Delivered in the House of Commons as contribution to debate on Iraq
Clare Short (Birmingham, Ladywood): The conclusions that I have reached about the way in which the Prime Minister misled us in order to rush to war in Iraq are serious indeed. I am well aware of that. I wish that I had not reached those conclusions, but I fear that they reflect my opinion and I need to put my case. Obviously, loyalty to one's Government is an important quality, but loyalty to the truth is a higher imperative.
If I am right in my conclusions, it is a very serious matter indeed. The truth must be found and lessons must be learned by the Government and by our system of government, so that such things can never happen again.
The Christian teaching on just war, to which the Liberal Democrat spokesman referred—and I understand that the Muslim teaching is very similar, unsurprisingly—says that the cause must be just, the remedy proportionate, the war winnable, and that there must be no other way of putting right the wrong. The problem with the war in Iraq is that the possibility of resolving the problem in another way was not exhausted. It was therefore not a just war. That is why the Churches all over the world, including all the American Churches apart from the Southern Baptists, opposed the war at that time.
As the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) said, most of us thought that we had to adhere to the possibility of military action to uphold the authority of the UN, but we wanted to exhaust the possibility of disarming Saddam Hussein and, if possible, displacing him without going to war and inflicting more hurt and suffering on the people of Iraq. We did not exhaust all the possibilities of achieving that.
I am not one of those who believe that we could ignore the problem of Saddam Hussein and continue with the policy of containment. On that, I agree with the United States neo-conservatives, now the hawks in the Bush Administration. Saddam Hussein was a vicious tyrant, guilty of grave crimes against humanity, he was defying the UN, and sanctions were causing enormous suffering to the people of Iraq. But Saddam Hussein was the problem, not the people of Iraq. We therefore needed to try to find a way to resolve the problem without inflicting on the people of Iraq further suffering, war and the chaos that has come after war.
The US Churches put forward such a plan. It came late, but it was well thought through. It included a proposal for coercive disarmament backed up by a UN-mandated force, the indictment of Saddam Hussein in order to bring him down and then a UN mandate in order to bring Iraq to democracy. There were other proposals that we should have tried, but I was always of the view that we had to be willing to contemplate the use of military force ultimately, and that we could not leave the situation as it was for a further 12 years.
On weapons of mass destruction, there has been a great deal of discussion today and my time is limited. I saw all the written intelligence for a number of months and had a number of personal briefings from the security services. We are all agreed that the regime was determined to experiment with chemical and biological weapons. It had previously tried to have nuclear weapons, which had been dismantled by the previous weapons inspectors. That is why Saddam Hussein continued to defy the UN and why sanctions continued. That is not in dispute among us. The question is how weaponised were the materials, how imminent was the threat, and why could we not wait for the Blix process to be exhausted.
The only reason not to allow Blix to go on, and thereby to throw away the unanimity that had been achieved in the Security Council on resolution 1441, was if there was some kind of urgency. I believe that the security services briefing was that there was a threat, as I have briefly tried to summarise, but then there was an exaggeration of the imminence of that danger. That is the importance of the 45 minutes and the suggestion of the potential link to al-Qaeda. There was an attempt to suggest an imminent threat that did not, in fact, exist.
Mrs. Angela Browning (Tiverton and Honiton): Will the right hon. Lady give way?
Clare Short: If I give way, Madam Deputy Speaker, does the time come off my 10 minutes?
Madam Deputy Speaker: No. The right hon. Lady will get an additional one minute.
Clare Short: I give way, then.
Mrs. Browning: I am grateful to the right hon. Lady. As somebody who could not support the Prime Minister in the Lobby that night, I have some sympathy with what she is saying. On 3 February, in relation to the al-Qaeda threat and the possibility that Saddam Hussein would make his weapons available to al-Qaeda so a third party would be the direct threat to us, not necessarily Saddam Hussein, the Prime Minister said:
"I repeat my warning: unless we take a decisive stand now as an international community, it is only a matter of time before these threats come together.—[Official Report, 3 February 2003; Vol. 399, c. 23.]
The Prime Minister was boxed in because he had troops deployed in Kuwait and war became the only option. That was so regrettable. It sounds to me as though the right hon. Lady would agree.
Clare Short: I shall deal with the points that the hon. Lady has made. The extraordinary thing about the al-Qaeda point is that al-Qaeda members must have gone to Iraq before the war. They must be there now. If there really was a risk from chemical and biological weapons, and indeed the International Atomic Energy Agency has said that the looting of the atomic plant has created the danger of the equipment for a dirty bomb becoming available, then why for heaven's sake was there not much more rapid action to make secure whatever material was in Iraq? That was extraordinary, and contradicts the claim that there was an al-Qaeda link. There will be more discussion of that and there will be inquiries, but I wish to make a number of other points, because I fear that there were other deceits on the way to war.
