Iraq Inquiry

Lord Hunt of Wirral Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Birt, but I part company with him when he says that the Chilcot report “takes the wisdom of hindsight a little too far”. I agree with him that it is an impressive report but what I find particularly striking from Sir John Chilcot’s statement on 6 July was his consistent stress on the importance of his main objective of identifying lessons for the future, so if the noble Lord will forgive me, I want now to concentrate on one of those recommendations:

“The need to ensure that both the civilian and military arms of Government are properly equipped for their tasks”.

There is much-needed emphasis on the wisdom of foresight. I am reminded of a famous phrase from when I was a student, in 1962, which everyone knows off by heart. I declare my interests as recorded in the register, including being a student at the time. I heard the former US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, say, on 5 December 1962, and he caused a considerable furore with this comment:

“Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role”.

We are still struggling to identify that role, and that very struggle lies at the heart of today’s debate and of so many other debates going on at the present time. It is also a struggle that has generated an existential crisis within our armed services.

In the Clinton-Blair years, the concept was born of the United States, the one great superpower, reinventing itself as a world policeman, supported, if one could be conjured up, by a “coalition of the willing”. Compared with the supine failure of the United Nations in Srebrenica in the summer of 1995, of which the noble Lord, Lord Soley, has just reminded us, that decisive, US-led NATO intervention in the Kosovo war seemed to mark an entirely new development. No longer was narrow, national self-interest alone the decisive factor in going to war. Sometimes, all that was required was a humanitarian impulse to curb the suffering of civilians, even in,

“a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing”.

This world policeman role has continued to this day, but I agree with noble Lords that by far the most foolish and counterproductive instance of it has now been seen to be the decision to support a military intervention in Iraq. The effect on Iraq itself is now well known, and our hearts go out to the victims of the continuing terror campaign that afflicts the people of that land. What also concerns me, however, is the effect of this new philosophy on our Armed Forces.

Our armed services are indeed our pride and joy, but they are trained—brilliantly trained—for combat, not for police duties. During that early phase of the occupation of Iraq, before the Sunni uprising began, we heard reports of how our troops were winning the hearts and the respect of areas of Iraq where they were in charge, and we felt proud. Were we not, perhaps, using our troops as policemen, not soldiers? But they were playing the part of “nice cop” to perfection. Our troops wore caps; the Americans wore helmets. But it did not last long.

I have had the privilege of attending so-called war Cabinets in the past. Particularly memorable was being in the margins of the meetings that Margaret Thatcher convened during the Falklands conflict. I remember clearly how the Chiefs of Staff would come and give their military advice, then there would be a debate among Ministers, and then a political decision would be taken. It was a clear and logical process. So long as the information is openly and honestly shared, it is a good process. When information is deliberately withheld—the existence of the Sèvres protocol in 1956, for instance—it comes to grief. But otherwise, the separation of the question of what is militarily feasible from the question of what is politically desirable is a very good one.

Unfortunately, as Sir John Chilcot’s report reveals, in the case of the Iraq war that straightforward honest logical process was smudged by the meddling of press secretaries and diplomats of a worryingly political hue, and by the spin, spin, spin of the Whitehall machine. That is not a recipe for good decision-making. The armed services—the poor bloody infantry, to coin a phrase—then got caught in the crossfire, literally as well as figuratively. Our armed services are rightly regarded as the best in the world. Not only should we allow them to do their job, but we should respect their expertise before, during and after any debate and decision about whether to go to war. This clearly did not happen in 2003, and the disastrous consequences speak all too eloquently for themselves.