Iraq War (10th Anniversary)

Michael Meacher Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on securing this debate from the Backbench Business Committee, and for her forceful, eloquent and moving opening speech. It is difficult to say the same of the Minister, who, constrained by the unpublished Chilcot report, chose to say, in almost half an hour, very little of substance, although he did give what I thought was a distinctly Panglossian view of the improvement in the state of Iraq, grossly overstating the case.

There has, however, been a great degree of honesty and frankness from all Members, which is extremely refreshing. I particularly congratulate in that context my colleague on the Front Bench, my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), and although it is always invidious to pick out one person, I thought the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) gave a remarkable speech, making what I think, in my lengthy experience, must be a unique statement in this Chamber: that we should be more willing to admit our own failings. It is true that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, but that is not a doctrine we normally find expounded here.

I want to go over some of the fundamentals. Now, 10 years on, the facts cannot seriously be held in doubt, and they are stark. The United States went to war in Iraq because of oil and because American control of the middle east region was considered important for their foreign policy, as clearly set out in the Project for a New American Century document published by the Bush election team in September 2000. As we now know from then US Treasury Secretary O’Neill, that war was planned from the very first day of the Bush Administration, and 9/11 simply provided the pretext for launching it.

The United Kingdom went to war because President Bush wanted UK support. I do not think there is any doubt that at the Crawford summit in April 2002, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair in effect committed to providing that support, publicly pledging that he was going to stand shoulder to shoulder with President Bush. From that point on, the assessment of the intelligence data conflated analysis into advocacy, to find a rationale for the war which had already been decided on for other reasons. That, I believe, is the explanation.

The decision having been made to go to war, Whitehall provided a briefing that any rationale depended on being able to show incontrovertible evidence of large-scale—I emphasise: large-scale—activity by Iraq to obtain weapons of mass destruction, but because the UN inspectors had left Iraq in 1998, evidence was non-existent or certainly flimsy. The CIA admitted that its resources on Iraq were “thin” and the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee had already concluded, in March 2002, that

“Intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction . . .and ballistic missile programmes is”—

in words we will always remember—

“sporadic and patchy.”

The key point is that in the evidence put together in those crucial five months between the Crawford summit and the publication of the September dossier to justify the war, all the specific data were flawed. The first and central point is that the inventory of chemical and biological weapons and weapon parts that the then Prime Minister presented to the House dealt with weapons that were unaccounted for in the first Gulf war, 12 years earlier, but they were not presented as weapons that were unaccounted for; they were presented as weapons that Saddam Hussein was definitely believed to possess.

Secondly, the 45-minute claim referred to battlefield nuclear weapons, but the impression given was that the threat went much wider.

[Pete Wishart]

The case for going to war was bunkum and nonsense, but the right hon. Gentleman voted for the war. Does he feel that he was lied to, misled or duped?

[Mr Meacher]

Yes—I am glad the hon. Gentleman has given me the opportunity to say, in the spirit of honesty and frankness of this debate, that I am utterly ashamed of what I did on that occasion. It is the worst political mistake that I have made in my lifetime, but I want to say why I did it. I did it because I listened carefully to the then Prime Minister during those two crucial debates. He spoke with enormous assurance and authority, and I believed that, as Prime Minister of this country, he would have been presented with the fullest degree and comprehensiveness of UK intelligence, and he would use those data in a proper and honest manner to make the case. Perhaps I was naive to think that—I now believe that I was—but that is what I believed. I am speaking today because I am so angry at having been deceived. That experience has deeply damaged my trust in the role of Prime Ministers and in the link between intelligence and the various Departments of State and the Prime Minister, who speaks for the Government. I hope that that will be repaired in future, but the damage done has been considerable, certainly to me.

I was talking about the 45-minute claim referring to battlefield nuclear weapons. When the media took it up—the hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) forcefully recalled the Evening Standard headline—that was not corrected, even though the authorities knew very well that the wrong impression was being given.

