Chilcot Inquiry

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Tuesday 11th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, I suppose that if one were to ask many members of the public for their memory of the political story of Iraq, they would probably say, “Well, in the United Kingdom, the governing Labour Party and the Official Opposition, the Conservative Party, supported the invasion, and the Liberal Democrats insisted on a UN resolution, which they did not get and they opposed the war as a result”. On that kind of narrative, one might well expect that I would be standing here wanting to find out the legal background—what really happened in past—in order to produce some kind of simplistic blame. It seems to me that that would be an extremely foolish thing to do.

First of all, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, said—and we must be grateful to him for securing this debate—it is a lot more complicated than that. Almost exactly 11 years ago to the week, on 15 February 2003, between 1 million and 2 million people came out to protest. They were not all Liberal Democrats or anything like it. There were Conservatives like Ken Clarke. There were Labour people, including Robin Cook, Tony Benn and many others, who had their reservations. Indeed, within the community as a whole, there was a great debate about this question. It was not simple, and I have no doubt that when Sir John Chilcot’s report finally is published it will be a thoughtful, complex and detailed report. I got to know him very well when he was at the Northern Ireland Office and I always admired his acuity of perception and his integrity of conduct, and the same could be said of his distinguished colleagues.

From my point of view, the purpose of this inquiry is something quite different. It is to try to understand how we got ourselves into such a difficulty in order that we can look to the future with better understanding of how to deal with the problems. I will give one example. At the time of the first Gulf War, which was permitted by UN Security Council Resolution 678, there was a great debate as to how far it might be prosecuted. Noble Lords will well recall a lot of discussion as to whether it should actually be prosecuted right through to Baghdad to get rid of Saddam or whether Resolution 678 did not permit it. I had a great argument with my old friend and colleague, now the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, on exactly this issue. It was my view that, with this particular guy in these circumstances, you needed to go the whole way to Baghdad and get rid of him. It seemed to me that to do anything other was not just a poor reading of Machiavelli but a poor judgment of the psychology of the person one was dealing with and the politics of the region. Paddy said, “No, no, no. That is not possible under UNSC Resolution 678. We cannot do that. We can just remove him from Kuwait”. Well, it is a bit ironic that so many years later it was UNSC Resolution 678 which was prayed in aid actually without a further activating resolution. If I was so hawkish—as I would have been deemed then—in the first Gulf War—why would I have spoken in your Lordships’ House in 2003 saying, “This is not the time to go ahead with it”? It is because situations change. I will come back to that because I believe it is the importance of the urgency of the Chilcot report.

The situation was that in the first Gulf War we had a huge coalition, there had been a clear breach, it obviously required military intervention, and it would have been possible to prosecute it through to the end. In the intermediate years, the Clinton Administration and others had tried to find negotiated ways of moving things forward. Indeed, as I said in your Lordships’ House on the occasion of that debate, there was a suspicion that the weapons inspectors were being put in place simply to try to produce a justification to return to Resolution 678. It seemed to me that it was not going to end well. It was not going to resolve the problems of the region and stabilise Iraq.

How does that relate to the situation now? Noble Lords will recall that Parliament, in debates in the other place and here, made an extraordinary decision that set the Prime Minister and the Government back on their heels on the question of Syria. It was a watershed decision, in my view, in that a Prime Minister and a Government had decided that they wanted to undertake a military intervention, and Parliament, with the overwhelming backing of the people, said, “No. That is not a direction in which we want to go”. It seems to me that this puts up for serious exploration our whole approach to military intervention as to when and how it should be undertaken. Should it always be with military force or are there other ways in which we should intervene? Should we ever be doing it on our own? Should it always require a UN Security Council resolution?

These are very serious questions, but not for the past—of course they are interesting for the past, and, as the noble and learned Lord said, perhaps for some students of history in the future. They are important questions for us in the present and over the next few years, not to apportion blame but to see if mistakes and misjudgments were made, and I think everybody is clear that there were, and to try to prepare ourselves—but not to deal with the last war. One of the mistakes often made by military commanders and politicians is that they prepare themselves better to fight the last war over again. Our job ought to be to become clearer about the changing dynamics of the Middle East and of other regions in order to better make judgments about how we, as a country, play our role in that complicated region and elsewhere in a time when military strength is no longer any guarantee of military success. That is why I believe that we need the report with some urgency. The situation in the Middle East and in other places is developing very quickly. We are uncertain how to proceed and we need to understand whether and how mistakes were made so that we can find a different way of working.

I have no doubt that one problem is civil servants being wary about what things should be redacted and what things should not. I was reading just yesterday a letter by Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the FCO’s deputy legal adviser who resigned; her resignation letter was published some time later. The redaction made at the time by the Foreign Office and later released through the press is quite interesting. I read the redaction and I read what was originally published, and I could not understand why on earth they had bothered to take out what they did, because it did not tell us anything that we did not know. I was not the least bit surprised because my own experience with many security and Civil Service documents is that when there is a great dust-up about what to release and what not to release, more often than not, although not all the time, when you read what is redacted, the fact that it was kept out—and it was clear that it was kept out—actually produced more suspicion that there was something really serious there. When you read it afterwards, you say, “What on earth was all the fuss about?”.

However, perhaps it is not that. Perhaps it is that our friends in the United States are very nervous about some of the conversations between the two Prime Ministers, Mr Brown and Mr Blair, and the President. I am a friend of the United States and I think we have an extremely important relationship, but good friends sometimes disagree honestly. Indeed, we are not good friends if all we ever have to say is that we support the United States. I hear this all the time with the Middle East peace process. What is the British Government’s policy? It is to listen to what the American policy is and agree with it. That is no help to our friends. We need to engage in a proper public debate about these issues and then be supportive.

Therefore, I appeal to my noble friend the Minister to help us understand why there is such a delay and to appreciate on behalf of the Government that early publication is not a matter of the past but an urgent requirement for the present and the future.