Iraq Inquiry

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, as one would expect, the debate in this House, like the references to Sir John Chilcot’s report last week, has been conducted with thoughtfulness and without emotion. I want to start this afternoon by saying how regrettable it has been that over these last 13 years, the vitriol poured upon individuals, and the disdain with which people have been treated, has led to an atmosphere which makes it extremely difficult to address key issues arising out of Chilcot, and future decisions which will need to be taken by government.

Leading up to, on the day of and immediately after the publication, some of our media, which should know better—our main broadcast media, not just social media or the tabloid press—had already assumed that it would be found that Tony Blair was a liar and had sought to mislead the nation, even though Chilcot found exactly the opposite. The atmosphere created around the publication did not shed a great deal of light on a detailed, thoughtful and extremely valuable report.

I intend to deal very briefly with three key issues: the context and history within which the decision was taken; the information on which it was taken and the structures of government, including the part that I had to play as a member of Cabinet at that time; and the lessons we can learn, now and for the future.

The context has to be seen in the history of the Iraqi nation and, in particular, the leadership, actions and—I have to say—maniacal behaviour of Saddam Hussein. It cannot be swept aside that the Shia majority attempted to rise up at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991. It cannot be swept aside that Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons to kill thousands of Shia Marsh Arabs. It cannot be swept aside—and the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, mentioned it, but in the opposite context—that Saddam Hussein was prepared to use chemical weapons in the war with Iran. It cannot be swept aside that in 1998 it was clear that the inspectorate had determined that such weapons, and the potential for their use and re-creation, existed.

It cannot be set aside that Resolution 1441—yes, with all its ambiguities—led the world to believe that the United Nations Security Council and all leading intelligence agencies believed that he had either weapons of mass destruction or the ability to reproduce them. If they did not believe that, they should not have put their names to Resolution 1441 on 7 November 2002. It was in that context, with the information that was available at the time, that some of us believed that the actions we were moving to take were justified—albeit extremely painful and very often on a knife edge.

Robin Cook has been referred to in this debate, quite rightly. Robin Cook was a very close friend of mine. I shared many moments with him, not just in Cabinet but in my party’s National Executive Committee. Robin Cook did make many of the points that have been made this afternoon and are reiterated in the Chilcot report. I make this point because you would think, from the way in which these issues have been debated, that somehow everyone was misled and therefore that in 2003 there was no debate that addressed some of the key issues—but there was. People were questioning: asking the right questions. There was a genuine disagreement within Cabinet, within Parliament and within the country about the right steps to take.

You see, no decision is a decision. The difference is that if you do not take a decision, it is unlikely that you will be blamed for the decision you did not take—to paraphrase a Rumsfeld version of how you present the world. In other words, those who take the most difficult decisions and agonise over them should not automatically be felt to be—as I, Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell were described in the Communist Morning Star last weekend—warmongers. We were not.

The information was flawed; we know it was flawed. We had no idea at the time that one of the three key pieces of evidence presented—by “Curveball”—was a complete fraud. In fact, of course, as Chilcot shows so graphically, over the period from December 2001 all the way through to July 2003, four months after the invasion of Iraq, the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, had not revealed to the Prime Minister, never mind to other members of the Cabinet, that those pieces of information based on flawed intelligence were as outwith reality as they really were.

So the context has to be understood, not least in terms of what happened on 11 September 2001, which has been referred to this afternoon, because it did matter when we said, as the noble Lord, Lord King, paraphrased in terms of the welcome of Congress for the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, that we all believed that we should stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States in the post-2001 attack.

Information flawed, context understood, structures of government, to which the noble Lord, Lord Butler, referred—yes, they were flawed. There is no question in my mind but that we could have done a lot better. We could have had more formalised procedures, we could have included a wider group of voices, minds and brains, and I think we learned the lesson. But make no mistake about it, no structure would in any way have set aside the flawed intelligence or changed the human nature of having to make decisions on that intelligence. This decision was not made in a vacuum; people were making decisions on the basis of what they knew at the time.

I do not believe for a minute that what has happened with Syria and the greatest refugee crisis in our history has any roots back to the decision in 2003. Yes, the Arab spring and the uprising of people seeking freedom from tyranny; but we must not place on what happened in the decision of March 2003 other things that have happened since and continually refer back to them as though they were the inevitable arising consequence of decisions taken by Parliament on 18 March 2003.

If I had had the same information again, sitting in the same Cabinet with the same context, I would make the same decision. Those who say they would not need to ask the question: well, what would it have been that changed their mind? Not hindsight but a different form of wisdom and an agreement with those with whom they were genuinely, openly disagreeing at the time—as I was with Robin Cook. That is the context, that is the information, that is the need for better structures and to learn the lessons, but not to continually denigrate those who genuinely took a decision in what they believed to be the best interests not just of the United Kingdom but of the world as a whole.