Iraq Inquiry

Lord King of Bridgwater Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord King of Bridgwater (Con)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the right reverend Prelate, because I think there has been a suggestion that perhaps things have turned out for the better in Iraq since the events of 2003, and he has rightly drawn attention to the absolutely tragic situation that Iraq now faces. Noble Lords may have seen the perceptive article by Jeremy Bowen in the New Statesman, in which he says that Iraq,

“has not had a day of real peace since 2003”.

The pressures that we face, and the damage that has been done, make us absolutely beholden to learn every lesson that we possibly can from this exercise. If I may say so, I have already heard enough speeches in your Lordships’ House today to recognise that this House has a particular contribution to make—probably rather more than the other place, because some of us lived through some of these periods, and we have a duty to bring our experience to bear.

The first lesson that I would like to pick up, which was also referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Butler, is that if we want to learn lessons from an inquiry like this, it must not take seven years. Noble Lords may have seen the interesting article by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, who criticised the process of “Maxwellisation”. He said that when he conducted the Bloody Sunday inquiry—which, as we know, went on for quite long enough anyway—he had a procedure whereby, if there were criticisms to be made, they were made to the witnesses or to those who came to give evidence in front of them, at the actual inquiry, rather than going through this very laborious Maxwellisation process, which added so much to the time this exercise took.

I would like to take noble Lords back to the start of the problem, and the origin of, “We’re with you for ever”, or, “I will be with you, whatever”. The image in my mind is of the very excellent thing that Tony Blair did when, within 10 days of 9/11, he went to Washington and was present when, 10 days after 9/11, President Bush addressed a joint meeting of the House of Representatives and the Senate. There, in Congress, there was a particular moment when President Bush was trying to restore the morale of the American people, and he said, “At a time of real difficulty and danger, you know who your real friends are”. And he looked up at the gallery and said, “Good to have you here, friend”. Tony Blair stood up, and the whole of the Senate and all the Congressmen turned and gave him a standing ovation. I think that that commitment—“I will be with you, whatever”—really started right there.

My own experience goes back some way, because I was involved in the first Gulf War. I was involved on that last day, when the very successful Left Hook land campaign expelled the Iraqi armed forces from Kuwait. They were fleeing for their lives—I remember Medina Ridge, and it was just a turkey shoot: “Mr President, shall we go on?”. I understand that at a meeting at the White House, after that, there was consideration as to whether they should go on—that is, go on to Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein. The diplomatic advice was, “Well, you could do it. You’ll lose a few votes in the UN, because you’re invading another sovereign country, and it’s not the same as expelling somebody from a country that they shouldn’t be in”. From the military point of view, the advice was, “You could do it, but we may have rather more casualties, because we haven’t yet really faced the full Republican Guard divisions, which are a completely different kettle of fish from some of the less formidable Iraqi forces. But you could do it”.

One voice then said, “Well, you can certainly do it, but there are two questions you need to answer. If you have decided to get rid of Saddam Hussein, who will you put in his place? The second question is: how long are you prepared to be there?”. What a pity those questions were not asked.

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell, made an excellent contribution to this debate. I strongly agree that President Bush was not necessarily in the lead on this. My former opposite number, Dick Cheney, was the most powerful vice-president America has had, with his considerable international experience gained before President George W Bush came to office. The Americans also had Donald Rumsfeld. There is no doubt that Secretary Rumsfeld was completely committed to regime change. Some may have heard General Tim Cross on the radio recently saying that Rumsfeld would listen to nobody. He would not listen to the State Department or the US military and he certainly would not listen to the UK. I do not think it is conceited to say that we have some knowledge and experience of Arab countries and the Gulf area. That knowledge and experience go back a long time. Our duty in these situations is not just to be a loyal, supportive friend, but a candid friend. I do not think there is a proper understanding in the Pentagon of the real depth of the problems of the Sunni/Shia issue, Arab/Kurd hostilities and conflicts and the sort of problems that could be unlocked. I say to the right reverend Prelate that when one looks at the situation now and the conflict that has broken out, and one thinks of the situation of the Christians, one has to note that for all the awfulness of Saddam Hussein, his Foreign Minister—Tariq Aziz—was a Christian. How different the situation is now in that regard.

I agree very strongly with the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Butler, in his most interesting contribution as regards the absence of proper Cabinet discussion or of any War Cabinet. I think that the Cabinet Secretary and Sir David Omand, as he was then, were excluded from discussions—the people who could have contributed significantly to the discussions and analysis of some of the intelligence that was coming in. The officials involved in the sofa government activity—David Manning, Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell—were, after all, loyal to the Prime Minister. They had a duty to support him but I do not think they provided the degree of critical approach that was needed at the time. I pay tribute to the speech made by Robin Cook in that fateful debate in the House of Commons. He was the only Minister to ask why there had been no discovery so far of any weapons of mass destruction, and called for more time for inspection. As he said, the Government had tried so hard to get a second resolution. They showed how important it was to get it and they could not then say the fact that they had not got it really did not matter at all. He pointed out that there was no agreement to support us on the part of others. We did not have NATO, the European Union or the Security Council on our side in undertaking these activities.

As regards the failure properly to analyse the intelligence, those of us who have had top secret intelligence files put in front of us know that this information is tremendously seductive. You want to believe it; you think that you are extremely privileged to have access to this information but then you need some wiser old heads around to tell you that there may be a few other considerations that need taking into account. They can ask whether the information has been checked and whether there is corroboration. I certainly found that that was the case in Northern Ireland, where a wonderful new source of intelligence appeared one day, but after a pause of a few months, when one asked what had happened to it, one was told that, for one reason or another, the source had been found to be a complete fraud. However, that sort of challenge and check did not exist in this case.

The tragedy of this sofa government approach, which has been referred to, is that no proper minutes were taken. The fact that they were not taken is as alleged by one official to have been because the people concerned were worried that if they were taken they would be leaked to either Gordon Brown or Clare Short. That shows the tragedy of the dysfunctional nature of that Government and that Cabinet situation.

Those are just a few points drawn from my own experience of these problems with regard to the lessons that have to be learned as we gradually plough our way through the Chilcot report.