Iraq War (10th Anniversary)

Laura Sandys Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) for securing this debate, and it is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), who made an extremely moving speech.

I was not in the House for the 2003 vote, and I certainly do not want to focus on it today; I am far from sure that I would have made the right decision. In fact, I think I would have been on the wrong side in 2003. It was not until I was stuck in Iraq in 2003 that I saw what a mess it was. I want to reflect briefly, therefore, on the lessons we might be able to draw, not so much from the decision to intervene, but from the questions about how we got stuck there and why we find it so difficult to acknowledge our failure.

The starting point for any discussion of Iraq has to be an acknowledgment that it was a failure and a scandal. However we look at the costs and benefits of what happened there, it was probably the worst British foreign policy decision since the Boer war or the first Anglo-Afghan war of 1839. Never have the British Government made a worse decision. By that, I do not mean that had I been in the House I would have voted differently. In fact, I suspect that I would have voted in favour of the war, wrongly. I hope, however, that this is an opportunity to reflect on what Parliament is, what the Foreign Office is, what the military is and how Britain as a whole—or at least the British policy establishment—could get something so wrong.

This matters because there are many similarities between what we did in Iraq and what we are doing in Afghanistan, and many similarities between those things and what we occasionally think of doing in Mali or Syria. At the base of the problem is our refusal to acknowledge failure, to acknowledge just what a catastrophe it was, and the House’s refusal to acknowledge how bewildering it was, how little we know and how complicated countries such as Iraq are. Sitting in Iraq for 18 months from the middle of 2003 to 2005, I found myself facing, in a small provincial town called al-Amara, 52 new political parties, many of them swarming across the border from Iran and many of them armed.

Nobody in the Foreign Office or the military, and certainly nobody in the House, would have been able to distinguish between Hizb-e-Dawa, Harakat-Dawa, Majlis Ahla, Hezbollah—which turned out in the Iraqi context to consist of two men with a briefcase—or any of the other Shi’a Islamist groups that emerged. None of us in the British policy machine predicted in January 2005 that 90% of the votes in the south of Iraq would go to only three Shi’a Islamist parties. Everybody in the foreign policy machine then predicted that it would be different at the end of 2005, and we were all wrong again. Why were we wrong? We were wrong because we did not have the right relationship between politicians, diplomats, soldiers and the local reality of these countries. We have not got it right yet.

We have not got it right because it is not realistic today—as it was not realistic at the time of the Boer war or the first Anglo-Afghan war—to expect people in Parliament to be experts on the internal politics of Iraq. What really began to go wrong after the invasion, beyond the decision about WMD, was all to do with micro-relationships in Nasiriyah and al-Amara and in the relationships between the different grand ayatollahs in Najaf. These are not things that anyone in the Chamber, however well briefed, can pretend to understand or judge. Instead, we have to rely on the military, the Foreign Office and the intelligence agencies, and there the problem starts. The problem starts because the entire structure of our organisations—their incentives, their promotions, their recruitment, how they interact with policy makers, politicians and Ministers—does not help us ever to acknowledge failure. In fact, these institutions are designed to trap us in these countries.

Careers are made by people going out for short tours. I remind the House and those in the Foreign Office that the initial tours in Iraq were for six weeks, extended to three months, then to six months. The idea—that people living in heavily defended compounds, moving around in armoured vehicles, generally unable to speak a word of any local language, unable to interact with an Iraqi for more than half an hour or an hour at a time, except if surrounded by heavily armed men and operating through translators, could really get a sense of whether Iraq was stabilising or what, to use the Minister’s words, Iraq would be like in 10 years—was of course misleading. The advice and challenge that they could provide to the Government, therefore, was not good enough.

It is not good enough that not a single senior British diplomat formally recorded on paper their opposition to what was happening in Iraq. Many of those who were inside the system now say that they made private comments, that they were worried, but nobody, from the political director downwards, formally objected on paper to the Prime Minister.

[Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)]

Was that not compounded even further by the American Administration, where if someone questioned what was going on, either strategically or tactically, they were sent back to the states, their future career very much in question?

[Rory Stewart]

That is a very good point, and perhaps it is a way for me to wrap up my analysis of the Foreign Office. Of course, this is not a uniquely American problem. Within any British civil service Department, there is no great incentive to admit failure. When I look back at the reports I wrote stuck in al-Amara and Nasiriyah, I find it extraordinary how every week, I claimed great success. Every week, I would write, “We’ve hired another 300 people into the police. We’ve held a new sub-district election. I’ve just created 3,000 jobs. We’ve just refurbished another set of clinics and schools.” To read report after report, week after week, it looks as if the whole thing is getting better and better. In retrospect, I know differently, of course. When I began, I could go into the bazaar to get an ice cream, but by the end, I was stuck in my compound with 140 rocket and mortar-propelled grenades flying at the compound, and we had to abandon it and retreat back to a military base, essentially surrendering Nasiriyah, a city of 600,000 people, to the insurgents.

