Report of the Iraq Inquiry

Lord Austin of Dudley Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that, because it is important to emphasise that further lessons need to be learned, some of which I hope to address. I will not spend time repeating any of Chilcot’s factual findings, because, looking to the future, we need to consider the lessons and make sure that we do not make any of the same mistakes again. The Secretary of State for Defence will speak later about operational lessons that the military must learn, and it seems to me that there are more lessons than the five that Ministers have outlined so far.

I want to outline some of the points that jump out at us from the report. It seems to me that we have continued to make mistakes during the current Prime Minister’s time in office, and I will explain why.

On the flawed intelligence, although Chilcot finds that no deliberate attempt was made to mislead people, the intelligence on which the war was based was clearly flawed and did not justify the certainty attached to it by the Government. Has that lesson been learned? Last year, the Government asked this House to authorise military action in Syria. By contrast with Iraq in 2003, the military action did not include the deployment of ground troops.

[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)]

Is my hon. Friend aware of an attempt to get the House to consider a contempt motion against Tony Blair? Does she agree that, whatever else is in the Chilcot report, it does not give grounds for such a motion?

[Emily Thornberry]

That is a serious point, and I hope that Members will consider it. The question is whether the House was deliberately misled. Chilcot concluded that, although the intelligence may have been flawed and the House misled, it was not deliberately misled. Therefore, in my opinion, if the House tried to make any findings of fact and act on them, it would move away from those previous times when the instrument of a contempt motion has been used. When it has been used previously, there has been a finding of fact upon which the House has been able to act, meaning that someone has either been found guilty or admitted an offence. There has been no admission of deliberately misleading the House, so if the House attempted to make a factual finding, it would become a kangaroo court, because the person accused would not be allowed to represent themselves or speak. In my view, such circumstances would fly in the face of this country’s established principles of justice. Opposition Members are particularly interested in the Human Rights Act, and in article 6, on the right to a fair trial.

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[Alex Salmond]

If the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) had been able to give evidence to Chilcot, no doubt the report would have concluded otherwise. However, we now have the report as it has been concluded. I am not talking about individual pieces of evidence; I am talking about the conclusion of the Chilcot inquiry itself. This is why The Times was undoubtedly right to describe the events as “Blair’s private war”.

On the question of collective responsibility in this place, I fundamentally disagree with the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe on one point. If Parliament is to hold future Executives to account, it will not just be a question of changing the process of decision making, although I accept that some changes have been made. I do not accept the Foreign Secretary’s confidence that the mistakes could never be repeated, and I do not believe that his distinction between a land campaign in Iraq and an aerial bombardment in Libya fully explains why this country—never mind its allies—spent 13 times as much on bombing Libya as we spent on the budget for reconstruction in Libya. That might be a lesson that has not been carried forward. The changes that must be made relate not only to the process of government but to parliamentary accountability, the most fundamental aspect of which is Parliament deciding whether it has been misled.

[Ian Austin]

The fact is that Libya was already in a brutal civil war before western air forces prevented Gaddafi from slaughtering innocent people—women and children—in Benghazi. That was what was happening. The question that the right hon. Gentleman has to answer is what he would have done to help those women and children in Benghazi. [Interruption.]

[Alex Salmond]

As the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) says from a sedentary position, I probably would not have supplied arms to people like that over a period of time. Not doing oil deals in a tent with Colonel Gaddafi might have been another thing.

[Ian Austin]

rose—

[Alex Salmond]

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I want to make my speech.

My point was about the lesson of reconstruction, not the argument for the conflict. It is fair to point out that this country spent 13 times as much bombing Libya as we did on the budget for the reconstruction of Libya. That might provide a lesson about the priority given to the aftermath of conflict, and I am unsure whether the Foreign Secretary has taken it fully on board.