Thirdly, the claim that Iraq tried to buy 500 tonnes of yellowcake, which is required for nuclear fission, from Niger was included in the dossier, despite its having been confirmed by a visit by the former US ambassador to that country six months before that it was completely bogus. None the less, the claim was included.

The fourth point, which is very important but which has received little attention, is that the then Prime Minister of this country claimed to the House on 25 February 2003 that the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, in 1995 had revealed

“the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear programme”.—[Official Report, 25 February 2003; Vol. 400, c. 123.]

However, as we now know, from a Newsweek exclusive just a few weeks later, what Hussein Kamel actually said during his debriefing was precisely the opposite. He said:

“All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.”

[Caroline Lucas]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for the tenor of his speech and for putting that fact more strongly in the public domain. To clarify: that piece of information was available in February 2003. The fact that it was covered up to such an extent—not even covered up, but completely contradicted—is one of the most shocking deceits in this whole process.

[Mr Meacher]

I entirely agree. That is precisely why I feel so let down by someone who was in the unique role of Prime Minister behaving in such a way. I do not expect any Prime Minister of any party ever to behave in that way.

As the Butler report points out so poignantly, all the ifs, buts, qualifications and caveats in the raw intelligence data were dropped from the dossier, while the positive allegations were distinctly overhyped. We all know that. Sources were treated as reliable when they were clearly not, and they were not checked against the expertise of intelligence staff. Anyone who has read appendix B of the Butler report, which was excellently put together, can see set out, step by step, how the massaging and accretion steadily accumulated until we were told in the final September dossier that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programme was—in words that have echoed for the past 10 years—“active, detailed and growing” and that the intelligence on which that judgment was based was “extensive, detailed and authoritative”. In fact, as we now know, Blair had been told just over a month previously, by the UK intelligence community, that

“we…know little about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons work since late 1988”.

The first great issue is accountability in relation to the Prime Minister’s own judgment, his deceitful presentation and his over-eagerness to take Britain into a war on grounds that far exceeded the evidence to justify them. One cannot take a country into a war under false pretences and then proclaim, as the Butler committee did, that no one can be held responsible.

Indeed the most striking characteristic of the Butler report is this disjunction between analysis and judgment. It is excellent on analysis and very poor, very cautious and very fearful about judgment. It catalogues a litany of failures and then pulls all its punches by declaring that, in effect, no one was to blame. I have to say that George Tenet was sacked as head of the CIA for intelligence failures over Iraq, but John Scarlett, who held the equivalent position in the UK and was equally responsible for the intelligence failures, is still recommended by the report for promotion, despite all the damning evidence in the report to the contrary. It is a very British establishment charade, when what is really needed is genuine accountability. I think everyone on all sides of the House is seeking that. But that the excuse is made that no one can be held to account and that it just somehow happened is completely unacceptable.

[Mr Ellwood]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech but, on the point about the Joint Intelligence Committee, it is the responsibility of Government to digest intelligence. The information is slid across the table and then it is the Government of the day and Whitehall who make the assessments. If the intelligence is scant, the Government need to respond on the day. Does he agree that people such as Mr Scarlett did their job? It became difficult for them when the documents were slid back across the table by people like Alastair Campbell, who were saying “You need to replicate what they are finding in America.”

[Mr Meacher]

I agree that the intelligence community can only do what it can do. There are limits to the amount of information it can provide and the politicians then have a responsibility to reflect that. I completely agree and one’s anger is not that politicians were selective, but that they said the opposite of what they were being told, which I believe is unforgivable.

There are two issues on which those responsible must be held to account. One is the presentation of the evidence to the House to agree to war. Being sinuous with the truth may not exactly be lying but it is certainly not open or honest. Presenting a seriously misleading account of the facts may not be lying either but it is certainly not truthful or straightforward. The second question is about the framework of governance that allowed this to happen. On that point, of course, it would have been much better if we had had the Chilcot report, but we still have to wait for its recommendations. I think everyone in the House agrees that it is far too long delayed and we need the report urgently.

