Iraq Inquiry

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, my father served on the Western Front in the First World War as a Royal Engineer officer. He was in the Somme valley from 1915 right through and beyond Armistice into 1919, so he was there throughout the build-up and there through the appalling slaughter of the Battle of the Somme, about which we have been thinking in recent days. Unsurprisingly, like many others of those who survived, he never really talked about his experiences on the Western Front and we knew only recently that he was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

His attitude later was undoubtedly reflected by that of many historians that the First World War was a matter of lions led by donkeys. If he were to summarise the Chilcot report, he would say that it was lions misled by political ostriches: politicians deliberately ignoring the facts and rushing into war to avoid them, on both sides of the Atlantic.

I note that last weekend the noble Lord, Lord Prescott —second-in-command in the Blair Government —wrote:

“In 2004, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that as regime change was the prime aim of the Iraq war, it was illegal. With great sadness and anger, I now believe him to be right”.

I salute the noble Lord for that. I would be even more impressed by his candour if he admitted that Charles Kennedy, and Liberal Democrat MPs, of whom I was one, took precisely that same view in March 2003.

I have few regrets from my political life, although I have some. However, I certainly do not regret that vote. Incidentally, those Conservatives who now revisit their enthusiastic support for the invasion on the basis that nobody could reasonably doubt the evidence and rationale that Prime Minister Blair placed before Parliament, seem to forget that Ken Clarke and 14 Conservative Members of Parliament also voted with us in the Division Lobby. They, just as much as Robin Cook, to whom reference has been made by many this afternoon, deserve to be recognised for sticking to their international principles in those difficult circumstances.

As the Chilcot report makes abundantly clear, the acceleration towards invasion was motivated by complicated US and UK government initiatives. In the UN they were having difficulty, and they had further doubts about Saddam’s elusive WMD, because they could not believe that Hans Blix’s investigations were, at that stage, correct. They were worried that their casus belli might be stymied by those doubts.

In the following weeks I had a particular reason for pursuing that aspect of the sorry saga. The first British casualty—the first British fatality—of the invasion was Sergeant Steven Roberts, whose family lived in my North Cornwall constituency. Within days his family had been informed, by letter from an officer in his unit, of the stark details of his death: his malfunctioning weapon; the fatal shot might well have come from a colleague; but, most significantly, he was not wearing appropriate protective armour—enhanced combat body armour, or ECBA. On their behalf, I asked a number of questions of the Ministry of Defence, and I received total brick-wall answers. Meanwhile, we were amazed by a revelation from the National Audit Office, referring to ECBA:

“200,000 sets had been issued since the Kosovo campaign in 1999, greatly exceeding the theoretical requirement, but these seem to have disappeared”.

Even when I secured a meeting with the then Secretary of State for Defence, Mr Geoff Hoon, for Sergeant Roberts’s widow, mother and brother, we got no satisfactory explanations for that extraordinary situation. The nearest we came to understanding was when a senior officer attending our meeting with Mr Hoon claimed that preparations for the invasion had to proceed “with some secrecy”. Paragraphs 811 to 813 of the executive summary of the Chilcot report make specific reference to this.

That is why I need to concentrate on that part of the report. It is clear that, egged on by the US President, who was still bent on misdirected revenge for 9/11, the Prime Minister was desperate not to appear to be preparing for an invasion while still seeking a peaceful outcome via the United Nations in the autumn of 2002. On this point Chilcot is quite explicit: going to war without a majority in the United Nations Security Council,

“undermined the authority of the UN”.

The subsequent board of inquiry report into Sergeant Roberts’s death identified political constraints,

“at the level of the Secretary of State, which held up ordering and deployment of sufficient sets of ECBA to protect all our troops in dangerous positions in Iraq”.

What Sergeant Roberts himself described as a joke was far, far worse: it was the end result of political subterfuge and misjudgment. At the inquest into his death, the coroner said that it was,

“as a result of delay and serious failures in the acquisition and support chain that resulted in a significant shortage within his fighting unit of enhanced combat body armour, none being available for him”,

and concluded that this was “unforgivable and inexcusable”.

Nearly four years after Sergeant Roberts’s death, in January 2007, the then Minister for Defence Procurement admitted in answer to a Parliamentary Question in your Lordships’ House that:

“At that time the United Kingdom was deeply involved in diplomatic activity endeavouring to find a peaceful solution to the crisis in Iraq and no decision to commit a UK land force to any potential operation had been taken. The judgment was that to place orders for equipment which would have indicated preparations for the deployment of a large land force would have risked undermining this diplomatic effort”.—[Official Report, 10/1/07; col. WA 90.]

In other words, Sergeant Roberts died because the UK Government spent several months trying to cover up the intentions of the US and UK Governments. I make no apology for emphasising this one very specific aspect of the Chilcot report.

Members of your Lordships’ House will, I think, understand why I feel so passionately that Tony Blair should now admit that his insistence on following President Bush willy-nilly into war was a tragic mistake. As the noble Lord, Lord King, said, that brief sentence:

“I will be with you, whatever”,

had tragic consequences. Of course, Sergeant Roberts’s unnecessary death has been followed by countless other tragedies—for Iraqi civilians as well as allied troops—and Britain’s international reputation is severely tarnished to this day as a direct result.

Perhaps the last word can best come from Charles Kennedy, in that fateful debate on 18 March 2003:

“Although I have never been persuaded of a causal link between the Iraqi regime, al-Qaeda and 11 September, I believe that the impact of war in these circumstances is bound to weaken the international coalition against terrorism itself, and not least in the Muslim world. The big fear that many of us have is that the action will simply breed further generations of suicide bombers”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/3/03; col. 786.]

That is where we are today.