Iraq Inquiry

Lord Butler of Brockwell Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, with whom I had the pleasure of serving on the Intelligence and Security Committee. It is marvellous to see him bringing his wisdom to the deliberations of this House.

I have had plenty of opportunity to comment on the matters covered by the Chilcot report and so today I intend to be brief. Sir John Chilcot and his colleagues have taken a lot of stick over the past few years, so it gives me pleasure—but not surprise—that their report has been welcomed as a thorough and forthright one which has given satisfaction and comfort to relatives of the bereaved. If a quicker report had been required, the terms of reference should have been more limited.

Errors in the assessment and use of intelligence have inevitably received much attention. We need to remember that at the time when the Government produced their intelligence dossier in September 2002, virtually all the intelligence agencies in the world were assessing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was seeking to acquire more. Hans Blix himself believed this when he took his inspectors to Iraq in November 2002. The problem was that this conclusion was based on relatively few sources and on inference, and the sources subsequently turned out to be unreliable.

As Chilcot says, the intelligence was presented with more certainty than was justified. But it was also a mistake to use it as a means of political persuasion. The Government were saying, in effect, “Don’t just believe us: believe the intelligence”. As countless examples from history show, intelligence is not uniquely worthy of belief: it is uniquely worth of scepticism.

However, this should not lead us to the conclusion that intelligence is valueless or stop us investing in it. In today’s world, intelligence is crucial. When we have weapons which can be directed to land on a sixpence, it is all the more important to know which sixpence to direct them towards. We need to learn the lesson that intelligence is a very valuable—indeed, indispensable—aid to political and military judgment, but it is not a determinant.

I have considerable sympathy for Mr Blair in the obloquy which is being poured on him. I have never believed that he lied to the British people, and I accept that he was sincere in believing that military action to remove Saddam Hussein was necessary as a last resort. The trouble was that he got caught in a trap in which a decision on whether or not to join the Americans in military action became unavoidable before other means of containing Saddam had been exhausted.

There is one more thing that I want to say. The Chilcot report paints a picture of a Government which—with great respect to those who served in it—as a collective entity was dysfunctional. The defence and overseas policies never met in the lead-up to the war. Plans were not shared with senior Ministers for fear that they would leak. The full legal reasoning of the Attorney-General was not made available to the Cabinet. Official papers were not circulated.

Proper Cabinet procedures should not be seen as pettifogging, bureaucratic impositions on busy Ministers. They are the means—inherited from successive generations of Ministers and officials—to ensure that the full expertise, experience and resources of government are brought to bear on crucial decisions. That is all the more important when the decisions are about peace and war. With hindsight, the Blair Government’s disregard for the machinery of government looks not like modernisation but like irresponsibility.

I am not so naive as to suppose that the interplay of personalities will not always play a part in politics, as in other human affairs, but one of the lessons of the Chilcot report is that when the great responsibility of governing the country is accepted by Ministers, their main duty is good government of the people, not personal political manoeuvring. If government is allowed to become a “Game of Thrones” it is the interests of the governed that will suffer. That lesson is going to be more important than ever in the difficult challenges that our Government are now facing today.