This is about not just the process of government but parliamentary accountability—that is the most fundamental point of all. Parliament has held people to account in the relatively recent past—there was Profumo and the sex scandal, and if I remember correctly, Stephen Byers was accused of misleading Parliament because he nationalised a railway company. Those things were no doubt important, and that line of accountability is crucial, but how much more important is the line of accountability on peace or war, when hundreds of thousands of people lose their lives as a result of decisions made by the Executive?

My contention is that Chilcot provides a huge array of evidence for a lack of parliamentary truthfulness, in that one thing was being said to the President of the United States and quite a different thing was being said to Parliament and the people. That did not happen in just a single speech or parliamentary statement, although the immediate run-up to the war provides ample and detailed examples. For example, the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) referred to the total misrepresentation of the situation in the United Nations. How do we know that it was a misrepresentation? Because Chilcot has published what was being said within Government, and we can compare that directly with the explanation that Parliament was being offered. The process of Parliament being told one thing while George W. Bush was being assured of something else took place not over a few weeks but over 15 months—that is amply demonstrated in the evidence presented to Chilcot. We know now why Chilcot fought so strongly to have the private memos as part of the report.

The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe rightly pointed to the motivation of regime change and the difficulty that regime change could not make the war legal in generally understood international terms. That is amply demonstrated in a private memo from Tony Blair to George Bush in December 2001, which states that

“any link to 11 September and AQ”—

al-Qaeda—

“is at best very tenuous; and at present international opinion would be reluctant, outside the US/UK, to support immediate military action though, for sure, people want to be rid of Saddam.

So we need a strategy for regime change that builds over time.”

At the same time, however, when pursuing the Prime Minister in the House, Charles Kennedy was being told that the “two phases” of war included the war in Afghanistan and the pursuit of

“international terrorism in all its different forms. That is a matter of investigating its financing, how terrorists move across frontiers”.—[Official Report, 14 November 2001; Vol. 374, c. 867-868.]

The House was being told that stage 2 of the war on terror was not an assault on Iraq—far less regime change in Iraq—but the pursuit of international terrorism. The two things are totally incompatible. One thing was being said to George Bush in private and another thing was being said to this Parliament and the people of the country.

Moving into 2002, there was something that was amply picked up by the press after Chilcot reported—the memo of 28 July to George Bush, stating:

“I will be with you, whatever.”

I heard the former Prime Minister explain that to John Humphrys on the “Today” programme by saying that of “whatever” meant somehow “wherever”, and that the memo did not give an unconditional commitment to stand with the United States in a war. I am not sure I fully understood that explanation, and crucially, nor did John Chilcot or Jack Straw, a crucial member of the Administration.

Jack Straw’s memos to Tony Blair have also been published. The report shows that on 11 March 2003 Straw wrote to Blair:

“When Bush graciously accepted your offer to be with him all the way, he wanted you alive, not dead!”

That referred not to the mortal danger to troops or civilians that would ensue from a war, but to whether the then Prime Minister would be alive or dead politically. Jack Straw was under no illusions whatever about the commitment that had been given to George Bush. Nor were Tony Blair’s own advisers, who advised him to take it out of the memo, or George Bush and his advisers, or Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Sir John Chilcot concludes, on the meaning of the memo:

“Mr Blair’s Note, which had not been discussed or agreed with his colleagues, set the UK on a path leading to diplomatic activity in the UN and the possibility of participation in military action in a way that would make it very difficult for the UK subsequently to withdraw its support for the US.”

But that was not what Parliament was being told at the same time. Parliament was not told of assurances to George W. Bush on military action. Parliament was told that the Prime Minister was striving for peace and trying to find any way to avoid a conflict, and that it was all up to Saddam to choose peace or conflict. That deliberate misrepresentation, in what was said to Parliament, of what was being said to the Americans continued into the very onset of war itself.

