Iraq War (10th Anniversary)

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart]

Members were almost hissing us for sitting still, but I am glad and proud that I never rose to my feet to clap that warmonger.

The Iraq war is, of course, associated with Tony Blair, and always will be. It is his legacy. He might as well have had it tattooed on his head, such is his association with that illegal war. Conflicts tend to become associated with prominent figures and leaders: we have had Thatcher and the Falklands war, Churchill and world war two—and Iraq and Blair.

What was it all for? What was achieved? More than 100,000 dead, a region destabilised, a country divided along sectarian lines, and international diplomacy discredited as never before. We may never retrieve our credibility in the international community following Iraq, and that is a sad, sad indictment of what happened here. I will not even bother to go into the details of the millions of people who have been displaced. But another dreadful thing happened, and it is the thing that we will most regret: we have alienated a generation of people living in the Muslim world. Furthermore, we have dangerously radicalised a proportion of them, and that is what we are having to deal with now. That is another legacy of the Iraq war with which we have continued to contend, and we will live to regret it.

By any standard, Iraq has been an absolute and utter disaster. That illegal war was one of the most regrettable and damaging foreign policy adventures ever undertaken in our name. Some Members have gone on about Suez, but the mighty Suez is nothing but a little stream compared with the foreign policy damage that has been created by Iraq. Those responsible must be held to account. History will eventually judge them, but I should like to think that it will be done now, while I am still a Member of Parliament. I should like to think that some justice will be delivered. So far, the only people who have lost their jobs because of Iraq are people who worked for the BBC. One person lost his job because he said that the dossier was “sexed up”. That dossier was more sexed up than some teenage starlet in her latest pop video.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

What is even more regrettable is that after the war, those on what was then the Government Front Bench continued to assert that there were weapons of mass destruction, and that, as a matter of faith, they would be found. Eventually, of course, they had to concede, but it was a matter of belief and not of fact.

[Pete Wishart]

The Minister has been asked today whether there were weapons of mass destruction, but even now—10 years on, and with a different Government —they cannot concede that there were no such weapons. If the Minister were to rise in order to say, “Yes, we concede that now,” I would give way to him, but so far no UK Government have conceded that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and I think that until a Government do that, we will not have political closure.

We have had five useless reports on Iraq. That is the only thing we can call them: useless. They might as well have been made out of whitewash, given their validity when it comes to trying to discover and understand what actually went on. Now worrying issues are starting to emerge in relation to our best hope of ensuring that those responsible are held to account through the Chilcot report. My right hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd referred to some of the current difficulties with Chilcot.

I mentioned to the Minister David Owen’s view that there is collusion between Tony Blair and No. 10 to ensure that the private correspondence between George Bush and Tony Blair is not revealed. We must see that correspondence, because it will probably tell us more than anything else about the reasons for going to war. We will be able to see how the plan was shaped and designed between the two of them, and to see the commitment that was made by Tony Blair to George Bush.

The Chilcot inquiry started four years ago, and with every year that passes, the Iraq war recedes and the Chilcot conclusions lose their potency. I say this, however, to the current Government and those who were in the last Labour Government: we will not forget. We will not forget this, and we will continue to hold this Government to account for what they do.

History will judge these people. At some point, what actually happened will have to come out. If Chilcot does not do that, it will come out later. I am not confident that we will get the truth about Iraq before the end of this decade, however. I think it will take another generation before the true story of Iraq is told, because there are too many big reputations at stake, and too many pillars would come down if it were actually revealed. The Foreign Office and the foreign policy of the United Kingdom would probably be totally discredited if the truth about Iraq came out.

That is why I am not confident that we will find out the true story about Iraq before the end of this decade, and I will be out of here by then. I do not want to be part of a country that does this. It is appalling to be part of a nation that indulges in illegal wars. I am from Scotland. Scotland is the nation that defines me, and I want my country to make a peaceful contribution to the world and not get involved in these illegal wars, so I am glad we will have an opportunity next year to ensure that we are no longer part of a nation that is prepared to indulge in such things.

It was not a Tory Government who took us into this illegal war; it was a Labour Government, for goodness’ sake—the last type of Government we would expect to take us into an illegal war. It is not all about the evil Tories, therefore. It was a Labour Government who did that, and I am glad that next year my nation will get the opportunity to vote for independence and ensure we will never be part of illegal wars again.

