Iraq War (10th Anniversary)

Debate between Rory Stewart and Laura Sandys

Thursday 13th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) for securing this debate, and it is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), who made an extremely moving speech.

I was not in the House for the 2003 vote, and I certainly do not want to focus on it today; I am far from sure that I would have made the right decision. In fact, I think I would have been on the wrong side in 2003. It was not until I was stuck in Iraq in 2003 that I saw what a mess it was. I want to reflect briefly, therefore, on the lessons we might be able to draw, not so much from the decision to intervene, but from the questions about how we got stuck there and why we find it so difficult to acknowledge our failure.

The starting point for any discussion of Iraq has to be an acknowledgment that it was a failure and a scandal. However we look at the costs and benefits of what happened there, it was probably the worst British foreign policy decision since the Boer war or the first Anglo-Afghan war of 1839. Never have the British Government made a worse decision. By that, I do not mean that had I been in the House I would have voted differently. In fact, I suspect that I would have voted in favour of the war, wrongly. I hope, however, that this is an opportunity to reflect on what Parliament is, what the Foreign Office is, what the military is and how Britain as a whole—or at least the British policy establishment—could get something so wrong.

This matters because there are many similarities between what we did in Iraq and what we are doing in Afghanistan, and many similarities between those things and what we occasionally think of doing in Mali or Syria. At the base of the problem is our refusal to acknowledge failure, to acknowledge just what a catastrophe it was, and the House’s refusal to acknowledge how bewildering it was, how little we know and how complicated countries such as Iraq are. Sitting in Iraq for 18 months from the middle of 2003 to 2005, I found myself facing, in a small provincial town called al-Amara, 52 new political parties, many of them swarming across the border from Iran and many of them armed.

Nobody in the Foreign Office or the military, and certainly nobody in the House, would have been able to distinguish between Hizb-e-Dawa, Harakat-Dawa, Majlis Ahla, Hezbollah—which turned out in the Iraqi context to consist of two men with a briefcase—or any of the other Shi’a Islamist groups that emerged. None of us in the British policy machine predicted in January 2005 that 90% of the votes in the south of Iraq would go to only three Shi’a Islamist parties. Everybody in the foreign policy machine then predicted that it would be different at the end of 2005, and we were all wrong again. Why were we wrong? We were wrong because we did not have the right relationship between politicians, diplomats, soldiers and the local reality of these countries. We have not got it right yet.

We have not got it right because it is not realistic today—as it was not realistic at the time of the Boer war or the first Anglo-Afghan war—to expect people in Parliament to be experts on the internal politics of Iraq. What really began to go wrong after the invasion, beyond the decision about WMD, was all to do with micro-relationships in Nasiriyah and al-Amara and in the relationships between the different grand ayatollahs in Najaf. These are not things that anyone in the Chamber, however well briefed, can pretend to understand or judge. Instead, we have to rely on the military, the Foreign Office and the intelligence agencies, and there the problem starts. The problem starts because the entire structure of our organisations—their incentives, their promotions, their recruitment, how they interact with policy makers, politicians and Ministers—does not help us ever to acknowledge failure. In fact, these institutions are designed to trap us in these countries.

Careers are made by people going out for short tours. I remind the House and those in the Foreign Office that the initial tours in Iraq were for six weeks, extended to three months, then to six months. The idea—that people living in heavily defended compounds, moving around in armoured vehicles, generally unable to speak a word of any local language, unable to interact with an Iraqi for more than half an hour or an hour at a time, except if surrounded by heavily armed men and operating through translators, could really get a sense of whether Iraq was stabilising or what, to use the Minister’s words, Iraq would be like in 10 years—was of course misleading. The advice and challenge that they could provide to the Government, therefore, was not good enough.

It is not good enough that not a single senior British diplomat formally recorded on paper their opposition to what was happening in Iraq. Many of those who were inside the system now say that they made private comments, that they were worried, but nobody, from the political director downwards, formally objected on paper to the Prime Minister.

[Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)]

Was that not compounded even further by the American Administration, where if someone questioned what was going on, either strategically or tactically, they were sent back to the states, their future career very much in question?

[Rory Stewart]

That is a very good point, and perhaps it is a way for me to wrap up my analysis of the Foreign Office. Of course, this is not a uniquely American problem. Within any British civil service Department, there is no great incentive to admit failure. When I look back at the reports I wrote stuck in al-Amara and Nasiriyah, I find it extraordinary how every week, I claimed great success. Every week, I would write, “We’ve hired another 300 people into the police. We’ve held a new sub-district election. I’ve just created 3,000 jobs. We’ve just refurbished another set of clinics and schools.” To read report after report, week after week, it looks as if the whole thing is getting better and better. In retrospect, I know differently, of course. When I began, I could go into the bazaar to get an ice cream, but by the end, I was stuck in my compound with 140 rocket and mortar-propelled grenades flying at the compound, and we had to abandon it and retreat back to a military base, essentially surrendering Nasiriyah, a city of 600,000 people, to the insurgents.

The situation is not helped by the way we talk about it in Britain today. We do not really think very much about Iraq. We do not think very much about what exactly Iraq is doing with Iran or Syria at the moment, why exactly Iraq got involved in dubious banking transactions to bust sanctions on behalf of the Iranian Government or why exactly our great ally, al-Maliki, appears to have been allowing trans-shipment of weapons from Iran into Syria. Why do we not think about these things? It is because we are not very serious. At some level, this country is no longer being as serious as it should be about foreign policy. Our newspapers are not writing enough about Iraq. The Foreign Office is not thinking enough about the failure. The military is not thinking enough about these things. Unless we acknowledge that something went wrong in Iraq and that something went deeply wrong in Afghanistan, we will get ourselves stuck again.

What do we do about it? We need to reform. It cannot be business as usual. We cannot just go around pretending it was all fine. We cannot simply blame Blair and Bush.

North Africa and the Near and Middle East

Debate between Rory Stewart and Laura Sandys

Monday 28th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

I would agree absolutely if I did not fear that Europe itself is hollowing out its foreign services in exactly the same way as we have hollowed out ours. German diplomats, French diplomats and Italian diplomats recognise that they are pinned in their offices with 400 e-mails in their in-tray, unable to study languages, unable to get out into the rural areas or to collect the political intelligence on which their Governments depend. They are looking in dismay at an External Action Service that is clearly not delivering and they are looking to countries such as Britain for the inspiration and leadership that they might find it increasingly difficult to receive.

Look at what we face. So far, we have dealt with just the second division but we are now entering the premier league. We are looking at countries such as Syria, countries of astonishing complexity with Orthodox Christians, Catholic Christians, Druze, Sunni groups, Alawite groups, orthodox Shi’a groups, Yazidis on the border and Kurds in the north. We are looking at a country such as Egypt that is set fair to become a modern Pakistan on the edge of Europe: a country where the economy is faltering, the military is grabbing on to power and terrorism is appearing on the fringes. We look, too, at Iran, split between its rural and urban populations, with nuclear weapons being developed.

What do we have to put against that? What will happen when we move with our team from the second division into the premier league? Are we up to the job? The answer is that, in many ways we are not. We are in a bad situation. Due to duty of care regulations, our diplomats have become increasingly isolated and imprisoned in embassy compounds. It is increasingly difficult for a British diplomat in a country such as Afghanistan to spend a night in an Afghan village house and even to travel outside the embassy walls without booking a security team in advance. When we attempt to compensate for that, as we did in Iraq by relying on Iraqi local translators or employing Iraqi staff to perform the jobs that our diplomats were not permitted to do, we find ourselves the subject of a class action suit from a British law firm, arguing that we owe exactly the same duty of care to our Iraqi locally engaged staff that we owe to our British staff, thereby tying us up absolutely.

