Iraq Inquiry Report

Douglas Chapman Excerpts

Thursday 14th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Douglas Chapman (Dunfermline and West Fife) (SNP)]

I thank the Members who managed to secure this important debate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. and gallant Member for Gravesham (Mr Holloway). If he had had the opportunity to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, I am sure that the final read might have been much more interesting than the one that we are anticipating.

There is a completely understandable sense of anger and frustration, some of which we have seen in the Chamber today and in the wider public over recent years, at the Chilcot report not yet being published. My constituents share that anger and frustration and find the situation totally unacceptable—six years on and still no report. I want to focus on the entirely predictable “keep calm and carry on” British attitude. I am sure that the Government see that as a virtue, but to heap unacceptable delay on unacceptable delay is not the way forward. Informing us that the final report may be heavily redacted only adds insult to injury, particularly for the families who lost loved ones in Iraq. It is a dreadful situation to endure.

The conclusion of the Chilcot inquiry should be a chance for the Government to draw a line under the Iraq adventure—perhaps I should say “misadventure”. It is an opportunity to understand where it went wrong, why we fell down this particular rabbit hole and why the UK’s strategy in the middle east was so feckless that the Blair-Brown Government felt that they had no choice but to follow the United States down that rabbit hole. Instead, we have this situation. Chilcot has become something of a “corpse in a cupboard” as the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) so memorably put it in the House this time last year. We must face up to Chilcot and learn the lessons that it may offer. We need to get on with understanding what the UK wants and what our strategic aims are. Otherwise, we will be condemned to continue living with that corpse in the cupboard and, worse still, an ineffective foreign policy.

It is that reality that led the great journal Foreign Affairs to write that Britain

“is at risk of slipping into irrelevance…its foreign policy is widely derided for both its passivity and short-term outlook”

and has led American commentators to talk about the UK resigning as a global power. Last month, when we were discussing the Syrian ceasefire, the Foreign Secretary was asked whether he had contacted his counterpart in Russia to find out more about the ceasefire’s implications. He replied that no contact had been made. We criticise Russia for being isolationist, but we should not fall into that same trap ourselves and become equally afflicted.

The Defence Committee recently undertook an investigation into Russia, and it has become increasingly clear over the course of the inquiry that the symptoms of British strategic impotence exist there, too. It is almost as if the end of the cold war made us stop thinking about Russia, just as we stopped thinking about the middle east. Instead of thinking seriously about the role that we can play in the world, a series of Governments have decided to sub-contract that role to a host of allies, who do not always share our values or have our best interests at heart. Let us break the habit of a lifetime. British make do and mend will not do any longer. I ask the Prime Minister to release the Chilcot report now and bury the corpse that is in the cupboard. Let us learn the lessons of Iraq and get serious about Britain’s role in the world.

I was in Baghdad several weeks ago and Iraq is in a complete mess—it is a shambles. I assure the House that it is far from being mission accomplished—if anything, it is quite the opposite.

After 134,000 Iraqi civilians deaths and 179 UK soldiers killed in action, with another 6,000 seriously wounded, who every day have to live with the consequences of their injuries, we see that we took part in a war that destabilised that country, that caused ongoing civil war in neighbouring states and that paved the way for brutal terrorist attacks across Europe. It was a war with no real endgame in sight and no endgame planned for. All those actions have huge repercussions for our foreign policy, national security and the way in which decisions to go to war are taken. This has eroded public trust in democracy itself. We all remember the demonstrations that took place against the war in Iraq—some of us took part in them. The people knew that our involvement in Iraq was wrong, but the Government of the day failed to listen to those protests and to how the people of this country wanted us to proceed. The current Prime Minister can take a different route—he can listen. I say to him again: this report does not have to be written on vellum and it does not have to wait for the EU referendum, so publish the Chilcot findings in full and publish them now.