Report of the Iraq Inquiry

David Winnick Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is right: one of the most powerful points in the report is that Blix should have been given more time. That argument was advanced at the time, but the way in which it is expressed by Sir John gives it even more force.

I do not think I can stand here and honestly say that all the changes we put in place make mistakes like that impossible. At the end of the day, Governments and Cabinets must make judgments on the basis of the evidence in front of them. The National Security Council, given the way in which it is set up, provides a better forum when it comes to making decisions, listening to arguments and hearing expert advice. I think that that makes it more difficult to press ahead if you cannot take expert opinion with you, although, of course, in the end Cabinet Ministers can decide.

[Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)]

However wrong it was to take military action on the basis of false intelligence—and I accept my responsibility in that I voted for military action—were not many of us very much influenced by Saddam’s notorious record? His aggression against the Iranian state, a war that lasted eight years, took the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people on both sides, but he was not satisfied with that, and two years later the aggression against Kuwait resulted in the first Gulf war. Would it not also be totally wrong to conclude that had it not been for this invasion—which, as I say, should not have taken place, because it was based on false intelligence—everything would have been fine in the middle east? Look at what is happening in Syria, where we did not intervene—rightly, I believe, and again I was influenced by what happened in relation to what we are discussing now.

[The Prime Minister]

I do not always agree with the hon. Gentleman, but I think he has put it very well. Saddam Hussein had an appalling record. He had gassed the Kurds, he had murdered his own people, and he had invaded his neighbour. He had used weapons of mass destruction in the past, we were being told that he was developing them again for the future, and we were being asked, on the basis of that, whether we could really risk leaving him in place and leaving those programmes in place, given the heightened risk post 9/11. Those were all very strong arguments, and I think it is worth recalling that.

It is also worth taking account of the hon. Gentleman’s other point. Who knows what would have happened if Saddam had still been in place at the time of the Arab spring, but it is quite possible to believe that his reactions to his own people would have been rather like the reactions of President Assad to his own people, which, I would argue, have perhaps done more to foment terrorism and cause extremism than anything else in the last decade.