Iraq

Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con): My right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley) has done the House a service by initiating the debate. However, it may not have escaped the Minister's attention that, with the exception of the Father of the House, not a single Labour Member has seen fit to take part. I suspect that that is because there is large and growing embarrassment on the Labour Benches. Had they known then what they know now, many Labour Members would never have trooped into the Division Lobby with the Minister and his colleagues. The fact that not a single Labour Member apart from the Father of the House dares to show his face in this Chamber today is effective testament to that.

I agree with everything that my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) said in his excellent speech. The House should also appreciate that the effects of the war have spread far beyond Iraq. I chair the Select Committee on International Development. Many millions of people live on less than $1 a day in central and Latin America. However, as a consequence of the war and the need to divert funds to Iraq, the Department for International Development has withdrawn all aid from the whole of central and Latin America. Every DFID office in places such as Peru is being closed. The House did not fully take that on board. It happened when the new Secretary of State was taking over from Baroness Amos. We have now completely abandoned Latin America.

When Baroness Amos was Secretary of State she appeared before the International Development Committee. It is clear that no assumption made by the Government or the coalition before the invasion of Iraq has come good. She said that

"there was preparation, there was preparation for a range of possible crises, ranging from prolonged urban warfare through large population movements and widespread disruption of essential infrastructure. As it happened what we did see was widespread looting and a breakdown in law and order, which had not been anticipated and which led to serious problems."

With some understatement, she continued by saying that

"we planned for very specific scenarios which did not occur . . . I think where mistakes were made were in anticipation of what we thought the problems were going to be."

That is like a statement from a general confession; the coalition prepared for eventualities that did not happen and made absolutely no preparation for those that did.

Hoshyar Zabary, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, recently observed that the coalition's greatest error was to assume in international law the role of an "occupying power." Reference has been made to United Nations Security Council resolution 1483. The Iraqi Foreign Minister is a Kurd. The coalition is putting its trust in him. He has said:

"I reminded Tony Blair that we have pleaded with his senior officials that this language would be catastrophic. The concept of occupation instead of liberation would change the minds of the people . . . everything we proposed was rejected. They did not have faith in the Iraqis."

We have a coalition that fails to get United Nations support; when it does get that support, it is simply to assert the US and UK military as occupiers. The coalition rejected all the advice it received, even that which came from Iraqis whom it was purporting to trust and to put into positions of responsibility.

A year after the downfall of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to credit how little sensitivity there is towards the Iraqis among some US soldiers. Over Easter, American soldiers who had arrested some Iraqis and bound their hands in plastic restraints were quoted as saying:

"We picked up these guys for wearing black . . . we are under orders to arrest anyone dressed in black."

My experience in Islamic countries is that Muslim pilgrims frequently wear black. In Iraq, Shi'ite pilgrims wear black. It may have escaped the attention of the coalition commanding officers that hundreds of thousands of Shi'ite Muslims were converging on Iraq's twin holy cities of Najaf and Karbala for the Shi'ite festival of Arba-Een.

Such cultural insensitivity and heavy handedness is part of the reason why, for the first time, the coalition is facing the twin threats of Sunni insurgents and Sadr's Shi'ite gunmen. No wonder on Good Friday, the Foreign Secretary was obliged to observe on "The World at One" that

"there is no doubt that the situation is very serious and it is the most serious that we have faced."

Ministers in the Foreign Office would have done well to have taken heed of the remarks of my right hon. Friend Lord Hurd of Westwell, a distinguished Foreign Secretary under whom I was privileged to serve when he held that office. He said:

"You really don't win hearts and minds by filling hospitals and mortuaries."

Haifa Sangana, an Iraqi novelist and a former political prisoner of the Ba'ath regime observed that

"ordinary Iraqi people are appalled at the way in which the coalition Provisional Council have seemingly been watching in silence while Iraqis have been killed ".

About 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the start of the conflict, and although most of the governing council's members were once victims of Saddam's regimes they now seem to turn a blind eye to the violation of human rights by occupying troops.

One of the first things that the coalition provisional authority did was to issue a memorandum to remove the jurisdiction of Iraqi courts over any coalition personnel in both civil and criminal matters. Amnesty International recently produced a report. There was a time when Labour Members used to quote what that organisation said, but they no longer do. That report states:

"Coalition forces appear in many cases to be using the climate of violence to justify violating the very human rights standards they are supposed to be upholding. They have shot Iraqis dead during demos, tortured and ill treated prisoners, arrested people arbitrarily and held them indefinitely, demolished houses in acts of revenge and collective punishment."