I think the case for independence is overwhelming, but this issue really helps it. The issue has politicised so many people. We have heard about the Stop the War coalition, which did so much great work on it, and Stop the War lost one of its greatest advocates in the last few days: the iconic author Iain Banks. I remember when he came down here and participated in the activities of Stop the War. He was an author without peer, an iconic Scot and a great, great guy. He was heavily politicised by the Iraq war. In fact, he tore up his passport and sent it to Tony Blair, such was his disgust at the war.

I want to pay tribute to Iain Banks in my final remarks by quoting some words not from his great works, “The Crow Road” or “The Wasp Factory”, but from him to Tony Blair. He said that

“it was Blair who bowed to Bush in the first place, and Blair who convinced the Labour party and parliament of the need to go to war with a dossier that was so close to lying that it makes no difference.”

Indeed!

--- Later in debate ---

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

It is an honour to follow such a passionate and well-informed speech from the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark). I think that we are all indebted to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) for securing the debate, and I apologise to her for not arriving in time to hear her speech—I was opening a job show in my constituency first thing this morning—which by all accounts was a powerful introduction to the debate.

Although I was not a Member of Parliament at the time, I am very proud that the Liberal Democrats played such a strong role in opposing the war. I am particularly proud of the role played by my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr Kennedy), who was leader of the Liberal Democrats at the time, and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell). The hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) talked about the breadth of the coalition that opposed the war and said that it was not just made up of predictable left wingers. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North East Fife is far from being a raging pacifist leftie. He is a thoughtful and distinguished advocate and is now, as he was then, a distinguished spokesman on international affairs. That voices such as his were ignored at the time is a measure of just how dogmatic certain people in the Labour Government were.

I have found this debate very humbling, not only because of the first-hand accounts of intelligence, diplomacy and military experience that we have heard from people who were connected to the war in different respects, but because of the emotion shown by those who were, in effect, forced to vote against their own colleagues in their own party. The hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas) made a very powerful speech about that. We have heard about the bitter regret felt by those who feel that they were misled into voting for the wrong thing. We should also remember the members of the Government who honourably resigned over this issue—Robin Cook, John Denham and others who gave up their ministerial careers. The emotions are clearly almost as strong now as they were then.

We have heard powerful descriptions of what felt like the inevitable momentum towards war. That was certainly felt outside Parliament as well. Those of us who were watching from the outside might not have picked up on all the details of the parliamentary debates, but every day we saw the pictures of the troops gathering in Saudi Arabia and had the sense that it was something that simply could not be stopped, no matter how many people marched, no matter what arguments were deployed and no matter what intelligence was presented to counter what was in the dodgy dossier.

If the right hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Mr Meacher) is right, that momentum had started long before. He mentioned the Crawford summit in April 2002, when Tony Blair stood shoulder to shoulder with George Bush. That was reinforced at subsequent summits between the two of them. Although I have a lot of respect for the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), it is not really credible to say that the leaders did not know the detail or had not had time to read it. I am sure that the detail of the intelligence on the military situation and the situation inside Iraq was all gone into in enormous detail, as was the legal advice. As everybody has said, the Chilcot report is long overdue, and we need to start to hear about the detail of the decision-making process. Some of the documents that are still not public need to be made public. It looks from the outside as though there was a deliberate collaboration in creating that momentum towards war in order to make it inevitable.

We have to allow that some aspects of that political mission had, in a sense, some honour to them. Saddam’s was a despicable regime. Thousands died in the chemical attacks in Halabja in 1988. There was also the massacre and destruction of the entire lifestyle of the Marsh Arabs in 1991 following the first Gulf war. There might have been a psychological element for George Bush in the sense that, according to the conservative psychology, his father had left the job half done in allowing the massacre of the Marsh Arabs to take place, because they had risen up in the expectation that they would be supported by the allied forces, but they were not.

We should remember that since 1991 there had been a safe haven in Iraq for the Kurds, reinforced from 1992 by the no-fly zone described on the basis of first-hand experience by the hon. Member for Colne Valley (Jason McCartney). Perhaps George Bush felt that he did not want to repeat his father’s error of betraying people in Iraq who were opposed to the regime. Perhaps the psychology of 9/11 also made people feel the need to do something to give some substance to the supposed war on terror, which, to me, has always had a slightly Orwellian ring to it.

[Hywel Williams]

The hon. Gentleman will perhaps recall the light-hearted quip at the time that for the US and UK to invade Iraq would be as though after Pearl Harbour the United States had invaded Mexico—it would have been as peculiar and as odd as that.

