Report of the Iraq Inquiry

Margaret Beckett Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

My reading of the inquiry report is that it does indeed identify that regime change as an objective would be illegal in UK law, but I think the suggestion is that, through a process of group-think, the people who were involved in this process came to see regime change as a means to deliver the legitimate objective, which was compliance with the UN Security Council resolutions. A fair reading of the report suggests that that is the process of mind that is being spelled out by Sir John.

[Margaret Beckett (Derby South) (Lab)]

I hope I may be able to assist the Foreign Secretary, although whether he will regard it like that is another matter. I perfectly understand what the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) says, and I understand that it is a view that he has held for a long time, but having had the advantage—that he did not—of being in the Cabinet room when these discussions were taking place, can I just tell the Foreign Secretary that, as we got closer and closer to decision time, the then Prime Minister, Mr Blair, stressed on repeated occasions to the Cabinet that the resolution called for Saddam Hussein to comply with the UN inspectors, and if he did so comply, there would be no military action? He pointed out that the downside of that was that this terrible man, who certainly did commit war crimes on a mass scale, would remain in power, but that that was a downside we would have to accept.

[Mr Hammond]

I am sure the House is grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving that insight from the frontline, as it were, of where this debate started, but one of the things that comes out very clearly from a reading of the report is the misalignment between the position of the UK Government and the position of the US Government, who clearly were pursuing regime change as an objective, as they were legally entitled to do under their own regime.

On operational planning, it is well recorded that the initial invasion and defeat of Iraqi forces proceeded rapidly. The UK’s armed forces performed extremely well—a fact of which we and they should be proud—despite the changes to the overall invasion plan as a result of the Turkish Government’s decision to refuse access to Iraq’s borders through Turkish territory. In fact, Iraq’s military turned out to be a good deal less formidable than many of us had imagined.

The task that should have been at least as big as preparing for the invasion was preparing for the aftermath. As Tony Blair said before the Liaison Committee in January 2003:

“You do not engage in military conflict that may produce regime change unless you are prepared to follow through and work in the aftermath of that regime change to ensure the country is stable and the people are properly looked after.”

However, Sir John has found that, when the invasion of Iraq began, the UK Government

“was not in a position to conclude that satisfactory plans had been drawn up and preparations made to meet known post-conflict challenges and risks in Iraq”.

Understanding what those challenges were—the need to restore broken infrastructure, administer a state and provide security, including against the threats of internecine violence, terrorism and Iranian influence—did not, as the report clearly states,

“require the benefit of hindsight”.

However, the Government assumed that the US would be responsible for preparing the post-conflict plan, that the plan would be authorised by the UN Security Council and that the UN would play a major post-conflict role, with the international community sharing the post-conflict burden.

The report finds that the Government

“expected not to have to make a substantial commitment to post-conflict administration.”

It concludes that the failure to anticipate and plan for post-conflict challenges in the short-to-medium term increased the risk that the UK would be unable to respond to the unexpected in Iraq, and, in the longer term, reduced the likelihood of achieving the UK’s strategic objectives there.

--- Later in debate ---

[Margaret Beckett (Derby South) (Lab)]

I want to begin where the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), who has just spoken very eloquently, ended. I entirely agree that there is much to learn from the Chilcot report. One of the things that I am most concerned about—I know that it is very early to say this—is that it is far from clear to me that we are actually going to learn the things that we should.

On the morning of the publication of the Chilcot report, I listened to the radio and heard a number of commentators and, indeed, Members of this House, including, I think the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), saying one after another, “Of course, we all know what happened.” The script was simple and familiar: “Tony Blair knew there were no weapons of mass destruction. He deliberately lied to the House of Commons about whether there was intelligence to suggest that there were such weapons. He made a secret pact with George Bush long before the war, committing us to it in all circumstances, so everything that happened in between was irrelevant, and the war itself was illegal because there was no second United Nations resolution.”

It seems to me that this is the right moment to point out that this is, I think, the fifth inquiry into what happened in 2003 and before and after the invasion, and, as far as I recall, none of them has verified that incredibly simply script. Nor does it seem to me that the Chilcot report confirms it.