I want to refer to the memo that my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Ms Ahmed-Sheikh) quoted earlier. When Blair was telling Parliament, even in his speech in the war-or-peace debate, that

“I have never put the justification for action as regime change”,—[Official Report, 18 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 772.]

he was telling George Bush only a few days later:

“That’s why, though Iraq’s WMD is the immediate justification for action, ridding Iraq of Saddam is the real prize.”

We heard earlier that this was not a matter of one man. But that one man was the Prime Minister. We were told earlier that it was really about process of government, but it was the Prime Minister who dictated the process of government and indeed prevented government processes, meaning that checks and balances did not work. Above all, it was the Prime Minister who prevented this House from having the information it required to make a reasonable judgment.

Last week, I heard that one of the defences of intervention in Iraq was a counterfactual argument: what if Saddam Hussein had stayed in power? What would he have done? For example, what damage would he have done during the Arab spring? I have had another counterfactual argument in mind: what if the massive international coalition that was built to deal with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan had been held together? What if the hundreds of billions of dollars that were then to be wasted in the Iraqi desert had been applied to making a real success of the rebuilding of Afghanistan? What if the justification for a totally legal international intervention, which this country took part in, had resulted in a genuine benefit? What if that massive coalition, which extended even to approval from the Palestine Liberation Organisation, had been able to demonstrate that a legal war, correctly applied, could result in construction, reconstruction and allowing a country the investment required to be a shining light of a genuine international intervention?

The United States of America was, in a way, never stronger than in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It was never more respected, because it had suffered a terrorist atrocity. What would have happened if an ever broader coalition had brought to fruition the situation that I have described, instead of this meandering into Iraq on a private vendetta of the President of the United States with his closet of neo-con advisers, aided and abetted by a British Prime Minister who subverted collective responsibility and prevented this Parliament from having the information that it required to hold the Government to account?

I once told the former Prime Minister that he would answer to a higher law than this Parliament, and I believe that to be absolutely true. In the meantime, this Parliament should hold him accountable at this stage, not because it is a matter of pursuing him but because it will demonstrate and illustrate that, even retrospectively, if a Parliament is systematically misled, it will say that up with it we shall not put. That is part of the changes that we should make not just in the processes of government, to impose collective responsibility, and not just in, I hope, learning the lessons of how to reconstruct a country, but, essentially, in parliamentary accountability. If we make those changes, we will be able to say legitimately that an Iraq could never happen again.

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[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)]

I start by paying tribute to all who served in the forces in Iraq, especially those, and the families of those, who were injured or lost their lives. It is absolutely clear from this debate and from last week’s statement that the Chilcot report will never settle arguments about whether the war was right or wrong, but it should lay to rest allegations about bad faith, lies or deceit.

First, the report finds that there was no falsification or misuse of intelligence by Tony Blair or No. 10. Secondly, it finds that there was no attempt to deceive Cabinet Ministers. Thirdly, it finds that there was no secret pact with the US to go to war. That means there is no justification for saying that evidence was “confected” or that the case for war was a “deception”, which is exactly what the Leader of the Opposition claimed in his response last week. He claimed that it created a colonial-style occupation, although the UN endorsed the west’s presence after the invasion, and the 2005 elections and referendum on a new constitution gave power to Iraqis.

To listen to Tony Blair’s critics, anyone would think that Iraq had been a peaceful haven of tranquillity before 2003, but nothing could be further from the truth. In Iraq, Saddam Hussain perpetrated the largest chemical weapons attack against civilians in history, killing thousands. He led a brutal reprisal against Iraq’s Shi’a majority, slaughtering up to 100,000 Iraqis in just one month—more than in any year since 2003. Abroad, he supported terrorism, offering al-Qaeda sanctuary, training and assistance in planning attacks.

The report does not say that Tony Blair ordered the falsification of intelligence that stated that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. UN resolutions required Saddam to demonstrate that weapons of mass destruction did not exist, but he acted as though they did, presumably because that helped him to subjugate his people. His refusal to co-operate with UN inspectors led intelligence services right around the world to believe that he did, in fact, possess those weapons. Even countries that were opposed to military action, such as France, Russia and Germany, believed that he had those weapons. The debate in 2003 was not about whether Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, but about how to deal with them.

