Report of the Iraq Inquiry

George Kerevan Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

Yes, but the problem that the inspectors and we would always have faced was summed up by something that was said at the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly. I was going to quote this later, but I shall do so now. On 21 August 2003, I attended the Hutton inquiry. In the course of giving evidence, Nicolas Rufford, a journalist, made a statement about a telephone conversation that he had had with Dr David Kelly in June 2003. Dr Kelly was, of course, a weapons expert, and knew all about the difficulties of detecting weapons stockpiles if they were hidden. In the course of that telephone conversation, Dr Kelly said to Mr Rufford that

“it was very easy to hide weapons of mass destruction because you simply had to dig a hole in the desert, put them inside, cover them with a tarpaulin, cover them with sand and then they would be almost impossible to discover”.

So the question that we come back to once again is: if Tony Blair had come to this House and more honestly highlighted the question marks against the reliability of the intelligence, would he be as excoriated today as he has been? Let me be counterfactual for a moment. Let us suppose that some stocks of anthrax had been discovered and there had been a secret cache. Would we still be saying that the people who took the decision in 2003, on the basis of what clearly was an honest belief that Saddam Hussein might have deadly stocks of anthrax, were wrong? I have no hesitation in saying that although the Government may have exaggerated—and probably did exaggerate—the strength of the evidence they had, I believe that they genuinely expected to find stocks of these weapons.

[George Kerevan (East Lothian) (SNP)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dr Lewis]

Yes, but I am taking a lot of interventions, and I am keen not to abuse the fact that I do not have a time limit.

[George Kerevan]

Given the right hon. Gentleman’s wisdom and expertise, he is a focal point in this discussion. Does he accept that there are some on these Benches who think—and who feel that this is justified by the Chilcot findings—that the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction was an artificial casus belli that was used to effect regime change? If weapons of mass destruction were an issue, why wait 13 years to invade? Why not go in at the time of the first Iraq war?

[Dr Lewis]

The answer to the second question is easy. What happened during those 13 years was the appearance on the international stage, in September 2001, of a group that had been around for a long time but had not previously succeeded in killing 3,000 people in the heart of New York and Washington DC. [Interruption.] Therefore, the issue at question, as we often hear quite rightly said in debates about international terrorism, was that the traditional policy—the technique of containment, which is usually the best technique to deal with rogue regimes that have weapons stocks—could no longer apply under the circumstances. It was feared that if an international terrorist organisation was, for any reason, supplied with a substance such as anthrax, rational deterrence would be ineffective in preventing the organisation from using it, no matter how suicidally.

--- Later in debate ---

[George Kerevan (East Lothian) (SNP)]

I sat through the whole debate yesterday and today, and it has been a fascinating education. I have appreciated listening to many of the Members who were here 13 years ago. I have been disappointed by the lack of numbers on the Benches. I am new to the Chamber. Given the gravity of the issue over the years, and given the long wait for the Chilcot report, I am surprised that there were not more Members present. I will put that down to the fact that so much else is going on in the political firmament, and that there is so much to read. The onus is on those on the Government Benches to think about that, and to realise that this is not the end of the Chilcot investigation. A lot more discussion and thought has to go into that report. I appeal to the Government to take that away and think about how we can come back to, and look into, all the ramifications that the report has brought to this Chamber.

No one has quite given due recognition to the fact that it was the previous Labour Government, under Gordon Brown, who commissioned this report, and that should be recognised, because it was a brave thing to do. I would gently chide those on the Conservative Benches, because after the Suez crisis—the other post-war global diplomatic disaster that Britain blundered into—there were repeated attempts in the remaining eight years of Conservative Government after 1956 to get a public inquiry, but they were systematically rejected, and that was a dangerous precedent. Having got the Chilcot report, we have learned that, when we make mistakes, we have to own up to them and examine the details.

I have particularly—“enjoyed” is perhaps the wrong word—appreciated listening to those on both sides of the House who took part in the debate in 2003. However, I have been surprised by the attempts of some Members—particularly on the Labour side—to justify what was clearly the biggest diplomatic blunder of the last 30 years. I was particularly surprised by the right hon. Members for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) and for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden), both of whom tried to draw some comfort from the fact that the Chilcot report has not found the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, guilty of misleading the House. I do not know whether that is what Chilcot set out to do, but it certainly comes down to what we mean by “mislead”. There is abundant evidence in the Chilcot findings—even from a cursory read of the report, and even in the summary report—that the facts were pummelled, twisted, jumped on and stretched to the point where no one knew what was going on. That was a deliberate move by the Executive to try to impose their view of the world on this Chamber.

That is abundantly clear, and we have to grasp the fact that, as well as the politics, the diplomacy and the military issues Chilcot deals with, there is a constitutional issue at the heart of the report, which this Chamber and you, Mr Speaker, have to take into account: the Executive, in the shape of Tony Blair and his immediate allies, got out of hand. This Chamber and the Cabinet lost control of the Executive in the run-up to the intervention in Iraq. That is the fundamental finding of the Chilcot report. Yes, the nature of the intervention, and all the disasters that came from it, are important, but if we abstract from that, we see that the Executive were not under control. It has been rare in the history of this House, and particularly in latter decades, for the Executive to get completely out of control, and that can never happen again.

If we are to have a debate about bringing some of these individuals, including the former Prime Minister Tony Blair, to this House to answer for their actions, the issue should not be retribution, or holding them to account because they were wrong on Iraq and got us into a terrible disaster. That is an issue, but the fundamental issue for the House in deciding whether the former Prime Minister should be held to account in this Chamber is that the Executive got out of control. We have to learn the lessons of that, and we cannot let it happen again. If that is what happened—I believe that it was, and that that is what the Chilcot report shows—we cannot let those who flouted this House and Cabinet Government get away with it. If we do that, it could happen again.

I was rather surprised by the vehemence with which the right hon. Member for Leeds Central and other Labour Members tried to argue that, whatever mistakes were made in the intervention in 2003, the ramifications—the breakdown of law and order and of society in Iraq, and the subsequent calamities that have beset the middle east—were the fault not of that intervention alone, but of the great fragmentation and deep divisions in the middle east, and that, as bad and as mistaken as the intervention was, it cannot be held to be fundamental to the divisions and other developments in the last 30 years. I am sorry, but Chilcot and history show otherwise. For example, Daesh is a horrible amalgam of the former military leadership of Saddam’s Ba’ath party and people who were radicalised inside American jails after the intervention in Iraq. There is abundant evidence, and it is a reasonable conclusion, that Daesh, as a movement, would not have existed had we not invaded Iraq and caused the meltdown of what there was of Iraqi society. We have been living with that consequence ever since.

Labour Members are rather misguided in not understanding the role of western intervention, and western support for Saddam in his war against Iran in the decade before America’s and Great Britain’s intervention in Iraq. The long and horrible war between Iraq and Iran was fundamentally supported by the west as a means of containing Iran after 1979. That war multiplied a millionfold the divisions between the Sunni and the Shi’ite populations of the middle east and north Africa. We are living with those consequences, too. The west cannot claim that it is not culpable for stoking up the divisions in the middle east prior to 2003.

We are not finished with Chilcot, and we are not finished with the ramifications of the failure of this House and of Cabinet government to control and hold to account the Executive. I ask you, Mr Speaker, to bear that in mind when any such issues are raised in this House in future.