The inquiry team accepts, as have the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and the former Attorney General, the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield, that when the Prime Minister told this House that he believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he believed it implicitly to be true. He was not making up the intelligence or telling this House anything other than what he believed to be true, let alone inventing a lie, which seems to be being implied. Indeed, the report points out that the basic case that Saddam Hussein had retained weapons of mass destruction and that he had the intent to develop more, given the opportunity, was what the Joint Intelligence Committee itself believed.

It seems to me that one of the most important things that comes out of Chilcot—the former Attorney General touched on this—is the degree to which whole swathes of people whose professional judgment was involved were mistaken, and that continued to be the case right up to and, indeed, beyond the invasion. Chilcot makes it clear that that is what the Joint Intelligence Committee had continually reported both to the then Prime Minister and to the Cabinet. The report states:

“There is no evidence that intelligence was improperly included in the dossier or that No. 10 improperly influenced the text…The Inquiry is not questioning Mr Blair’s belief, which he consistently reiterated…or his legitimate role in advocating Government policy.”

It is really important to bear that in mind, especially as one listens to some of the detailed and very determined attempts to create a different impression.

Sir John Chilcot also pointed out that, along with the dangers that the intelligence community believed that Saddam Hussein presented, it believed that,

“Saddam Hussein could not be removed without an invasion.”

That was also thought to be relevant.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight we all know that the intelligence community and the then Prime Minister were wrong, but we did not know it then. What is more, what our intelligence services believed was believed by almost every other intelligence service in the world, including the French and the Russians, and there is no doubt that that is why Security Council resolution 1441 was carried unanimously.

[Mr David Davis]

The right hon. Lady said that we did not know at the time. However, on 15 March 2002, the JIC said that the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programmes was sporadic and patchy. Three weeks later, in Texas, Tony Blair said:

“We know he has been developing these weapons. We know that those weapons constitute a threat”.

How did we not know at the time, and how is that consistent?

--- Later in debate ---

[Margaret Beckett]

I am familiar with the insistence that, in some way, this is hugely important. That is not the impression that the public are being given or, if I may say so, that the right hon. Gentleman, among others, is striving every day to give them. The public are being given the impression, not that the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was sporadic and patchy but that it was there, but that the intelligence services and the then Prime Minister knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction and deliberately misled the House. That is not true and was never true. No attempt—

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[Margaret Beckett]

No.

No attempt to read that into the record can possibly be justified. We did not know it then—no one knew it then—and most people very firmly believed in Saddam Hussein’s intentions.

The third allegation is about the secret commitment. I was not the slightest bit surprised to hear the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) quoting the single sentence that is included in the background notification. I agree with him entirely if his assertion is that it was a profound mistake for the former Prime Minister to use that phraseology. However, I do not read into it the sinister feeling that the right hon. Gentleman does, nor indeed did the Chilcot inquiry. To my mind, if this had been a conversation, rather than a written memorandum, it would have been something along the lines of, “I am on your side, but”—but—“if we are to take action, all these things have to be addressed; we have to go the United Nations and so on.” Chilcot acknowledges that it was Mr Blair’s intent to get President Bush to go through the United Nations route, and that—against the advice of the President’s own allies—he pursued that with determination and had success in doing so.

[Alex Salmond]

The right hon. Lady will find, as she peruses the report, that Chilcot found it much more significant than that. That is why he said that it would make it very difficult for the UK to subsequently withdraw its support for the US. In a memo to Tony Blair, her colleague Jack Straw said:

“When Bush graciously accepted your offer to be with him all the way”.

Can the right hon. Lady give us an explanation for that?

[Margaret Beckett]

It would be better to ask my former colleague. However, having been the recipient of Jack Straw’s notes, I would suggest that he was ironically quoting back to the Prime Minister words he did not think the Prime Minister should have used; and he was right about that, as no doubt the right hon. Gentleman will agree.

Then there is the question of legality. It has been said here before, and no doubt will be said again, that Chilcot does not pronounce on the legality of the proceeding. He criticises the processes but he does not say that a second resolution was needed, although I accept that he does not go into that territory. There is an enormous amount of dispute about this matter, and the former Attorney General touched on it a moment ago. It has led to the query, which he raised, as to why there were so few questions from the Cabinet to the Attorney General when he gave us his advice.