The situation is not helped by the way we talk about it in Britain today. We do not really think very much about Iraq. We do not think very much about what exactly Iraq is doing with Iran or Syria at the moment, why exactly Iraq got involved in dubious banking transactions to bust sanctions on behalf of the Iranian Government or why exactly our great ally, al-Maliki, appears to have been allowing trans-shipment of weapons from Iran into Syria. Why do we not think about these things? It is because we are not very serious. At some level, this country is no longer being as serious as it should be about foreign policy. Our newspapers are not writing enough about Iraq. The Foreign Office is not thinking enough about the failure. The military is not thinking enough about these things. Unless we acknowledge that something went wrong in Iraq and that something went deeply wrong in Afghanistan, we will get ourselves stuck again.

What do we do about it? We need to reform. It cannot be business as usual. We cannot just go around pretending it was all fine. We cannot simply blame Blair and Bush.

--- Later in debate ---

[Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), who secured the debate. I am very pleased to be participating in it. I also pay tribute to those on both Front Benches, who gave us an evocative, and also reflective, perspective on the war. I agree that this is not an anniversary but an analysis—an analysis that is crucial for the future of foreign policy, for people’s trust in Government, and for the institutions surrounding the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development.

I pay tribute to our soldiers, and also to the civilians in Iraq who have lost their lives. I was pretty horrified by the fact that, for the first couple of years, the Americans in particular seemed to have no interest in counting the civilian casualties. It struck me as extraordinary that we, who had entered the country on behalf of the civilians of Iraq as, in many respects, their advocate against their authoritarian leader, did not pay enough attention to what was happening even to count the number of those civilians who had lost their lives.

I became involved in Iraq in 1993, just after the ejection of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. My responsibility was to travel around the capitals of Europe highlighting Saddam’s human rights abuses. Halabja has been mentioned; I was there, showing videos of people’s suffering. I was in and out of Kurdish police stations where the police showed videos of torture to their prisoners before embarking on torture themselves. This was a brutal, disgusting regime. Saddam Hussein’s authoritarianism ran through the veins, and created fear in every single household in Iraq.

[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.

[Ian Lucas]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, first for giving way, secondly for her kind comments, and, thirdly, for making a powerful case for the importance of an Opposition holding a Government to account in relation to events in the middle east. Is that not a very important lesson for this Government?

[Laura Sandys]

Opposition on an issue such as this can come from all sorts of different directions.

It was frightening to see how the group-think had emerged and how, for example, the issue of 45 minutes to London arose. Do we remember that claim? The Evening Standard front page was in many ways a motivation, a call to action, and I was told by friends, colleagues and people who I would say are less than colleagues, “Laura, your position in being against the war is putting families in London at risk.” The debate became really quite vicious. It was not friendly, and it was not constructive in respect of understanding Iraq per se and—I say this having worked in the defence sector myself, and having worked in academia in the defence sector—understanding the potential and the possibilities of ballistic missiles.

What was fascinating about that whole 45-minutes-to-London claim is that No. 10 said afterwards, “Oh, we didn’t endorse that leak, wherever it came from,” but did they question it or contest it, saying to the Evening Standard and the other newspapers, “This actually is wrong”? That was an omission that allowed untruths to permeate the debate and created a very toxic environment, in which, as the hon. Gentleman rightly said, an opposition needed to thrive.

[Pete Wishart]

The hon. Lady is absolutely correct about the untruths and all the other issues she has raised, but how come they were so easily accepted by the Opposition? The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), who was then Leader of the Opposition, was probably more enthusiastic about this war than Tony Blair was.

[Laura Sandys]

The hon. Gentleman will have to ask them. I was not a Member of this House at the time. However, lots of people from very different political perspectives—people on the right, the left and across the board—were against the war, and there were also people from all the parties who felt it was the right thing to do. I would also say this to the hon. Gentleman: I have seen some of the videos, and I have spoken to people who were tortured by Saddam Hussein, and I can see why people right across the board might have found the humanitarian motive extremely compelling.

One of the gravest failings was mainly constructed in America: the lack of planning post-Saddam and for the future. From my perspective, that was extraordinary. I was part of the “red team” working with military intelligence, and we met three times a week in the run-up to the Iraq war and then during the Iraq war. The minute the so-called conflict stopped, we were all disbanded because we were not needed—because there was no need for anybody with any expertise in Iraq, because the roses were going to be thrown on to the tanks and the Americans and the Brits were going to be embraced in every street, and there were going to be parties and we were going to have liberation right across the board. That naivete was, as has been said, in many ways a result of the lack of opposition and the lack of questioning of every element of the implications of this intervention.

I have subsequently heard that there were two opportunities for our armed forces to support the Iraqis to topple Saddam: as we arrived in Kuwait as part of our preparations for war, and as we were arriving close to Baghdad. At both times, leaders in the republican guard—not the special republican guard—approached the allies and said, “Can we instigate a revolt against Saddam? Then we will invite you in to support us.” That has received very little coverage and created little interest, but, from what I understand, there is truth in it, and I would be interested to see some of the papers to get to the bottom of it. We were there, and if our objective was to get rid of Saddam Hussein, we should have understood that it was important to do that in conjunction with the many forces and interests within Iraq that wanted to get rid of that brutal dictator.

