Report of the Iraq Inquiry

Kirsten Oswald Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[John Nicolson]

The hon. Gentleman remembers well. We did indeed sit together in television studios, because we journalists called in experts to ask them for their evidence. It was relatively easy, even as a journalist, to pick apart many of the absurd claims.

Of course, some journalists were screaming for war. The Sun ran the absurd headline “Brits 45mins from doom” about a supposed threat to troops in Cyprus. The Star wrote “Mad Saddam ready to attack: 45 minutes from a chemical war”. It was all nonsense. The journalists who wrote it knew that, but it was terrifying for some Members.

In January 2003, United Nations weapons inspectors reported that they had found no indication whatever that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons or an active programme of chemical weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency at the time found

“no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq.”

The United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission said at the time that it

“did not find evidence of the continuation or resumption of programmes of weapons of mass destruction”.

However, US Vice-President Dick Cheney retorted that he believed that Saddam Hussein

“has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei”—

the director general of the IAEA at the time—

“frankly is wrong.”

Who were parliamentarians to believe—the chemical weapons experts, the missiles experts, the IAEA, or Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and the neo-cons? The House had to make up its mind.

In the run up to the Iraq war, I was working as a journalist, as the hon. Gentleman pointed out. Among other things, I was presenting a three-hour daily radio news programme. We had access to experts, as any news journalists do. We called them in and asked them to outline their evidence. Now, I am not a pacifist. I supported NATO action in Bosnia and Kosovo due to the imminent threat to life and the need to save civilians; in fact, I was on the flight back from Iraq—mentioned earlier—with the returning hostages who had fled from Saddam Hussein. However, during interviews with experts and academics in the run-up to the House’s vote, I saw clearly that the case for war was built on exaggeration and deceit. It was blindingly obvious.

Tony Blair frequently told this House and the British people that he was working towards disarming Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. He repeatedly told the House that his aim was not regime change. The House could have been under no illusion about what it was being asked to vote on. Mr Blair said that Saddam was a “very brutal and repressive” leader but that the aim was

“disarmament of weapons of mass destruction, it is not regime change.”

Regime change was not the basis for war. The challenge for the House on the day of the debate was clear. Mr Blair was asking Members to vote on one basis and one basis alone: the imminent danger posed by Saddam’s weaponry.

What if all the experts talking in public were wrong? Was there an elevated group of experts—an inner core with extraordinary knowledge that was unavailable to the ordinary expert? As Members will recall, Tony Blair often said, “If only you could see what crosses my desk, you’d never doubt the danger that we are in and the pressing case for immediate action.”

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend share my concerns about recent mission creep and the use of intelligence-led drone strikes that are notified to the House only after the event? What does that mean for lessons learned and transparency?

[John Nicolson]

Many Members keep saying that we have learned the lessons of war, but I am not convinced, and neither was I when we had the debate on Syria. Tony Blair made a direct appeal that he had seen privileged information that no one else had seen, and he asked the House to trust him. Many Members have said that that appeal for trust was what swayed them.

There was a direct appeal for Members to ignore the available scientific evidence, but there was one embarrassing hurdle in the way: Robin Cook. I had an extensive interview with Robin Cook after his resignation from the Labour Front Bench on 17 March 2003, and I asked him whether he saw the same briefings as the Prime Minister on Iraq. He said, “Yes, I do.” I asked him what it was that had crossed Mr Blair’s desk that he could not tell us about but that contradicted all the expert evidence. Robin Cook told me that there was nothing—nothing had crossed the Prime Minister’s desk that had not crossed his as Foreign Secretary and nothing had crossed his desk or that of the Prime Minister to suggest an imminent threat from chemical weapons. Robin Cook told me that, on that basis, the war could therefore not be justified. Every MP who listened to that interview, who met Robin Cook in the House or who took on board the opinion of experts at the time would have known that the case presented to this House was flimsy to the point of absurdity.

I am, of course, aware of the pressure that MPs were under. Setting aside their promotion prospects in the Government, tabloid newspapers had launched a vicious campaign against opponents of the war. The Sun published a traitors dartboard—I note that it has since deleted that from its website in the aftermath of the Chilcot report. It ran a front-page showing a picture of a snake and Charles Kennedy with the headline, “Spot the difference. One is a spineless reptile that spits venom...the other’s a poisonous snake.” MPs were frightened that they would be targeted as cowards and peaceniks.

As we survey the carnage of Iraq, with countless civilian lives lost, soldiers’ lives lost and family lives destroyed, it is easy to look for a single scapegoat. Although I share the disdain widely felt for Tony Blair, there is something gutless about attributing all blame for the votes of individual MPs to him and him alone. The truth is that expert information was freely available to any Member who chose to take it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

I welcome the opportunity to participate in this debate on an issue that should have been addressed long ago. Those responsible for such an affront to basic standards of trust and integrity should be held to account. I was interested to hear the speech by the hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess), and I absolutely agree with him and my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) in their call for action in this House against Tony Blair.

There is a growing sense in the UK of a protected elite who are above the law, too often because the law seems drafted to permit things that most of us would regard as wholly unacceptable. Voters have watched as organised theft goes unpunished when it is done through manipulation of the financial system. They have seen companies stripped of assets, leaving pensions unfunded and care home residents fearing eviction.

Thanks to this report, a former Prime Minister is exposed as having taken this country to war on grounds that were, it seems, deliberately set in train. Tony Blair’s now infamous memo with the phrase,

“I will be with you, whatever”

seems tantamount to subcontracting to President Bush the decision to invade Iraq, committing UK troops to back his decision, whatever. If anywhere in the 2.6 million-word Chilcot report clarifies a time when he thinks Tony Blair reconciled that private commitment to war with a public statement, I am yet to find it.

