever our forces are in the field, we cannot have an inquiry, which seems madness to me? We had a successful inquiry into Norway, for example.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. He mentioned Norway, and indeed there is plenty of precedent. I think that that was an excuse for not holding an inquiry, and I think that it was a mistake.

It is not just the bereaved who are owed an explanation, however. Those of us who were in the House at the time are owed one as well. All of us bore a responsibility for the decisions that we made on whether to vote for the war or not, and those of us who were on the Front Bench bore a special responsibility. However, we had no more information than what we read in the newspapers.

When I voted for the war, I did so for three reasons. First, I had had a meeting in New York with Hans Blix, the United Nations chief weapons inspector, who had said that he had no doubt that Saddam Hussein intended to develop weapons of mass destruction, and that if he could develop them he would use them, but he—Hans Blix—could not, at that point, find them. He said that just a month before the war started, and I thought that it was pretty compelling.

My second reason was, of course, the “45 minutes” claim. I remember this vividly, because it was all over the front page of the Evening Standard. We were told that Saddam Hussein could launch what I think were described as “battlefield biological and chemical weapons” at 45 minutes’ notice, and reach the sovereign British base of Cyprus. I thought, “I have a responsibility. I am a shadow defence Minister.” I could hear Mr John Humphreys, on the “Today” programme, saying, “Well, you knew all about this, Mr Howarth, so why did you not take action at the time?” I felt that that claim had to be taken seriously.

Thirdly, I thought that, as a key ally of the United States, we had a very close relationship with that country, and we had to have a good reason for not supporting our US friends. I realise that that view will not be shared universally in the House.

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[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

It is an honour to speak in the debate, but I take no pleasure in doing so. I do not think that we should be having this debate, because the Chilcot report should have been published by now.

Time has been a huge issue since the genesis of the report. We should particularly bear in mind that Sir John Chilcot promised that the report would be delivered by 18 April, or the week commencing 18 April, and I understand that he will honour his word. Also, the Prime Minister promised to have it security-cleared within a fortnight, which would be by the week beginning 2 May. The promise that I seek from the Minister is that the Government will keep their word, and that a fortnight after Sir John Chilcot has delivered his report, we shall see it published.

As many have said, and as was said at the press conference, publishing a report is not a difficult matter these days. It is no longer a matter of “cold lead”. It is, as we heard from the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), a matter of pressing “send” and the thing is published. People have waited far too long for this report, and further delays are only adding to the pain of the families who are looking for closure. Delays also add to the ever-increasing time during which we have failed to learn the lessons of Iraq, which we should have learned several years ago.

There are further timelines relating to the Chilcot report. On 29 January last year, there was a debate—also hosted by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden—on a motion calling for the report to be published by 12 February 2015. There was uproar in the House during Prime Minister’s questions and at other times when it was suggested that the report could be delayed beyond the general election of May 2015. We are now in April 2016, and again there is uncertainty about the report.

This report was kicked off in 2009, but there was another timeline before that of impatience for the report. I remind the House of a cross-party debate held here on 31 October 2006, when I was quite a new MP, having been here for about a year and a half. It was led by Adam Price, the then hon. Member for Carmarthen, East and Dinefwr. It is instructive to go back and look at the words that Adam used at the beginning of his speech. He said:

“It is about accountability. It is about the monumental catastrophe of the Iraq war, which is the worst foreign policy disaster certainly since Suez, and possibly since Munich. It is about the morass in which, regrettably, we still find ourselves. It is also about a breakdown in our system of government—a fault line in our constitution that only we, as Parliament, can fix. Fix it we must, if there are not to be further mistakes and other Iraqs under other Prime Ministers, in which case we shall only have ourselves to blame.”—[Official Report, 31 October 2006; Vol. 451, c.163.]

Those words still ring true today.

There was another debate, to which Tony Blair refused to come, despite saying a few weeks earlier to a Conservative Member that he would come at “any time” to a debate on Iraq. Part of the defence for that was that soldiers were in the theatre of operation, but that was admirably dealt with by Douglas Hogg, then a Conservative MP and now Lord Hogg. He said during world war two, the debate on the Norway debacle was led by his father, and that took place when troops were in action. The key moment of the Norway debate—I am not certain about the name of the inquiry—led to the removal of Chamberlain and the installation of Churchill, which may have been instrumental in changing the course of world war two, because this Chamber had shown that it was not afraid.

[Mr David Davis]

The House needs to address this idea that we cannot debate or investigate anything when troops are in the field. When I have spoken to our troops in the field, they have said that they want our democracy to work properly. They want to feel that they are fighting for an honourable cause. In future, we should dismiss this idea that we are undermining our troops; we are standing up for something that will ensure that their lives are not wasted in the future.

[Mr MacNeil]

The right hon. Gentleman is quite right. People, and especially troops, want to feel that this place is not on auto-pilot. They want to know that it is living, functioning, thinking and reacting to lessons. As was said, to commit troops to a morass and refuse to learn lessons is an absolute abdication of the House’s responsibility.

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[Mr Holloway]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman in the sense that the original invasion of Afghanistan was highly effective and that the Afghan people essentially removed al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but unfortunately it was the disastrous NATO deployment to Afghanistan that whipped up the insurgency. I shall come on to that point in a minute if I may.

As I was saying, people do not get promoted for telling the truth. I sent my first draft of this speech to a friend who is a well-known and courageous BBC foreign correspondent. He emailed me, saying, “Reminds me of being attacked for negative coverage that I put out in Iraq and Afghanistan by officials who later admitted, either privately or in memoirs, that things were actually worse than I was saying in my news reports.”