One of the things I am pretty sure I have said before, but I do not suppose anybody has paid any attention and they probably will not now, is that it is quite simply the case that the issue of whether we needed a second resolution had been gone over ad nauseam. It had been discussed at length. The Cabinet had had extensive verbal reports from the then Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister about the progress of discussions in the Security Council, about the desire to have a second resolution, about how things were going, who was objecting, and the detail of how that process of negotiation was taking place.

The views of the then Foreign Office legal adviser in London have been much quoted. Evidence was given to the Chilcot inquiry about that, and it is absolutely right and wholly understandable that all the focus has been on the advice of the Foreign Office legal people in London. Although I was interested in the remarks of the Former Attorney General about how unclear international law is and how interpreting it is not always an easy matter, that is certainly not the impression that the public have been given.

However, I have rarely seen any reference made to the fact that someone else gave evidence to the inquiry about the legality of resolution 1441 and whether a second resolution was required. That person was the head of the Foreign Office legal team at the United Nations—the team whose day-to-day dealings are with the Security Council; the team who advised the then Government, and who presumably advise equivalent people in the Government today, on the handling of negotiations; and who give the Government legal advice about the detail of what resolutions mean—what their import will be.

That legal adviser confirmed what the former Foreign Secretary had consistently told the Cabinet, day after day—that the Russians and the French, in particular, had tried to get an explicit reference into resolution 1441 to the need for a second resolution before any military action could be undertaken, even though resolution 1441, as drafted, stated that it was a “final opportunity” to comply with UN resolutions and talked about “serious consequences” if Saddam did not comply. The legal adviser told the Chilcot inquiry that those discussions in the Security Council were exhaustive; that a very strong attempt was made to insist that a second resolution was carried; but that, in the end, the Russians and the French accepted that a second resolution was not referred to, and the resolution was carried unanimously—including, if I recall correctly, with the vote of the Syrian Government, which is a remarkable thought in today’s circumstances.

The accusation has also been made in all these discussions that the attempt to get Saddam Hussein to conform with UN resolutions was in some way false—that there was no wish for Saddam Hussein to conform, and that the intention from the beginning was military action. As I said in an intervention on the Foreign Secretary, the then Prime Minister repeatedly warned the Cabinet that if Saddam Hussein did, indeed, choose to comply with the UN resolutions, he stayed; and he reminded us that that would be an outcome that many—not least the many in this House who campaigned on behalf of the Kurds—would deplore and regret. It was repeatedly pointed out to us, “If Saddam complies, there will be no military action. He stays in power.”

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the right hon. Lady for so graciously giving way. The Chilcot report contains a quote from Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6 at the time, telling Tony Blair that the US was deliberately setting the bar

“so high that Saddam Hussein would be unable to comply”.

So the idea that when Tony Blair was standing in the House of Commons on the day of the vote, there was still time for Saddam to comply, is simply wrong. Tony Blair has already been told by Sir Richard Dearlove that the bar has been set deliberately high for the weapons inspectors, so that Saddam cannot comply.

[Margaret Beckett]

I know about the quote from Sir Richard Dearlove and I know that he expressed that view, as I recall, quite some time before, because I do not think he was in post at the time we are speaking of. I accept that it was serious and difficult, but if Saddam had shown any intention of complying or made any move to readmit inspectors—for example, a series of tests was proposed that Saddam could meet to show whether he was complying, but all that was rejected—by the French, by the way, and also by Saddam. So that is where we are. There was, indeed, a warning that if Saddam complied, military action would not occur.

That is the original four-point series of accusations. To that story, three further accusations have now been added. The first, from the Chilcot report, is that action was taken when it was not a matter of the last resort. The second is that we could have held back longer and the whole matter could have been addressed by further inspections. The third was that the events that have since taken place in the middle east are all a result of the Iraq invasion, and that that too should lie on the consciences of all of us who voted for it.

