Iraq War (10th Anniversary)

Debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Laura Sandys

Thursday 13th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The hon. Lady is right to highlight Iraq’s appalling human rights record during that period, but will she reflect on the fact that Britain was selling arms to Iraq throughout it? Even after Halabja, Britain took part in the Baghdad arms fair of 1989, and continued to supply weapons right up to the start of the Gulf war.

[Laura Sandys]

That is evidently true. I am in no doubt about our relationship with Saddam Hussein, or about our relationships with many leaders around the world. Those relationships involve big ethical issues. What I am highlighting is human rights abuse, the brutalisation of a country by a man and his family, and the fact that such a small group of people were able to hold Iraq in so much fear.

It was against that backdrop that I was explicitly, and very vocally, opposed to our invasion of Iraq. I do not claim to be a great expert on Iraq like my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), but I had a little more insight into Iraq—its dynamics, and the interrelationship between the different communities there—than most people, and I felt at that time that the debate was extremely superficial. It was group-think. It was very binary. It was us and them. It was evil people and good people. As can be seen throughout the international foreign affairs perspective, the “cowboys and Indians” analogy works very poorly except for those who are sitting on the very outside.

I was a member of the Conservative party at the time, although not a member of the House of Commons, and I recall the cacophony. Does anyone remember how many times Richard Perle came over and appeared on television shrieking with fear and anticipation of our untimely demise? There were the neo-cons, and there were some colleagues who adopted quite a shrill tone. I was very concerned about the war and I wanted us to get rid of Saddam Hussein, but to do so by means of other mechanisms. I wanted Iraqi solutions to the Saddam Hussein problem. However, I found myself being accused of being anti-war, accused of being a pacifist, and accused of walking away from trouble. Well, those who know me are aware that it is unusual for me to be seen to be walking away from trouble.

The question of weapons of mass destruction was a fascinating aspect of the situation. Many Members have explained the whole issue of Hans Blix and the inspectors; however, those who, at the time, kept saying “But Saddam Hussein is not standing up and saying he has no weapons of mass destruction” did not understand enough about the regime itself. None of them understood the position that Saddam was in. At that moment, just before the war, he was extremely weakened—weakened internally. The republican guard had started to create a fair amount of tension in his regime, although the special republican guard was still on his side.

Saddam Hussein—the man of terror, the man of weapons of mass destruction—could not stand up and say “I do not have these weapons.” We were asking him to do something that would have constituted, in a sense, the disarming of every element of authority that he had. We were asking him to do something that he was not going to do, although many of us knew—and I worked with military intelligence during the war—that the weapons did not exist, or at least had an extremely limited capacity.