When this House was recalled in September 2002 to consider Mr Blair’s dossier, he said that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programme was “active, detailed and growing”. That was simply part of a plan orchestrated by Bush and Blair to take Iraq and the international community to the brink of war, and then push them over. Always the wordsmith, Mr Blair called this his “clever strategy” in a paper sent to President Bush, suggesting it was a strategy for regime change that built up over time to the point where military action could be taken if necessary. It seems that Blair owes more to Robert Maxwell than just the opportunity to rewrite evidence against him before anyone else gets a chance to see it. If, as a constituent said to me at a surgery recently, you are going to tell a whopper, make sure you do it in plain sight so that no one can accuse you of concealing anything—except the truth.

It is instructive to remember who the cheerleaders for Blair’s action were. The inquiry notes that an editorial in the News of the World claimed that the dossier would be as devastating as it was vital, and show that Saddam had enough chemical and biological stocks to attack the entire planet, and the missile technology to deliver them. That Government-planted story was a lesson in building exactly the kind of narrative that the dossier was designed to back up, by a Prime Minister intent on feeling the “hand of history” on his shoulder. Instead of the hand of history, it is surely right that the hand of Parliament lands on Mr Blair’s shoulder and returns him to this House to account for his disastrous legacy.

The US strategy for Iraq was described in 2001 by General Wes Clark as to leave Iraq so unstable and chaotic that it did not pose a powerful threat in the region. Thirteen years later, Iraq is indeed unstable and chaotic, and the consequent sectarianism and hatred pose a powerful threat to the region and much further afield. Those consequences cast a long shadow over our age and will not easily be forgiven or forgotten.

At the heart of this decision-making process, we were sending the men and women of our armed forces into conflict. It is incumbent on the Government and the defence staff to ensure that troops sent into battle are properly equipped for the task and their welfare given due consideration. Therefore, I was disappointed to hear General Sir Mike Jackson’s comments on the BBC on the inadequacy of the equipment available to the armed forces in Iraq, saying simply,

“We had what we had”.

The MOD was not given the green light to obtain supplies for the operation until Christmas 2002.

Some of the deficiencies were not unique to the Iraq operation. There should have been standard items for a country whose leaders regularly boast of using our armed forces to punch above our weight. The evidence is that the Government wantonly ran ahead of the armed services’ capacity to deliver without being under-resourced and overstretched. Given the background, no self-respecting commander would want his forces on the battlefield without adequate nuclear, biological and chemical protection, but that is exactly what the Government required of the troops.

The National Audit Office reported major deficiencies in the supply of these protective suits, unusable residual vapour detector kits and a 40% shortfall in tactical nerve-agent detection systems. In this Chamber, the Defence Secretary reassured members that there was at least one nuclear, biological, chemical suit for all personnel. Of course, if the risk of chemical or biological weapons was being taken seriously, many more suits than that would have been required. In reality, personnel were given suits that did not fit.

The MOD noted that troops and equipment were probably in the same country, but not necessarily in close proximity. In fact, severe shortages of both desert suits and desert boots meant that sand and heat were the real problems for the British forces. Why did it take the MOD until weeks before deployment to find out that that protective gear was in short supply or had been left in storage, unserviced and unusable?

The evidence given by Gordon Brown highlights the financing assumptions for the MOD. Basically, it is funded to be ready in case there is military action. However, all costs of military action are met by the Treasury, thus encouraging the MOD to stretch its budget by saving on maintenance of existing kit. Some of the kit needed in Iraq had been bought for the 1991 Gulf war, and appears to have lain untouched for over 10 years. How many more items on the MOD inventory are in such condition? It also meant that combat-critical items needed to be procured at the last minute. However, in the case of Iraq, no one was authorised to start the procurement process until both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown gave the go-ahead. General Sir Mike Jackson noted, days before the invasion:

“In the name of accounting orthodoxy, we lack basic items, such as desert clothing.”

Clearly, these are key issues to bear in mind in our debate next week on Trident. How can a defence budget that can barely sustain basic equipment, and that is based on ever-declining personnel numbers, stretch to accommodate the UK’s own weapons of mass destruction?

Of course, the other way in which the MOD stretches its budget is simply to overstretch members of our armed forces, sending them on deployment more often or for longer periods than should be the case. The House will note that the report highlights considerable overstretch on the Army throughout the Iraq war and occupation. The UK Government aim to reduce the strength of the regular Army by 2020 by an amount that is virtually the same size as the initial land force deployment in Iraq. Clearly, with such a reduction, the potential for overstretch on the Army has increased considerably, but the computerised personnel system introduced in 2007 makes it impossible to measure overstretch.

I would like to close by considering the armed forces waiting in Kuwait for word to move into Iraq, among them the officers and men of the Black Watch. In action, soldiers work around many problems caused by the failure of others. However, special contempt must be reserved for top brass who dodge responsibility for failures of kit by blaming poor, benighted end users.

Three days into the Iraq war, the chain gun on a Warrior armoured vehicle caused serious injuries to one of our men. In the face of compelling evidence to the contrary, senior officers blamed the Warrior gunner, my constituent Tam Henderson. His appeal hearing heard of mechanical and electrical faults with the Warrior vehicle and the chain gun, and he was cleared of all charges, but senior officers held a board of inquiry in secret and pointed the finger of blame once more. When someone alerted Captain Henderson to that cowardly act, the MOD caved in and settled out of court. Nevertheless, I am told the MOD will do nothing to remove that self-serving finding from its records. Captain Henderson bravely allowed me to highlight his fight for justice in today’s debate, but I will seek an opportunity to raise the issue more fully after the recess. It is an irony indeed that those who served in Iraq face such injustice, when those responsible for sending them there face no justice at all.