The point about whether the intervention was a last resort was also raised by my late right hon. Friend Robin Cook, and those who make that case rest their argument on the continued effectiveness of containment backed by sanctions. What nobody seems to mention any more is that at that time, it was widely and seriously believed that containment was weakening and ceasing to be effective. Anyone who was around can cast their mind back and recall that there was an enormous and growing campaign against the sanctions that were helping to keep in place the hoped-for containment. Many right hon. and hon. Members will recall the protests that took place continually, across the road in Parliament Square, but nearly everybody has forgotten that that was not at first a protest against the war; it was a protest against the maintenance of sanctions against Saddam Hussein. To be fair to those who undertook that protest, it was done on a perfectly legitimate and understandable basis, because Saddam was stealing money that was being given to feed the Iraqi people and using it for his own purposes, and consequently there was growing poverty and hardship in Iraq. It was understandable that people should have been against sanctions on that basis, and they were, and the campaign against those sanctions was growing.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Lady fully understand the significance of chapter 20 in the executive summary, which states clearly that this action was not a last resort? That is important because it is fundamental to the definition of a just war. If we accept Chilcot’s assertion, its corollary is that this was not a just war, with all the consequences that follow from that. In all these volumes of stuff, that simple sentence in the executive summary bangs the whole lot to rights.

[Margaret Beckett]

I realised that that was what it meant. I was under the impression—I may be mistaken; unlike many others here, I am not a lawyer—that a just war was a religious rather than a military or legal concept, although I do understand it in those terms. Apart from the question of whether the war was just because it was not a last resort, on containment, evidence was found after the invasion that Saddam Hussein had been further in breach of UN resolutions than we understood at the time. Robin Cook was unaware of that when he made his statement in this House, and the impression was created that containment was working—for example, missile development had been forbidden, but people were not aware that, as the Butler report stated, Iraq was developing ballistic missiles with a longer range than permitted under the relevant Security Council resolutions. Saddam Hussein clearly intended to reconstitute long-range delivery systems that were potentially for use with weapons of mass destruction. As we discovered after the invasion, it was not a simple matter of containment working and there being no breaches, or that Saddam Hussein was not trying to develop weapons.

There is also the argument that we could have held on, and I must accept Chilcot’s verdict that such action was not impossible. However, no one now touches on the circumstances in which people found themselves by then. We had troops in theatre in difficult, unpleasant, and incredibly dangerous circumstances. Indeed, those troops were expecting hourly, daily, the potential attacks involving chemical or biological weapons that everyone believed Saddam Hussein possessed, and that one hoped our troops were equipped to resist. So it was not a simple matter of saying there was no need.

If you are going to take action, you have to start military preparations. By that point, military preparations had advanced to such an extent that our troops were in theatre. Ultimately, one could argue—no doubt people will—that those troops could have been withdrawn, but what kind of signal would that have sent to Saddam Hussein or to the rest of the world? It seems to me that it would have given Saddam Hussein the signal that he was perfectly free to resume the kind of operations he had undertaken in the past, whether against the Kurds or Iran. These issues are not as simple as is sometimes assumed. I completely accept, however, the argument made in Chilcot that one of the lessons we should learn is that we should be wary of letting military concerns drive political decisions. That brings me back to my principal thesis, which is that there is much in Chilcot from which we can learn, but only if we do not divert ourselves on to things that Chilcot does not say.

The final issue or accusation I wish to address is that everything that has happened in Iraq, Syria and across the middle east since has all flowed from the invasion of Iraq, that it is all down to a dreadful miscalculation. The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) called it the worst foreign policy mistake. Let us say that it was. I do not myself quite take that view, but let us accept his premise. But I do not think he argues, and I certainly do not for one second accept, that everything terrible that is happening now or has happened since in the middle east is as a result of that invasion.

It is grossly irresponsible, in order for people to satisfy the clear, very real anger and passion they feel against the then Government, the then Prime Minister and the current civil war in Iraq, to say to the evil men of ISIL, Daesh and al-Qaeda that they are off the hook for the blame for any of the terrible things they do because it is all down to our fault. [Interruption.] It is no good people making noises off, because we all know that that is exactly the kind of assertion that very many people make: that all of this stuff is down to the mistakes of the west; it is all down to the evildoing of the west and everyone else is absolved.

No one should be absolved from responsibility for the things they themselves advocate or they themselves do. I do not seek to resile from the responsibility that I exercised when I voted in Cabinet and I voted in this House for the Iraq war. I regret bitterly the events that have occurred since, as any sensible person would, but I do not pretend that the decision I made was not my decision and that it was somehow all somebody else’s fault.

[Several hon. Members rose—]