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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.]
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."
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 right 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.
3.31 pm
Tony Baldry (Banbury): The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short) in her opening and concluding comments, made it clear why the Government would be wise to accept this motion. This issue is about the integrity of the Government and the trust that people place in them. The right hon. Lady, who until recently was a member of the Cabinet, has laid the most serious allegations against the Prime Minister. In her opening comments she said in terms that the House had been misled by the Prime Minister. That is from a person who, until recently, had been a leading member of the Cabinet. I worked with the right hon. Lady in my capacity as Chairman of the Select Committee on International Development and, like all members of the Committee, I know the care with which she carried out her duties. We are confident that she would not have resigned from that post without good reason. After all, she was the first Secretary of State for International Development and had built up the Department over six years. We are all professional career politicians who know that people do not surrender such jobs unless they have some real reason of substance. The right hon. Lady has given us some insight into what that might be.
We are also concerned about the integrity of the Government when we see the way in which they have responded to the stories in the past couple of days. It is the most bizarre action for No. 10 to put up the Leader of the House to make the allegations that he has made in a newspaper article and on the "Today" programme this morning. Everyone in the House knows that the Leader of the House, under any Government, is a senior member of the Cabinet, and he would not have made those press comments unless they had been fully cleared with No. 10 and with the machinery of government as a whole. We all know that the "Today" programme puts in bids for Ministers. We often hear John Humphrys and others saying that so and so was invited on to the programme and that they refused to come. The Leader of the House showed no reticence about going on the "Today" programme this morning to repeat his comments, allegations and accusations against the intelligence service.
The purport of that and the reason why Members are concerned is that it gives the impression of a Government trying to spin away a story about whether the House has been misled by suggesting that it is all down to some rogue intelligence officer who has been briefing journalists such as Andrew Gilligan and others. They contend that that is really what the story is about, rather than the concerns of the right hon. Members for Livingston (Mr. Cook) and for Birmingham, Ladywood that the House has been misled over a period of time.
I hope that the Government understand that if they cannot start to reassure our constituents about such issues, confidence not only in them but in the machinery of government will simply leach away. Many of our constituents will be scratching their heads about other matters this evening. We repeatedly heard the Prime Minister say at the Dispatch Box today that the reason why weapons of mass destruction had not been found was that the search had only just begun and the team had only just started its work. I ask those on the Treasury Bench about the large numbers of my constituents who wrote to me and visited me in
constituency surgeries. They came from Church groups and other groups, and included other concerned individuals, and they lobbied hard before the conflict, saying that the UN weapons inspectors should be given more time to find weapons of mass destruction and establish whether they existed. How on earth will the Government and the Prime Minister explain to those people—my constituents and those of every Member of this House—that there was insufficient time to look for weapons of mass destruction, so it was necessary to go to war and remove a regime by force of arms, but some eight weeks later, when no weapons of mass destruction have purportedly been found, the Prime Minister's excuse is that we have only just started our work? How on earth can those claims be reconcilable? The suspicion among large numbers of our constituents is that this is a question not so much of weapons of mass destruction as of words of mass deception used by the Prime Minister and others.
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