Chilcot Inquiry and Parliamentary Accountability

Kirsten Oswald Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

Since we debated the publication of the Chilcot report in July, I cannot be alone in hearing constituents express their doubts about the likelihood of any action on its findings—recalling previous occasions where evidence of failures was debated in this place, only to see the issues disappear without trace as the months and years moved on. Since the time when the matters on which Chilcot reported took place, we have watched the Arab spring rise and fall, Daesh has taken large swathes of the middle east back to the dark ages, and a resurgent Russia provokes NATO—just as the hammer-blows of an ill-thought-out Brexit and the rise of Trump threaten to destabilise the relationships on which the alliance depends.

Already, those of us who believe the public still need answers see others characterise the Iraq war and the events that led up to it as ancient history. This is not a new phenomenon. In the 2010 Labour leadership race, David Miliband said:

“While Iraq was a source of division in the past, it doesn’t need to be a source of division in the future. I said during the election campaign that I thought it was time to move on.”

But, of course, as the Chilcot report makes clear, it is decidedly not time to move on.

The exchanges in July’s debate showed that the route to military action was settled directly between Bush and Blair. One of them was driven by a determination to finish the job left unfinished by his father, while the other was convinced that if he said yes to each step along the road to war, he could drag America back from the brink at the 11th hour.

“I will be with you, whatever”,

wrote Blair, as he subcontracted to Bush the decision on whether the war would go ahead. He committed UK troops to go, if that was what Bush decided. The report is damning on this point. Sir John said in launching his report:

“We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted.”

It might have taken many years and millions of words for the UK to catch up on what its Prime Minister did, behind the scenes, in our name. In the US, the verdict was arrived at long ago and the conclusion was clear: the Iraq war was not an innocent mistake; there was no need to argue over flawed intelligence; and the Bush Administration wanted a war and everything else was pretext. Blair’s decision to hitch the UK armed forces to that wagon of deception is not something that we can allow layers of events to silt over.

The public have long demanded—and deserved—an explanation and action. The families of the servicemen and women killed in Iraq deserve to know the truth, and deserve to know that this will not happen again. Their loved ones were marched to war behind a dodgy dossier that was designed to mislead. Those with family members in the UK armed forces expect to see military intervention used to root out injustice and instability. Instead, that is what the Iraq war left in its wake.

On top of the dishonesty about the reason for going to war, the consequences appear to have received no thought from those leading the charge. If there was any post-invasion plan, it was the Bush Administration plan—to leave behind an Iraq deliberately weakened, politically and militarily. The result of that flawed policy was the first appearance of Daesh, growing from the ashes of the discarded Iraqi army—an Iraqi spark that became a flame in the war in Syria and threatens to engulf communities across the middle east, Europe and beyond.

Some right hon. and hon. Members would like us to move on. I was struck in July by the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) who drew attention to the need to learn the lessons of Iraq in advance of the intervention in Libya, only to be told: “We are not putting boots on the ground, so it isn’t an issue for us.

However, if we move on from Iraq now and leave the drawing of lessons from these events for another day, how many more Iraqs, Syrias and Libyas will there be?

In July, in response to the hon. Member for Bridgend, the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) said that he had voted for intervention in Libya because he was

“terrified that people would be killed.”—[Official Report, 14 July 2016; Vol. 613, c. 489.]

But, of course, people were killed, and are still being killed, in each of those countries and many more. They are dying as they flee once-thriving communities. Much of the destruction is still rooted in that flawed pact between Bush and Blair, and until we understand how we got here, it is not clear how we will find our way back. Why does that matter now? There are many reasons. Two of them are the largest aircraft carriers ever purchased by the UK Government. They are designed to project UK power across the globe, but to what end? If the policies driving the use of those vessels are not open to democratic scrutiny or review, will they and their associated air power add to our security or undermine it?

Since the launch of the Chilcot report, we have seen an increasing number of appearances by the former Prime Minister. He has read the runes and believes that scrutiny is over for him. However, I know that Members in this Chamber believe that the armed forces’ sacrifice means that any decision to send them to war must be made with integrity and based on fact. In this case it was not, and we must scrutinise that further.