Three very senior figures in Whitehall said to me that the Prime Minister had agreed in the summer to the date of 15 February for military action, and that that was later extended to mid-March. At the time, the Prime Minister was telling us that he was committed to a second resolution, and I preferred at that time to believe the Prime Minister. From reflecting, reading and examining everything that was done, I now believe that the evidence is overwhelming that there was a date. That is why the Blix process was not allowed to be completed. We acted according to a date, not to deal with the fundamental problem. If we were trying to deal with the fundamental problem, we could have allowed a bit more time for the Blix process. That is my view.
The Foreign Secretary said at the time that we had to threaten force to avoid the use of force, and I agreed with that. That was his paradox. I agree that that is how we got 1441, but then came the contradiction. We were told that we had to go to war because we had troops in the desert, but we had deployed them in order to try to avoid war. That is explained only if there was a date to which we were working.
The Prime Minister told us that we could not get a second resolution because the French had said that they would veto any second resolution. A member of the public sent me the transcript of the Chirac interview, and it is plain that he said clearly on 10 March that the Blix process needed to be completed and we had to see whether that could succeed in achieving disarmament, but if not, we would have to go back to the Security Council and the Security Council would have to authorise military action. We were misled about the French position, and the French have been vilified disgracefully, when it was not their position to rule out all military action. We will never know—
The Minister for Europe (Mr. Denis MacShane): Will my right hon. Friend give way on that point?
Clare Short: Do I get another minute?
Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. May I explain to the right hon. Lady that she is allowed up to two minutes?
Clare Short: In that case, I give way.
Mr. MacShane: I have the French transcript of the exact words that President Chirac said. Nowhere did he say that he was ready to contemplate the use of force. What he said—I do not refer to the veto reference—was that if there was a majority of nine on the Security Council authorising war, France would vote no. [Hon. Members: "Ce soir."] Not "ce soir". That is in a different part of the interview. He said that France would vote no, and that killed the chances of a UN path to peace.
Clare Short: I shall run out of time. I have the words of President Chirac on 10 March. He said that if the weapons inspectors came back to the Security Council, stated that they could not achieve disarmament, and said:
"'We are sorry but Iraq isn't co-operating, the progress isn't sufficient, we aren't in a position to achieve our goal, we won't be able to guarantee Iraq's disarmament', in that case it will be for the Security Council and it alone to decide the right thing to do. But in that case, of course, regrettably, the war would become inevitable. It isn't today."
That is what Chirac said on 10 March.
We will never know whether, if we had pursued the Blix process and indicted Saddam Hussein, we could have liberated Iraq without the horror, chaos, death and suffering of war. As a result of the secrecy and the element of deceit in getting to war by that date, preparations for the post-conflict situation were inadequate. The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which was set up in the Pentagon to deal with post-conflict Iraq, was full of politics about who was going to be the new Government of Iraq. That was not a matter for that body: it should have been left to the UN to be done properly under a Security Council mandate. ORHA did not face up to or prepare for the Geneva convention obligations: the keeping of order being fundamental, as well as the immediate provision of humanitarian relief and the maintenance of civil administration. There is chaos in Iraq, and some 70 people a week are dying.
Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. May I remind the right hon. Lady that the motion before us is about an independent inquiry?
Clare Short: I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I think that the independent inquiry should extend to these serious matters. Many people have lost their lives, including some of our soldiers and an awful lot of people in Iraq. There must be an inquiry into those matters.
Madam Deputy Speaker: The motion is about the use of intelligence information. I am sure that the hon. Lady can concentrate her remarks on that.
Clare Short: I hear what you say, Madam Deputy Speaker, but the intelligence information was used to justify the action that I am discussing, and it could have been interpreted in such a way that a different route could have been taken to resolving the problems to which it referred.
My time is almost gone, so I shall briefly explain the conclusions to which I have sadly come. We should have tried to resolve this crisis without military action if we could, but the grave accusation that I am making is that there was deceit on the way to military action. If we can be deceived about that, what can we not be deceived about? We must get to the bottom of this. The Government's record must be made absolutely clear, and there is a major lesson for our system of government. We must not make decisions like this. There must be better ways of making sure that information is properly used and decisions are properly made, especially when the lives of large numbers of human beings are at stake.