Senator Kerry described the June deadline for a handover of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi Government as a fiction; he said that it was an arbitrary decision that had

"almost certainly been affected by the elections schedule."

Those of us who voted against the war on the grounds that it did not have the authority of the United Nations can only sadly observe that far from striking a blow against terrorism, the invasion of Iraq seems to have unleashed the very forces of extremism that it was supposed to destroy.

During the Easter recess, we watched sadly as the situation in Iraq became blacker by the day, and often by the hour. Dozens of Iraqis have been killed or injured, lives of coalition troops have been lost, foreigners have been kidnapped and any scintilla of a suggestion of coalition forces being peacekeepers has been blown away; they are now clearly occupiers.

Did I dream that President Bush, some months ago, stood on the deck of US warship Abraham Lincoln to announce the end of all major military operations, beneath a banner claiming, "Mission accomplished"? Bizarrely, whatever the body count, the situation seems continuously to be one of "mission accomplished." On Good Friday, US General Sanchez, the No. 2 US military commander in Iraq observed that

"a new dawn is approaching."

That is what US military commanders were telling us exactly a year ago.
When it suited the United States and, sadly, the United Kingdom, they ignored the United Nations. Now, apparently, Washington is lobbying countries to commit troops to protect UN personnel in the hope of convincing the UN to return to Baghdad to help organise elections and to finalise the constitution after the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi Government. Not surprisingly, neither Kofi Annan, who withdrew his staff from Iraq last October after an attack on UN headquarters had killed 22 people, including his representative, Sergio de Mello, nor individual member states are now rushing forward to endorse that suggestion. One cannot simply pick and choose when one seeks the help of the UN.

A year after coalition troops entered Baghdad, there are only 12 hours of electricity a day and there is more sewage in the streets. Why have the coalition forces failed to restore the basic necessities of life, such as power and water, for the people of Iraq? After 30 years of disastrous wars and the brutality of Saddam Hussein, the vast majority of Iraqis simply wanted to get back to normal life. All the US and the UK had to do was to the get the relatively efficient Iraqi administration up and running again, and they have not done that. Few in Iraq will necessarily have been celebrating the anniversary of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein on 9 April, because what, in reality, have they to celebrate?

The Economist endorsed President Bush in the 2000 election and unequivocally supported the war against Iraq. Yet it was obliged to observe on 1 April that

"the war was one of choice not necessity. Given that, it was foolish to exaggerate Saddam's weaponry, downright misleading to imply a link between the Iraqi leader and Al Qaeda and hubristic to do so little to prepare for post war reconstruction . . . mistakes soon piled up: handing the running of the country to the Pentagon; letting looters rip out the infrastructure; disbanding the Iraqi army and dismissing outside efforts to help."

Iraq was invaded by a coalition of willing countries. However, it was not a coalition of willing countries acting with the authority of the UN. The invasion has always lacked legitimacy, and that lack of legitimacy has been a tragic flaw.

Commenting on the first Gulf war, Douglas Hurd, in his book "The Search for Peace" observes that after the invasion of Kuwait:

"There was a good deal of argument about the best means of ensuring legitimacy. Article 51 of the UN Charter provides an absolute right of self defence. International lawyers argue convincingly that this right extended to allies trying to rescue Kuwait, as well as to Kuwait itself."

Douglas Hurd notes, however, that the American Secretary of State, James Baker, argued, with his strong support, that "this was not enough." In their view they needed specific authorisation of their efforts by the Security Council. As Douglas Hurd observes:

"There were hazards in this course; there was the danger of Russian or Chinese vetoes, but more subtle was the danger of fudge and obscure wording in a Security Council Resolution which might prevent our Commanders in the field from doing what was necessary."

However, he concludes:

"We managed through firm diplomacy in New York and in capitals to avoid these dangers. The specific approval of the Security Council was a necessary condition of allied success."

What a pity that President Bush Jr. did not follow the foreign policy lead of his father.
Later this summer, the inquiry led by Lord Butler of Brockwell will report, following its review of the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that was used by Ministers as a justification for war. At that point, the House will undoubtedly need to revisit the legal case for the war, because it seems clear that Ministers at the very least misunderstood the vocabulary, language and ambiguities of the intelligence that they sought to rely on.