Even 10 years on, we still have not been told the crucial evidence of the secret pledges that Blair made to Bush at his Crawford ranch in Texas some 10 months before the war began and, of course, before consulting the Cabinet, Parliament or the British people. Chilcot has seen this evidence but, as I understand it, has been prevented from publishing it, even though Blair himself, as well as Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell have disclosed privileged information when it has suited their case when they have given evidence to the inquiry. Being told, as we have been, that it is not in the public interest that it should be disclosed is, in my view, the strongest possible indication that it is very much in the public interest that it should be revealed.

The second fundamental dimension of this whole saga is clearly what the war achieved in the long term.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My hon. Friend is giving a very interesting narrative of the process in government. Does he think that there is now case for legal action at an international level against those who deceived successive Parliaments in this country and in other places, which resulted in this terrible war?

[Mr Meacher]

That is why I say that we need the Chilcot report, in the light of which my hon. Friend’s point will be a serious consideration. The truth is that, in realpolitik, to the victors the spoils, with only those who are defeated paying the penalty. I take my hon. Friend’s point, which is an honest and fair one, and we should return to this when the report is finally published.

The second dimension is what the war has achieved. On this 10th anniversary, it has been said that the US won the war, Iran won the peace and Turkey won the contracts. But did the US win the war? At a cost that has been estimated at $1.5 trillion, something over £1 trillion—Joseph Stiglitz, a former member of the presidential economic council, thinks it is actually twice that level—and at a cost to the US of a death toll of 4,500 troops, 32,000 wounded and with thousands of survivors still struck down with post-traumatic stress disorder, the US completely failed to anticipate the insurgency that eventually forced it out. Moreover, the war actually produced the one thing that the US was desperately anxious to prevent; namely a Shi’a autocracy in Iraq, closely aligned with a resurgent Shi’a Iran. Even the US goal of securing control of the enormous Iraqi oil reserves, second only to those of Saudi Arabia, it was forced to forgo. If one had to pinpoint the moment when the US lost unipolar power as the world’s hegemon, it must surely be this comprehensive disaster of the Iraq war.

As for Iraq itself, it remains a bitterly divided and violent country, as others have said. It is not only the hundreds of thousands of dead and, at the height of the war, the 4 million refugees, but after nine years of occupation by US and British troops, thousands are still tortured and imprisoned without trial, health and education have dramatically deteriorated, the position of women has horrifically gone backwards, trade unions are effectively banned, Baghdad is still divided by the checkpoints and the blast walls, the electricity and water supplies have all but broken down, and people pay with their lives if they are honest enough to speak out.

In the longer term, the war has undermined the moral standing of the US and the UK across the world, not only in the middle east. It generated the al-Qaeda presence, which certainly was not there before, and it sent a clear message, which has emboldened Iran and North Korea, that the only way to deter US blackmail and attack was indeed to acquire weapons of mass destruction. It could even be said about the war without exaggeration that the greatest weapons of mass destruction were those wielded by the Americans. We saw the comprehensive and systematic demolition of Falluja, the US-led massacres at Haditha, Mahmudiya and Balad, and the biggest refugee crisis in the middle east since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.

My third and final consideration lies in the lessons, briefly, that can be drawn from this disaster. The chief one, as I said, concerns the governance structure that allowed it to happen in the first place. As we know, there was the mendacious, illegal and devious manner in which the US and the UK claimed authority in launching the war at all. Saddam had no involvement whatever in 9/11. There were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, as was widely suspected by western intelligence at the time, but suppressed by the politicians. The ways used by Bush and Blair to take their countries to war were, as we know all too well, brazenly deceitful.