[Laura Sandys]

Let us think about what we used to do under the colonial service, although that has lots of negative connotations: people lived in those countries for years—perhaps 10 years—and spent time travelling the country, getting to know all the different levers, whether they were economic, political or otherwise. Does my hon. Friend think that the structure in our FCO, which involves postings of two to three years, is fit for purpose when we consider the more complex and dynamic environments in which we and those diplomats must operate?

[Rory Stewart]

That is a very good point. The analogy with the colonial period is a very dangerous one and we do not want to recreate some form of colonial service. The structures of imperial control are no longer relevant, but my hon. Friend is absolutely right about the complexity and unpredictability of the modern global world. My hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) misleads himself, perhaps, in that he imagines the modern global world as some uniform space in which the fundamental language is English and the fundamental symbol is the mathematics of the banker. In fact, the modern globalised world is defined by complexity and by specificity. The very failed states that we consider tend to be among the most isolated and most alien societies with which we have to engage. That brings us to the problem of the Michael Jay reforms.

Those reforms are the second problem that our Foreign Office has inherited. Since 2001, a consecutive series of permanent under-secretaries have shifted the balance at the Foreign Office from languages and area expertise towards management jargon and an increasing insistence on the “best practices” of the corporate world. All that has meant that because of the very precise details of the “core competences” required for promotion to the senior grades and the appointment procedures, the Foreign Office, instead of giving linguistic and political experts that sense of status and pride, is rewarding people for their ability to deal not with people outside the embassy walls but those within the embassy itself.

That all takes place within a broad context. As the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) suggested, we operate in a multilateral world in which we are very dependent on other partners. Those partners, too, are being hollowed out. We hope that we can depend, as our political service collapses, on journalists, but the newspapers are collapsing and their foreign correspondents are being drawn back to their capitals. There is less and less capacity on the ground.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rory Stewart]

I could not agree more—it certainly allows us to have a great deal of information. However, at the fundamental core of the Foreign Office’s work, which concerns politics and power, there appears to be a problem. The same problem was apparent when nobody challenged the Government’s policy on Iraq, which is the single most humiliating mess into which the British Government have got themselves since Suez. Not a single senior British diplomat publicly or even privately challenged the Prime Minister on that issue. Why? Because at the same time as we imagine that everything is manipulable through technocratic processes and technology, the knowledge and the confidence that came from country immersion and language is lacking, as is the confidence that would allow one to challenge power.

[Laura Sandys]

I thank my hon. Friend for being so generous with his time. Let us look at what the Pentagon did about four or five years ago. It put a huge amount of investment into technology and the technological retrieval of data, and then it decided that many of its decisions, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or internationally, had failed because the system did not have enough human intelligence. Technology can deliver a certain level of intelligence, but ultimately we need people who really understand the area to interpret that information and to add that human dimension.

[Rory Stewart]

I could not agree more. This is not an either/or situation. I am deliberately being somewhat, or even intensely, polemical, so let me try to be more reasonable. Technology is not irrelevant and nor is it the case that the world has not changed since the 19th century, but it is important to recognise that the countries that pose the most trouble for us are often those we find the most difficult to understand. It is in precisely those contexts that deep knowledge of those countries and their power structures and relationships is required, and I think the same would almost certainly be true if one was trying to run a business selling into those markets. That applies not only to our diplomats’ relationships with politicians and a Cabinet but to their relationships with rural populations and opposition groups. All of that would put Britain into the state of grace and provide the insurance policy on which this country depends.

Moving towards a solution and a conclusion, the solution must lie in pushing ahead with the very reforms that the Minister and the Foreign Secretary have undertaken, but to push them harder and faster. The diplomatic excellence initiative that the Foreign Secretary has launched is a very good beginning. Even today, however, one still meets political officers in embassies who say that they cannot see how that will help them with promotion. They say, “Focusing on policy work is not going to get me promoted because you haven’t changed the core competences. It’s management of two people and the DTI staff that will get me my next job.” Those are the things we need to address.