With some hugely honourable exceptions, the same is true of senior military officers. After a recce of Helmand in 2004, a military officer reported back to his boss, a general at Permanent Joint Headquarters. The general asked him, “So, what’s the insurgency like in Helmand?” The officer replied, “Well, there isn’t one, but I can give you one if you want one.” At the time, the mission statement at PJHQ actually stated that the military were to give “politically aware” advice. The top brass volunteered the UK for Helmand and, as in Iraq, assured Ministers that it was doable with the original force numbers.

We experienced exactly the same with the lack of equipment. Military people in Afghanistan constantly reminded us that we had enough helicopters to do the job. A few weeks before Colonel Rupert Thorneloe and Trooper Joshua Hammond were killed by an improvised explosive device, Rupert wrote that he and his men were making “unnecessary...road moves” because of the lack of helicopters. He went on to say:

“This increases the IED threat and our exposure to it.”

A senior British general briefed the Defence Committee at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, and basically tore my head off for being a naysayer. When I was back in Kabul a few weeks later, again on a private trip, I went to see him at the end of the day. As I rather nervously walked into his office, I said, “Well, general, are we still winning?” He said, “If we damn well are, I’ll be dead by the time we do.” I was hearing one thing in public and another in private.

As a soldier, I was in Iraq before the war in 1991, and in 2003 I found myself back on the ground. As I have said before, I will never forget driving into Mosul after the regime dissolved and the city collapsing into anarchy before our eyes. It was the first time as a journalist that I had kept a sub-machine gun close to me. There were bodies on the streets. There was chaos, and a really nasty, threatening environment. American jets were coming down low, fast and noisily to intimidate people. I went to a police station to find out where the American troops were in the city. Saddam Hussein lookalikes were standing around, and the police brigadier general told us where the Americans were. Just before we left he said, “When you find the Americans, can you please get them to come up here and give us our instructions?” I hope you will agree that it was pretty astounding that, as their regime was falling, they were taking instructions from the Americans. I found the American colonel, and when I had done my business with him I said, “By the way, the Iraqi police brigadier general up the hill wants his instructions.” The American colonel said, “You can tell him to go **** himself.” It was quite extraordinary.

We ignored other experts who could have helped us. Of all the people who knew anything about Iraq, who suggested it was a good idea to dismantle Ba’athists like those police officers from the various structures of government? Would any expert have thought that that was a good idea, if asked? I do not know of anyone, apart from General Tim Cross, who thought about our responsibility to the people of Basra after the invasion.

In Afghanistan, too, the experts were consistently ignored. I was there in 1984—for part of my gap year before I went to university—when the mujahedeen were fighting the Russians. No one listened to our officials who had run the training programme for the Afghan resistance. No one listened to the senior ex-mujahedeen commanders living in north London or in the suburbs of Kabul. No one heard the concerns being expressed by the expert contractors to our foreign intelligence services, who knew many of the Taliban leadership personally. No one spoke to the agronomists who had been working for decades in the Pashtun belt.

[Mr David Davis]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the criticisms he is rightly laying at the door of several different establishments should properly be laid at the top of those establishments? Just before the Iraq war, a regimental colleague of ours serving in the planning section of the Ministry of Defence said to me, “David, I have never known a war in which the British officer class has been less happy”—so somebody was asking questions and not getting any answers.

[Mr Holloway]

Absolutely. If my right hon. Friend will forgive me, I will give the House one more anecdote on this subject. I had a barbecue in my garden in Gravesend for the officers of a regiment that was about to go to Afghanistan. I asked the officer who would be responsible for engaging with the local community in Helmand province how he would do that. He came up with a pretty unconvincing answer. About 15 minutes later the colonel, the commanding officer who was about to lead his troops on a six-month tour, took me aside and said, “Adam, I’ll tell you the best way to influence the people living in Helmand positively towards us: it’s not to get on the plane in the first place.”

No one listened to the experts. The Pakistanis, for example, know a little bit about Afghanistan and the Taliban, and the Russians certainly do—but of course, as ever, we knew it all. I remember sitting in Kabul with the general who had looked after Helmand province for a couple of years after the Russians had left. I said to him, “ISAF must be consulting you the whole time.” He looked down at his four mobile phones and said, “No one has rung me yet. I am still waiting for them to ring.”

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[Mr David Davis]

This has been a very good debate. Every speech has been impressive, well-informed and passionate. There are three reasons why Chilcot matters: one is learning lessons; one is holding people to account; and one is giving closure to those who have suffered the loss of their nearest and dearest. From the point of view of the last of those reasons, I want to say through the Minister to Sir John Chilcot that publication in June or July is incomprehensible and unacceptable. In the Gallery is Peter Brierley, whose son Shaun died 13 years ago in the service of his country. In my mind, he represents the 179 families who have lost sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, loved ones, wives and, in some cases, mothers and fathers. We owe them a debt. We call ourselves right hon. and hon.—and sometimes gallant—Members, and this is a matter of honour: let us give those families closure.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House calls on the Government to conclude the National Security checking of the Iraq Inquiry report as soon as possible in order to allow publication of that report as soon as possible after 18 April 2016, and no later than two weeks after that date, in line with the undertaking on time taken for such checking by the Prime Minister in his letter to Sir John Chilcot of 29 October 2015.