Iraq Inquiry

Lord Soley Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

It is appropriate that we are having this debate today when a book of remembrance has been opened in the cloisters of the House of Commons in memory of more than 8,000 Muslim boys and men who were slaughtered at Srebrenica. If people go and sign that book, as I hope to do and I hope others will do, we should think of two things. The first is that not intervening costs lives too. That point has been made by other noble Lords today. Secondly, and very importantly, it was at that time that some of the Muslim community began to fight because they believed that Christian Europeans would not intervene to defend Muslims. It may be forgotten now but we had to take military action not only against the Serbs but against some of those groups. The idea that the terrorism of today has evolved just in recent years is wrong. It has a much longer history.

I think that the report is very good and I have a lot of time for it. Some of the people who think that Tony Blair has not taken the criticism ought to read again in full his statement in relation to the report, and some of the newspapers criticising him might feel a bit guilty given what they were saying at the time. There are terrible double standards. One thing was always clear to me: Tony Blair was not lying. He believed it very strongly. One of the absurdities of the argument about him lying is why on earth would any Prime Minister take a country to war on a lie that they knew would be found out to be a lie within a matter of weeks or months after the end of the war? It was always just a political gesture to say he was a liar. Sadly, one of the responses to this report, particularly in some aspects of the media, has been vindictive and to simply look at him as a scapegoat. I was at a party in Inverness this weekend just gone and seven people came up to me separately and without me asking for it—I was not speaking on the issue or anything—and said that they thought that the response to Tony Blair was vindictive and one person said it was just trying to have him as a scapegoat for all the problems. There are a lot of lessons in this report. Tony Blair quite rightly has to take responsibility and we all have to learn from it.

The noble Lord, Lord Butler, said that he had never liked sofa government and I have no doubt that every time he thinks about that he puts his head in his hands. However, government is at times dysfunctional—if you look at the run-up to Brexit and immediately after the Brexit vote, by God it was dysfunctional. The dysfunctionality on the Iraq issue was that of the US Government. Tony Blair did have a lot of influence with George Bush but two people had far more influence than he did. One was Donald Rumsfeld and the other was Vice-President Cheney. Every time Tony Blair tried to get movement, Cheney and Rumsfeld went in and said, “Don’t bother with the UN. Don’t bother with it with any of these other matters”.

Again, we have to be honest. My noble friend Lord Judd is a great supporter of the United Nations. So am I, but let us recognise that the Security Council is also dysfunctional. It will not normally support intervention because Russia and China do not believe in regime change. So we all have to support these despotic dictators being kept in power. That is what is happening now with Syria. Assad is still in power because Russia wants to keep him in power. We have to recognise that this report needs to be taken in context and not rush out and condemn Tony Blair or anybody else such as the security services or the military team. We have to learn the lessons but not kid ourselves that somehow or other we can just make this right by using them as scapegoats or by being vindictive like some people. The painful reality is—and it has troubled me for years—that we do not know how to intervene successfully and maintain the peace afterwards. We did it well after the Second World War: we policed Japanese and German areas with German and Japanese troops supervised by British NCOs and officers.

My heart sank after Colin Powell was removed because he knew that we would have to keep large numbers of troops in Iraq to police it. He was manoeuvred out by Cheney and Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld really did believe in the most naive way possible that if you got rid of Saddam Hussein the people of Iraq would embrace democracy. It was a lovely idea but not true. Some people have said that there was no attempt at a post-conflict effort at all. There was, actually. There were talks at Wilton Park which this Government and previous Governments know about. They were not very successful, not least because when Colin Powell went the whole lot was brought virtually to an end.

When I was the MP for both Hammersmith and Ealing I had a lot of Arab constituents. The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, is right that among those were Iranians, who are not Arabs, and also of course the Kurds. The Kurds were absolutely in favour of intervention. They would come to me and say, “Please do not back down this time as you did in the last Gulf War”. The Iranians—or the Shia, if you like—were more in favour than against, but they were much more wobbly. The Sunnis and others, particularly the Palestinians, were strongly against. The whole of that region was divided about intervention. The horrors that the Kurds, in particular, had suffered from both chemical weapon attacks and conventional attacks were awful. As my noble friend Lord Judd said, we have to remember that real people get hurt.

Time and again in my advice surgery I saw people from all these brutal dictatorships, starting with the Iranian one in 1979, and I was shown their injuries, and I said there was nothing we could do. Actually the world could do something but because of the dysfunctionality of the United Nations, we do not and we cannot. That is the major message, and it is not new. In the 19th century, after we made the slave trade unlawful, we used the Royal Navy to intervene and stop it. All the correspondence in the newspapers at the time was for or against intervention. It is fascinating that those against were using the same arguments as they use now, such as that it will make matters worse and, “Oh, look, the slaves are being thrown overboard because the British ships are chasing them”. We persevered with that intervention.

One of the things that troubles me most—and I will finish on this—is that as a result of the way things went wrong because of our failure to do the post-conflict bit well in Iraq, there is a danger that we will not intervene again. We will lose confidence in ourselves. If the West loses confidence in the idea of the rule of law and the idea of democracy and is not prepared to fight for them, and if it is not prepared to make sure that other people have the opportunity of enjoying the peace that those bring, then, frankly, the wider world is in trouble.

We need to get our confidence back and start to understand that everything that is happening in the Middle East now is not our fault, but nor is it all down to Iraq. There was a peaceful period when people in the area had a choice and could have chosen ways that did not lead to the present problems. The Arab spring—perhaps misnamed now but nevertheless very important —was another trigger in all of this and it was not caused by us. Finally, remember that in Libya Gaddafi gave up his nuclear process and his chemical weapons because of what we did in Iraq. It went wrong after that, not because of Iraq but because of what happened in Tunisia. Please let us make this a debate much more about the problems of how and when we intervene and what resources we put into it. That is the message for the future and we had better get it right.