Chilcot Inquiry

Lord Anderson of Swansea Excerpts

Tuesday 11th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to follow my noble and learned friend and to adopt many of his questions. First, I shall reflect on the precise question in the Motion and then consider whether the inquiry is likely to be judged worth while.

Perhaps the first question can be answered briefly. It is largely contained in Sir John Chilcot’s letters to the Prime Minister of 15 July and 14 November last year. Apparently, only in June last year did the inquiry request that certain documents should be published to give evidential backing to its conclusions. I make two observations on that. First, why was the request made so late in the day? Secondly, surely it was unrealistic of the inquiry to believe that Cabinet Office documents and confidential exchanges between heads of state could be published. By sticking to such a principle, the inquiry ensured further delay for a process that began in June 2009 and was expected by some at the time to last but for a year. The Guardian of 29 December last claimed that a compromise agreement had been reached between Sir John and the Cabinet Secretary that extracts could be published in a redacted form. I pose this question to the Minister: is that so? Was not such a deal in effect inevitable from the start?

Many doubts remain as to whether the length and expense of the inquiry have been worth while. My noble and learned friend referred to the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday. However long and expensive that inquiry was, it had the merit of having a cathartic effect on divisions within Ulster. Perhaps the Chilcot inquiry was necessary because of pressures at the time, but many key questions have already been answered. Certainly, every conceivable question was asked of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister at the time. For some the motive was a sort of personal vendetta against Tony Blair—let us remember “Blair liar” and “Blair war criminal”—but they are likely to be disappointed.

I personally had the privilege of an important vantage point. Between 1997 and 2005 I chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee of the other place. I gave evidence to the Hutton inquiry and I visited key figures in the Washington establishment at least twice a year over the period between 1998 and 2005. I had one-to-one meetings with the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and Sir Richard Dearlove. As a result, I am wholly convinced that Tony Blair acted with total integrity and relayed to Parliament and the public the advice that both he and, indeed, I too had received. There may be criticisms that he did not ask sufficiently searching questions of the intelligence services about their sources. Certainly the US Administration relied excessively on exiles and partisan sources such as Mr Chalabi and the Iraqi taxi driver, Mr Rafid al-Janabi. There was much suspicion that the US Administration was seeking revenge on Iraq for 9/11.

The Prime Minister at the time may be criticised for being insufficiently independent of the United States and having a rather starry-eyed view of President Bush and the special relationship, but again, for example, at Crawford in March 2002 he told the President that he would support military action not come what may, but provided,

“that certain conditions were met”.

He did ensure that the United States took the UN path until thwarted by Monsieur de Villepin and contrary to the neo-cons’ view in Washington. Equally, he avoided the isolation of the US, and in my judgment both of those were the objectives. The inquiry is unlikely to find a smoking gun and it has said in terms that it will not apportion blame.

What about the breaches of international law to which my noble and learned friend alluded? Even if in retrospect we recognise that there was greater weight against intervention among those international lawyers who opposed the intervention, there were respected lawyers on both sides of the argument for pre-emption. The inquiry would be well advised, in spite of its excellent legal adviser, not to seek to give a definitive view in this very uncertain field of international law. What about the role of the security services? Surely that was adequately covered in the Butler report. What about the role of the military? It has had its lessons learnt reviews. There were some concerns about the quality of military equipment, but surely the general, correct view is that it was executed superbly by our Armed Forces.

The follow-up to the Iraq intervention is that there has been much public revulsion against all intervention. There was the Chicago speech by Tony Blair in, I think, 1998. There were successful interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo, but following Iraq and Afghanistan, as we have seen in Libya with no boots on the ground and as we have seen in the parliamentary view on intervention in Damascus, there is now a very strong public and parliamentary tide against intervention.

What about the likely conclusion about governance? Was there too much armchair government? Was there a presidential-style Government with the Cabinet sidelined? That may be so, but the memoirs of Robin Cook, no great admirer of the former Prime Minister, suggest otherwise. What about the insights into transatlantic relations? It was the clear strategic priority of the Prime Minister not to keep the United States isolated; that was very much a major factor for him. There was a great deal of evidence of that in the US inquiries. I had a certain personal experience of the somewhat naive views of the neo-cons in Washington when on several occasions I met Mr Richard Perle, whom Denis Healey called the “Prince of Darkness”. He relayed to me his view that come the liberation, while perhaps the bells would not ring in Iraq, there would certainly be great rejoicing and that the ripples of democracy would flow out from Iraq over the whole of the Middle East. That was a view which was in part accepted by the President, and the neo-cons were then very much in a dominant position in Washington.

