Iraq Inquiry

Earl Attlee Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I have an interest to declare because I was a TA officer serving in Kuwait and Iraq in early 2003. I was serving as a G1/G4 ops watchkeeper in HQ DSG, part of 1 (UK) Armoured Division.

Before I was called up on 26 February 2003, I was the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman for defence in your Lordships’ House. While I thought the “dodgy dossier” was appropriately named, I honestly had faith in the Prime Minister. I thought that perhaps the officials were telling him that he had to deal with Saddam Hussein then or he would never be able to deal with him. I believed it my duty to believe the Prime Minister on a matter of national security. During the run-up to the operation, Dr El Baradei had more or less told us that there was no nuclear threat from Saddam, and in the HQ and in the theatre we honestly believed that we faced a threat from imminent chemical attack and it was not just some conspiracy in No. 10.

My noble friend Lord King mentioned the Maxwellisation process. It seems to me that Maxwellisation is an invitation to witnesses to be as economical as possible with the quantity of evidence, safe in the knowledge that if the inquiry gets a bit too close they can give further details.

Mr Blair and I had privileged upbringings. We were both privately educated and many of our teachers would have served in the Second World War and had a terrible time. My teachers drummed into me time and again that war is to be avoided at all possible costs. Nevertheless, they also ensured that we knew how to defend our nation, particularly in respect of leadership, so I am not quite sure what went wrong.

There are some good aspects to this. The SDR 1998, initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, was a particularly good defence review. It recognised that we would be getting into expeditionary warfare. We practised it with Exercise Saif Sareea in Oman in 2001, and we learned a lot of lessons. Some tried to suggest that Labour Ministers deployed UK forces on Op Telic 1 ill trained and inadequately equipped for the military task that had been set for them. They did no such thing. The problems, as we know, were with the legality and the necessity of the operation and with post-conflict planning, but I have no issue at all with the way that Op Telic 1 was conducted. It was a brilliant operation, very rapidly executed.

Initially, up until December 2002, the plan was to deploy through Turkey with a British armoured brigade and two logistic brigades. Then, in December, the plan was changed to go in through the south of Iraq with an armoured brigade, a commando brigade and an air mobile brigade. This was a massive change in plan; nevertheless, we were ready to cross the start line in early March 2003. That was very fast indeed—it gave little time for our opponents to prepare and its speed minimised our casualties. Of course, once a force is deployed, you cannot leave it deployed very long. You have to recognise that your own forces will never be perfectly prepared and the longer you wait, the better prepared your opponents will be. It is not generally recognised that only the US, UK, France and Russia can deploy an armoured formation out of area, away from their own land mass. Other nations simply cannot do it; they lack both the physical and conceptual components to do so.

I want to dispel a few myths. Take the matter of body armour, raised by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. When I mobilised I was issued with brand-new body armour at Chilwell, as were all the other people being mobilised. Yes, there was a shortage of body armour in theatre. Body armour is very heavy and I suspect that what happened was that some enterprising quartermaster put his unit’s body armour in an ISO container in order to allow the troops to carry more of their own gear into theatre, not realising how fast we were going to move. We ended up in the situation that we were short of about 600 sets of body armour in theatre and the logistical system is simply not geared up to deal with that sort of problem. Unfortunately, the fact that we did not have a system of tracking the ISO shipping containers was a problem, but that is not a reason for not deploying. I am very sorry to have to tell the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, that the reality is that body armour, no matter how good—unless you cannot pick it up—will not protect a soldier from a burst of fire from a general-purpose machine gun mounted on a vehicle. You simply do not have a snowflake’s chance in a blast furnace.

I can say, years later, that I am ashamed of some of the attacks made by my honourable friends on Labour Ministers. They should have known better. Parliamentarians have to understand that it is impossible to engage in war-fighting operations without taking numerous casualties. I have said before and I will say again that the attention we pay to each casualty is inversely proportionate to the number of casualties we take. Some outside the House think that the MoD, the staff and senior officers have a sort of “Blackadder” attitude to taking casualties. They do not. In every HQ, at every level, every casualty hurts like hell. I know; I have been there.

Now I will say a word about protective ability. In late May 2003 I was running around Basra province in a soft-skin Land Rover. I was heavily armed, with a Browning 9 millimetre pistol, my body armour was somewhere in the back of the Land Rover, and I hoped that my driver had remembered to bring his rifle. We did not need anything more: it was a benign environment. It was only later, when the post-conflict plan was unravelling and we lost the consent of the people, that it became a dangerous environment.

The report observes that MoD staff in the UK were preoccupied with the FRES programme—a new armoured vehicle programme. The danger with buying a large UOR fleet is that you end up with a wide range of flat platforms with different build standards, and no plan for sustaining the fleet in the future. I am sorry to say that that is exactly what we have now—as I am sure Mr Putin’s military advisers are well aware.

The shocking part of the report is not the intelligence failures but the late consideration of the legal issues, the total lack of Cabinet government, and the problem in involving Ministers, such as Defence Ministers and Foreign Office Ministers, at all levels. Finally, I would like to say that the blame does not all lie with Labour Ministers. My noble friend Lord Dobbs touched on the role of Her Majesty’s Opposition. I am not clear, and the report does not cover, what role Her Majesty’s Opposition took in asking the very difficult questions of Ministers. If they had done that, the outcome might have been different.