Of course, we must learn the lessons of mistakes made after the invasion of Iraq, but we must also learn the lessons of not taking action. British intervention in Kosovo and Sierra Leone prevented people from being slaughtered. Libya was already in a brutal civil war before western air forces prevented Gaddafi from killing innocent people in Benghazi, but without support afterwards the country is a huge problem for the whole of north Africa and the wider region. Not intervening in Syria did not prevent the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, hundreds of thousands of deaths or millions of refugees, let alone terrorist attacks not just in Syria but in Tunisia and Europe.

I also want to deal with the claim that toppling Saddam led to ISIS or, as we are so often told, plunged the middle east into chaos. As Martin Chulov, The Guardian’s middle east editor and author of a definitive study of ISIS, says:

“The Syrian civil war was not driven by Isis. It fed directly out of the Arab awakenings and was a bid to oust a ruthless regime from power. Assad could not have prevailed against the will of the streets. So he tried to transform the uprising into something that was driven by internationally-backed global jihad. Isis grew out of the chaos. They flourished with Assad’s direct and indirect support until they became a monster no one could control.”

None of that will make the slightest bit of difference to Tony Blair’s critics, to the critics of the Government of the day who took those decisions or, especially, to those on the hard left. The facts make no difference at all to those people, because they are implacably opposed to the UK or other western countries ever taking military action.

[Dr Murrison]

I am following the hon. Gentleman’s remarks very carefully. Does he accept that many of us here do not doubt that Tony Blair did not lie to the House, but that that is a pretty low test? The challenge is really whether he acted in a way that came anywhere close to competence. Chilcot clearly thinks that Tony Blair was incompetent, and that is the charge before him. The hon. Gentleman seems to be suggesting that the Iraq war was in some way a success; manifestly, it was not.

[Ian Austin]

I said earlier that, clearly, mistakes were made after the invasion. But let us be honest; the charge that is made against Tony Blair and the Government of the time is of falsification and misuse of intelligence, and of wilfully misleading this House and the rest of the country. That is what people are saying, and I think the Chilcot report proves beyond doubt that none of those charges is true.

[Caroline Lucas]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Ian Austin]

No, I will not give way, because other people want to speak.

Tony Blair’s critics on the hard left opposed every attempt to use British forces, not just in Iraq or Syria, but even in Kosovo, where the UK intervened to prevent thousands of people from being slaughtered. The right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) described that at the time as “unpardonable folly”, even though Britain was intervening to prevent genocidal slaughter. I will take no lectures from the SNP on these issues.

The leader of the Labour party was a founder member and chair of the Stop the War coalition—an organisation that, under his leadership, praised what it said was the “internationalism and solidarity” of ISIS, and compared it to the international brigades. It supported what it called the Iraqi “struggle” against British troops “by any means necessary”, and among many other appalling things, it said that it stood with Saddam Hussein, compared Assad to Churchill, and promoted or provided a platform for Assad apologists. For the hard left, the world is a simple place: all the problems are caused by the west, and the solutions are easy.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Ian Austin]

No, I will not give way. Of course we must learn the lessons from Iraq, but let us make sure we learn the right ones. For me, the central lesson is that taking action can lead to terrible consequences, and military action anywhere in the world involves huge risks. However, there can also be terrible consequences from not intervening. If we learn the wrong lessons, we might have fewer Iraqs but we could easily have more Syrias. Perhaps we ought to consider a Chilcot-style inquiry into the consequences of not intervening in Syria, where people have been slaughtered or displaced in their millions.

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[Ms Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh (Ochil and South Perthshire) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the very passionate speech by the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat). I pay tribute to him for his service in the Iraq war.

