Report of the Iraq Inquiry

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Andrew Mitchell

Wednesday 13th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry]

I appreciate that there is speculation about what may or may not happen to the former Prime Minister. That is not within my brief today, speaking as the shadow Foreign Secretary and attempting to draw the lessons from Chilcot. It is important that I address that this afternoon and leave it to others to take such legal action as they think appropriate. It will be for them to take that to the proper court, which will make a decision. We cannot, within the great traditions of our country, constitute ourselves as a court.

Last year, the Government asked this House to authorise military action in Syria. By contrast with Iraq in 2003, the deployment of ground troops was ruled out, which meant a reliance on local forces instead. I mentioned flawed intelligence; at that stage, we were told that there were 70,000 moderate rebels in Syria who would help defeat Daesh, which would force Assad to negotiate a peace agreement and step down. Many of us were sceptical about that 70,000 figure, and I was certainly one of them. That figure was produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee, and the Government declined to say which groups were included in that figure, where they were, what the definition of “moderate” was, how we could be sure that all these rebels were signed up to the coalition’s military strategy, or how they would get to the battlefield. All those questions mattered.

As the Government acknowledged, no military strategy could succeed without forces on the ground. Time will tell whether those 70,000 moderate Sunni rebels existed and whether they were in a position to fight the battles that it was claimed they would be able to. However, it seems to me that there is a parallel to be drawn between the intelligence that was relied on in relation to the 70,000 figure and the flawed intelligence that has been relied on in the past. It is therefore important for us to learn a lesson from Iraq 12 years earlier. Serious questions have been raised about the intelligence that underpins our decisions to take military action. Once again, Parliament was asked last year simply to take on trust what the Government said about intelligence.

There are further issues to consider, including a lack of ability for people to challenge things internally. Chilcot makes it clear that both civil servants and Cabinet Ministers lacked the opportunity, information and encouragement to challenge the case being made to them. The Prime Minister says that his National Security Council has fixed all that, but if so, why does the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy say that the NSC has so far proved itself to be

“a reactive body, rather than a strategic one, which seems to us to be a lost opportunity”?

That criticism is important, and we should not be complacent in the face of it.

The NSC certainly did not challenge the short-sighted and highly damaging cuts to our armed forces in the last Parliament, despite the huge and justifiable misgivings of senior military figures about the impact on our defence capabilities. Nor is there any evidence of the NSC doing anything to challenge the inadequate planning for the aftermath of the intervention in Libya, a subject that I will address shortly. Ultimately, while making progress in small ways, the NSC has failed to address the fundamental problem, which is a culture in Whitehall of overly optimistic group-think, which exposure to independent views could help us challenge. It is not good enough to say that it has been fixed, because it has not. [Interruption.] The Foreign Secretary asks how I know that. I am giving him the evidence of how I know that there is overly optimistic group-think. It is partly because of the results of decisions that have been taken, but there is more, which I will go into later in my speech.

[Mr Mitchell]

The hon. Lady is completely wrong in her analysis of how the NSC approached the strategic defence and security review in 2010. All the papers were put before members of the National Security Council—I was one of them—and we spent weeks reading the best possible advice. We made our decisions in the light of the very difficult economic situation that the country found itself in and the £38 billion black hole left in the defence budget by the Labour Government, but the idea that we lacked expertise before us at that time is completely wrong.

[Emily Thornberry]

I spent only six months in the area of defence, but although I spent a great deal of time immersing myself in it, I am not just relying on my own views in saying what a disaster the coalition’s first so-called strategic defence review was. It is not just me who thinks that. Senior military figures, not just in this country but among our allies, were very concerned about what cuts to the military budget were doing to our capability. It is my view that the second strategic defence review spent a great deal of time patching up the holes that had been created by the coalition’s first one.

[Mr Mitchell]

The hon. Lady is being generous in giving way. However, once again, she is wrong. The most senior military officials and soldiers in the country were at the table for the first security and defence review. They were part of the discussion; they were not locked out.

[Emily Thornberry]

The right hon. Gentleman has had his opportunity to put his views on the record, and I am sure that he will speak later. My view is that if things had been fixed in the way that the Foreign Secretary has stated, we would not be swinging backwards and forwards on our military budget. We make cuts and create holes in our defence capability, then the next time we try to patch them up.