My final point is that we must learn the lessons of history. I suspect my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border, and many other Members, would agree with me on that. We went into Iraq in 1917 and had a very difficult and torrid time, and many of the issues we faced in 2003 were identical, both in intention and implication. We must make sure that we do not end up across the region with three countries: a Sunni country, a Shi’a country and a Kurdish country. My group at King’s college at that time was explicit about that, and we see the same issue arising again now in relation to Syria. If we end up with those sorts of conflicts arising over the next few years, we will have to see our invasion of Iraq as being the first step in causing some deep fragmentation, some great destabilisation and some great global challenges, faced as a result of this decision on Iraq, which was not well thought through.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Meacher]

That is why I say that we need the Chilcot report, in the light of which my hon. Friend’s point will be a serious consideration. The truth is that, in realpolitik, to the victors the spoils, with only those who are defeated paying the penalty. I take my hon. Friend’s point, which is an honest and fair one, and we should return to this when the report is finally published.

The second dimension is what the war has achieved. On this 10th anniversary, it has been said that the US won the war, Iran won the peace and Turkey won the contracts. But did the US win the war? At a cost that has been estimated at $1.5 trillion, something over £1 trillion—Joseph Stiglitz, a former member of the presidential economic council, thinks it is actually twice that level—and at a cost to the US of a death toll of 4,500 troops, 32,000 wounded and with thousands of survivors still struck down with post-traumatic stress disorder, the US completely failed to anticipate the insurgency that eventually forced it out. Moreover, the war actually produced the one thing that the US was desperately anxious to prevent; namely a Shi’a autocracy in Iraq, closely aligned with a resurgent Shi’a Iran. Even the US goal of securing control of the enormous Iraqi oil reserves, second only to those of Saudi Arabia, it was forced to forgo. If one had to pinpoint the moment when the US lost unipolar power as the world’s hegemon, it must surely be this comprehensive disaster of the Iraq war.

As for Iraq itself, it remains a bitterly divided and violent country, as others have said. It is not only the hundreds of thousands of dead and, at the height of the war, the 4 million refugees, but after nine years of occupation by US and British troops, thousands are still tortured and imprisoned without trial, health and education have dramatically deteriorated, the position of women has horrifically gone backwards, trade unions are effectively banned, Baghdad is still divided by the checkpoints and the blast walls, the electricity and water supplies have all but broken down, and people pay with their lives if they are honest enough to speak out.

In the longer term, the war has undermined the moral standing of the US and the UK across the world, not only in the middle east. It generated the al-Qaeda presence, which certainly was not there before, and it sent a clear message, which has emboldened Iran and North Korea, that the only way to deter US blackmail and attack was indeed to acquire weapons of mass destruction. It could even be said about the war without exaggeration that the greatest weapons of mass destruction were those wielded by the Americans. We saw the comprehensive and systematic demolition of Falluja, the US-led massacres at Haditha, Mahmudiya and Balad, and the biggest refugee crisis in the middle east since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.

My third and final consideration lies in the lessons, briefly, that can be drawn from this disaster. The chief one, as I said, concerns the governance structure that allowed it to happen in the first place. As we know, there was the mendacious, illegal and devious manner in which the US and the UK claimed authority in launching the war at all. Saddam had no involvement whatever in 9/11. There were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, as was widely suspected by western intelligence at the time, but suppressed by the politicians. The ways used by Bush and Blair to take their countries to war were, as we know all too well, brazenly deceitful.

Much is made of the fact that there was a vote in the House of Commons, and there was, but that vote was on the very eve of war, hours before the bombing started when, with 45,000 British troops already deployed in the field, it was virtually impossible to draw back. So the first lesson is obviously that in any such future scenario—God forbid that there ever should be such a future scenario—the House of Commons vote must be at a much earlier stage in the process when war is first seriously being contemplated and at that stage the documentation must be provided to justify, or purport to justify, the war, and that must be fully disclosed to the House before the vote is taken.

[Laura Sandys]

As somebody who has so much more experience than I do in Parliament, will the right hon. Gentleman speculate what would have happened if we had voted against the war? Would we have been able to roll ourselves back? I think it was almost too late and it would have been a very big dilemma for the Prime Minister of the time to be in that position—an interesting dilemma and one that we need to resolve if we are to have votes before intervention in the future.

[Mr Meacher]

That is indeed an interesting point. It would not just have been difficult for the Prime Minister—it would have been a massive humiliation and embarrassment if that had happened. One has to ask why the vote was taken so late. Maybe—I can only speculate—it was precisely to put pressure on Members of this House for what was virtually a fait accompli, which would compel a majority of them to support it. I pay enormous tribute to the 139 MPs who voted against the war. Most were Labour Members, but some were Tories or Members from the smaller parties. They need to be given the credit and honour that they are due.