In 2003, The Sun ran a story under the headline “Open Fire on Traitors”. The piece, which has now been deleted from the newspaper’s website, called on readers to

“aim your own missiles at the cowards and traitors who opted to support Saddam Hussain”.

It meant “cowards and traitors” such as Robin Cook, Charles Kennedy and other Members from all parties of the House, all of whom stood up for their principles, spoke out against Tony Blair’s war and were vilified for it. Alongside these figures stood the 1 million people who marched on the streets of London to make their case and the 80,000 people who took to the streets of Glasgow. We were not traitors and it is not cowardly to promote a minority view. At that time, it was a minority view to champion peace over war, and we now know that war was not the last resort. It took courage and bravery, and we in this House must be courageous, brave and honest by calling out a predetermined commitment to war and a failure of government for what it was—just that.

[Ian Austin]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Ms Ahmed-Sheikh]

I will not be giving way.

The publication of the Chilcot report last week was a vindication of all those in Parliament and across the country who were vilified for opposing this terrible, unnecessary and ultimately failed war. It exposed the sorry tale of misleading statements that preceded the House’s decision to support military action, and put our servicemen and servicewomen in harm’s way. We cannot allow that to happen again.

When I began reading the Chilcot report last week, my first thoughts were with the families of those servicemen and servicewomen, and those who have been saddled with the physical and mental scars of that war. Families such as that of Lance Corporal Andrew Craw from Tullibody in my constituency, who died in Iraq on 7 January 2004. How must they have been feeling when they read the report? They now know that we entered into a failed war, as Chilcot said, without adequate support for our own troops or proper thought for the aftermath and the millions of people in Iraq. To see these families’ bravery and dignity, as they publicly responded to the report last week, was humbling and inspiring. It is worthy of note that Blair’s team of spin doctors had 18 months to look at the sections of the report referring to him, whereas the families were given three hours. They must be reassured that Parliament takes its role seriously and acts truthfully at all times. They deserve no less.

The reports makes it clear that there was a complete absence of the Cabinet government essential to ensure the vital issue of national security. The evidence shows that Ministers around the Cabinet table did not effectively challenge the decision to take us to war or devote their energies to planning efficiently for the aftermath of the campaign of shock and awe at the outset of military operations. Most of all, it lays bare what took place in order that they might win the hearts and minds of the country and this House. As we have heard, Tony Blair said in his note to George Bush:

“I will be with you, whatever”—

whatever the facts, whatever the circumstances, whatever the consequences! What a damning indictment of a diminished figure!

As Tony Blair’s memos to President Bush demonstrate, he said one thing in this place and another behind closed doors. He stood here, in this place, and claimed that these acts were predicated on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, but confirmed in writing to President Bush in private that regime change was their goal. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) has articulated five falsehoods in the lead-up to the parliamentary decision in 2003 and in connection to the post-conflict plans. Paragraph 630 of the executive summary is indeed damning.

These actions have led to around 1 million Iraqi children under 18—about 5% of Iraqi children—losing one or both parents and resulted in 70% of children in Iraq suffering from trauma-related symptoms. This is not about binding the hands of Tony Blair’s successors but about showing that facts and evidence are central to everything we do. Lessons must be learned and the mistakes of the past must not be repeated. A modern Parliament needs a modern approach to transparency and accountability. If the public cannot trust what is said here, it places in peril our whole parliamentary system. Parliament must act now to protect its own integrity.

As I prepared for today’s debate, I reread the speech that my predecessor, Sir George Reid, made to the Scottish Parliament prior to war in 2003. He said:

“Above the doors of the Red Cross in Geneva, there is a phrase from Dostoevsky, which we should remember in time of war. It states that, in war,

‘Everyone is responsible to everyone for everything.’”

This House now has a responsibility to hold the former Prime Minister to account for his actions. This would be not a judicial process but a parliamentary one, for which there is precedent. This is our responsibility and we should rise to it.