[Martin Horwood]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point.

There was the emotional declaration of the war on terror but then a feeling that it did not have much substance. I think that those in the conservative right in the United States were searching for something to give it more edge and substance, and perhaps that was part of the psychology that led them to towards war. The psychology of the British Prime Minister involved is something that I will not go near.

I am not one of those who now hope that the decision will be proved wrong by the failure of Iraqi democracy. I hope that Iraqi democracy will succeed and that a stable, federal state will emerge from the continuing conflict. I do not want to paint everything that is happening in Iraq as being as bad as or worse than it was under Saddam. Nevertheless, I think that those hon. Members who voted against the war made the right decision and I am very proud that Liberal Democrats did so. There are three central reasons why I think they were right to oppose the war.

First, there really was no case: there were no weapons of mass destruction. A few years later, after I had become an MP, I remember Hans Blix telling a meeting in Parliament that he had wanted and had pleaded for more time and that, had they been given it, the weapons inspectors could have established the facts of the case, but of course they were evacuated to make way for the invasion. It was not Iraq that stopped the weapons inspections; it was the United States and the UK. As the right hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton has said, the intelligence on which that action was based was old and out of date.

There was no immediate humanitarian crisis. In Syria and Libya, and even in Bosnia, people were dying or being threatened with blood baths, but that was not the case in Iraq. There was no immediate humanitarian justification for intervention. If there was a secondary reason—this was sometimes mentioned—it was the idea that Saddam might be in cahoots with al-Qaeda, but that also turned out to be completely imaginary. In fact, the precise opposite, if anything, was true. Subsequently, of course, we have seen the emergence of al-Qaeda in Iraq as a substantial force of Sunni jihadists, and it is now spilling over into Syria, where a direct offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Jabhat al-Nusra, is making that conflict worse. The repercussions of the intervention are extraordinary, but there was no fundamental case for it, as we were told there was.

Secondly, our party’s view is that the war was illegal. We have still not seen the then Attorney-General’s advice to the Government. UN resolution 1441 is cited, but as other Members have said, it did not provide a legal justification for invasion. Actually, its central concern was with the weapons inspection regime, which, as I have said, was brought to an end by the invasion. The weapons inspectors were evacuated because of the invasion. They were not prevented from continuing their work by Iraq.

Hon. Members’ speeches and the recent excellent BBC documentary have highlighted how the real political objective was clearly regime change and that other arguments and cases were deployed tactically to try to support it. Perhaps regime change was a laudable objective—Saddam was a terrible dictator—but the only complication is that regime change is illegal under international law; we therefore participated in an illegal invasion.

The third crucial reason why it was wrong to go to war was the political and diplomatic effort behind it. It was not a united international effort. In the end, the troops were from, I think, the United States, Britain, Australia and Poland. Others might want to correct me. Perhaps Spain was involved as well. NATO was disunited, the French were in opposition and the region was disunited. The United Nations was certainly disunited and the Secretary-General warned that the invasion would be in contravention of the UN charter if it went ahead. This was cowboy diplomacy. It was almost the kind of unilateral interventionism of which the world needs to be very fearful. The decision to invade posed a danger not just to the people of Iraq—although it certainly did—but to the whole world, because it could be used as justification for anybody’s decision to intervene without international sanction, regional support or a proper legal case.

I think that the coalition Government have learned those lessons. The recent intervention in Libya stands in stark contrast to the invasion of Iraq. There were no allied boots on the ground. It was a limited intervention, even though militarily it was a simpler prospect than Iraq. There was clear sanction from a UN resolution and an immediate humanitarian case. There was also united regional support in the Arab world. We can say collectively—those who are in the Government in particular—that we have learned the lessons of what went on in Iraq.

We now have the strange situation in which we are still waiting for the final chapter: the Chilcot report. We have been waiting for four years. That is almost as long as Britain’s military intervention in Iraq. If it carries on for much longer, it will outlast the war itself. That report will raise deep and serious questions that we still want answers to. For the former Prime Minister, it will raise some threatening legal issues and some deep questions about his role in taking us to war. The irony of ironies is that in the meantime, he has been made a peace envoy to the middle east, which I find extraordinary. All credit to him for the role that he has played subsequently in trying to bring peace to the region. However, we still need to ask how and why he took us to war. We need the Chilcot report and we need it soon.