What about the post-conflict planning? Is the inquiry likely to tell us anything useful about that? The truth is, of course, that we in the UK played a very secondary role in the conflict and certainly a secondary one in the post-conflict planning. I saw that when I went to the green zone in Baghdad and was in the office being occupied by Sir Jeremy Greenstock. I saw the role of Mr Paul Bremer and his large component on the other side. There were two contrasting blueprints for the post conflict. The State Department had Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, who told me that there was more combat experience on his floor in the State Department than on the relevant floor of the Department of Defense. In that department were Mr Donald Rumsfeld and Mr Paul Wolfowitz. They were at the top of the department and said that the Iraqi army was dissolved. As we know, the Chilcot inquiry was unable to interview key people in the US Administration, so it has been given only a partial view of the key players in the post-intervention scene in the United States.

In conclusion, I fear that this long-awaited and long-expected inquiry, long delayed for good or bad reasons, may well prove to be no more than an historic document mainly of interest to students of government. Possibly, after an initial flurry of interest in the press and among the public, the waters will close over it and it will have as little ultimate impact as the Franks committee report on the Falklands, referred to by my noble and learned friend. At least that had a totally UK national perspective. Many expectations have been raised, but it may well be that many expectations will be dashed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I would distinguish between access and publication. The delay is very much about working through thousands of documents, many of them very lengthy, and deciding how much can safely be declassified for publication—how much therefore can be published, how much some documents should be redacted in part and whether there are documents which it would be safer not to publish at all. That has taken a good deal longer than was hoped, but it is now well under way and is what we are currently considering.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

Is it true that the request by the inquiry was only made last June?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Sorry, which request?

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

The request to publish the documents set out in the letters.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am not informed on that matter. I know that, last July, they hoped to be able to start the process of Maxwellisation within a few months. That has been delayed because what happens in a Maxwellisation process—here again I have to correct the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan—is that those who are mentioned in the report will be allowed to see in full those elements of the report which carry their evidence and will be published. So they will not see more; they will see what will be published.

This is not, incidentally, a court of law. In no sense is this a legal inquiry. It is not a matter, if I may quote the noble Lord, of people against whom there is a case; it is a matter of those who may see themselves as being criticised in the report being given time ahead of publication to prepare their response to the criticisms. So, if I may say so to the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, this is not a roadblock. It is, however, an obstacle course, and that takes a good deal of time and discussion among different government departments, which I regret has taken longer than we hoped. I very much hope that it will be concluded soon. The Maxwellisation letters will then be able to go out and we will proceed at the normal stately but sure pace of government publications to a publication of the final report.

I also raise the role of the Cabinet Secretary because I know that he has been criticised quite substantially in the press. The Cabinet Secretary is entitled to see all the papers of previous Governments. In the final resort, as we all know, the Cabinet Secretary only advises and the Prime Minister can always override, but I am old-fashioned about civil servants. Senior civil servants are servants of the Crown as well as of the Government, and they advise in their perception of the long-term national interest. That is what the Cabinet Secretary is doing and I regret that there has been some rather partisan criticism in the press about his role, criticism which I think is unjustified.

The question was also raised as to whether the Butler report covered intelligence, so that we do not need to take it again. The Butler report covered intelligence leading up to the war. This inquiry, which takes us several years past the war, may well need to address one or two other questions. I should perhaps also mention the Gibson inquiry, which, as noble Lords will know, provided an interim report last December on some of the issues of rendition and alleged ill treatment of British nationals and others. A picture of various different dimensions will come into that.

This does, therefore, take a good deal of time to complete. It has not been helped, sadly, by the illness of one of the five members of the Chilcot inquiry, but the other four are well under way and I stress again that Gordon Brown’s promise at the beginning that:

“No British document and no British witness will be beyond the scope of the inquiry”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/6/09; col. 23.],

has been carried out for the inquiry. The question that therefore remains, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, rightly points out, is how much of this it is wise to publish. That is what has caused the delay and it is what we are currently working through.

So there are questions about how fast we can work towards this conclusion and there are, as the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, said, questions for the future. I disagree with those who have suggested that the report, when it comes out, will be simply a historical document gathering dust. I think that it will raise precisely the sorts of questions which the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, has suggested. What should be the conditions for future intervention? How much information should be shared with Parliament and with opposition parties in order to carry Parliament and the public with the Government? How should we handle the coalition aspects of interventions, given that it is highly unlikely that Britain will be involved in any serious military operations abroad in the future which are not in coalitions with others? There, I think, is where the debates will focus.

The Government are well aware of the sensitivity of these issues. I return to the questions raised by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. What is a reasonable time before we disclose conversations with our closest allies and what precedents do we set if we start to publish Cabinet minutes of the previous Government, when others give their advice in Cabinet and elsewhere on the basis of full confidentiality? These are serious questions with which the Government are currently struggling.

I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, for raising this question. I assure the House that a large number of officials are working through those issues. The Chilcot inquiry and its four active members are still at work, and we very much hope to publish the final report within the foreseeable future. I will be pushing for that future to be as foreseeable as it can be.