Much is made of the fact that there was a vote in the House of Commons, and there was, but that vote was on the very eve of war, hours before the bombing started when, with 45,000 British troops already deployed in the field, it was virtually impossible to draw back. So the first lesson is obviously that in any such future scenario—God forbid that there ever should be such a future scenario—the House of Commons vote must be at a much earlier stage in the process when war is first seriously being contemplated and at that stage the documentation must be provided to justify, or purport to justify, the war, and that must be fully disclosed to the House before the vote is taken.

[Laura Sandys]

As somebody who has so much more experience than I do in Parliament, will the right hon. Gentleman speculate what would have happened if we had voted against the war? Would we have been able to roll ourselves back? I think it was almost too late and it would have been a very big dilemma for the Prime Minister of the time to be in that position—an interesting dilemma and one that we need to resolve if we are to have votes before intervention in the future.

[Mr Meacher]

That is indeed an interesting point. It would not just have been difficult for the Prime Minister—it would have been a massive humiliation and embarrassment if that had happened. One has to ask why the vote was taken so late. Maybe—I can only speculate—it was precisely to put pressure on Members of this House for what was virtually a fait accompli, which would compel a majority of them to support it. I pay enormous tribute to the 139 MPs who voted against the war. Most were Labour Members, but some were Tories or Members from the smaller parties. They need to be given the credit and honour that they are due.

[Pete Wishart]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way and for commending the parties that voted against the war. He was just speculating on what might have happened if the House had voted against the war and whether that would have stopped it. One clear conclusion is known, because Tony Blair said that he would have resigned if the vote had gone against him. I think that was as big an incentive as any to vote against it that evening.

[Mr Meacher]

We all can have our views on that opinion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman is making an intervention, not a speech. We have only two hours remaining for this debate and at least six Members still wish to take the Floor. I would be grateful if Members wishing to intervene did so briefly, because otherwise those who wish to make a speech will be disappointed.

[Mr Meacher]

I am pleased that my hon. Friend provided the House with that information, as I do not think it is well understood. It has been claimed in this debate is that the whipping was not very strong, but that is absolutely not the view that most of us take. It was an attempt to corral Members of all parties to support the war. I think that he has skilfully shown the work that was done under the counter, which forced what was necessary. Without it, the vote might well never have happened.

The second lesson—I will be quick, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I know that I have been speaking for some time—is that the power and wilfulness of a Prime Minister who can so brazenly override normal democratic procedures, quite apart from the personality of Tony Blair, is a very serious issue. He made a commitment to go to war at Bush’s Crawford ranch in Texas 10 months before that vote and without consulting anyone. He regularly told Parliament, right up to the very start of the war, that no decision had been taken. Clearly an unstoppable momentum had been deliberately built up. He lent heavily on his Attorney-General between 7 and 17 March to induce him to chance his legal warning that the war was not legal. On 15 February he ignored and dismissed the biggest protest demonstration this country has ever seen, with up to 2 million members of the public marching against the war. According to evidence given by the UK’s ambassador to the US at the time, Sir Christopher Meyer, Bush even rung up Tony Blair to suggest that he could “sit out the war”, while the Pentagon’s Donald Rumsfeld was quite happy to go in alone, but Blair was obsessive and determined to see it through. In an interview in December 2009 he was asked this question:

“If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?”

He replied:

“I would still have thought it right to remove him”—

that is, Saddam Hussein. To that end, he even colluded with what his own head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, said in July 2002, eight months before the war—that

“the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

That background of the contumacious wilfulness of a Prime Minister dragging this country, virtually single-handedly, to war—as it turned out, a war of momentously disastrous consequences—makes it the duty of this House to set down inviolable conditions to prevent any such catastrophe from ever happening again. That must, at the very least, embrace unquestioning compliance with UN resolutions; a clear and unwhipped vote of the Commons and, indeed, the Lords, long before any envisaged hostilities; and a full disclosure of all the data and evidence that can be used to justify war. Only when those conditions are made to apply will we have learned the lessons of this dreadful episode.