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Mr. Mark Hendrick (Preston): It is a question not of eight weeks, but of about 12 years in which the United Nations has been trying to get the weapons out of Iraq. I put it to the hon. Gentleman that he does his constituents a disservice and insults their intelligence, as the Prime Minister made that clear today.
Tony Baldry: I think that the hon. Gentleman was not listening to what the Prime Minister said. He was asked repeatedly why weapons of mass destruction had not been found in Iraq. The hon. Gentleman and every hon. Member can read Hansard tomorrow, but it is clear that, on numerous occasions, the Prime Minister said at the Dispatch Box today that the reason why the weapons had not been found was that the new inspection team had only just started its work and could hardly be expected to have found them in such a short period.
The hon. Gentleman misses the key point, to which I shall return, as it is very important. The key point concerns the integrity of the Government and the machinery of government. That is why it is vital that there is an inquiry such as that proposed in the motion. I also find it bizarre that the Foreign Secretary should be so dismissive of judicial inquiries. I speak as a former Minister who was the subject of a judicial inquiry almost instantly after this Government came to office. I had been a Minister in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, and no sooner were the Government through the door of No. 10 than they set up a judicial inquiry into the handling of BSE—
Mrs. Browning: Led by the Master of the Rolls.
Tony Baldry: Yes. We made no complaint about the judicial inquiry to which we were subject, but at no time did the Foreign Secretary or other Ministers mention the reasons that they have given at the Dispatch Box today for not conducting a judicial inquiry into such matters. Only when the issue starts to touch on the integrity of Ministers in this Government, and of the Prime Minister himself and other key Ministers, do the Government become so reticent about the idea of a judicial inquiry.
The Foreign Secretary made it clear today that co-operation with the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs will be pretty minimal. As a Select Committee
Chairman, I had not appreciated until today that the answers that we are given depend on our security clearance. I am not quite sure what my security clearance is or whether one's security clearance as a Member of this House changes when one ceases to be a Minister. I seem to recall that when I was appointed as a junior Foreign Office Minister, like the Minister for Europe, I was given what were known as my powers, of which I was very proud. They were purportedly signed by the Queen. When I took them home and showed them to my children, my daughter, with great perspicacity, said, "The Queen doesn't really know you, does she, daddy?"It is clear that the Foreign Affairs Committee will be told only what it is convenient for the Government to tell it, and the excuse will be given that it cannot be told certain things on security grounds. That was the explanation that was given this afternoon. None of us doubts the integrity of members of the Intelligence and Security Committee—they are all very honourable and senior Members of this House—but it is by definition a Committee that meets in secret and is largely dependent on what the Government choose to give it.
The Government should look themselves in the face and consider the damage that will be done to the machinery of government, given the allegations made by two senior former Cabinet Ministers who were so recently involved in the day-to-day handling of these issues, if they seek to brush matters of such importance under the carpet and refuse to have a full, proper, independent judicial inquiry.
3.40 pm
Mike Gapes (Ilford, South): This morning John Keegan, the military historian and journalist on The Daily Telegraph, made the extraordinary claim that the war ended too soon. I suppose that for those who wanted millions of refugees and tens of thousands of dead, and wanted us still to be fighting street by street to liberate Baghdad, it did end too soon. One of the underlying elements of the motion that we are debating is that those who opposed military action, together with those who for opportunist reasons wish to associate themselves with a motion tabled by a party that they oppose, have decided to unite with the feeding frenzy that is going on in the mass media.
Because there is no effective political opposition, certain journalists, including certain correspondents at the BBC, believe that it is their job to generate a feeding frenzy of a kind that—in their view, as they have openly been saying—could bring down the Government. Democracy in this country is ill served by such opportunism. It is also ill served—I say this as someone who has never been a Minister—by people who are happy to be Ministers for many years, but then bite the hand that fed them. I say that with great regret, because I have enormous respect for many of those who have taken that position. I find it sad.
I remind my colleagues that there was no great opposition from some people in 1998 when we bombed Iraq in Operation Desert Fox, or when we launched military assaults against Serbia without a United Nations resolution. Those same people were happy to be in Government at that time. We have to be honest about the motives behind some of the comments that have been made today.
On the basis of what has happened in the past few weeks, if the military action had not happened and the Iraqi people had not been liberated, we would presumably be carrying on with the inadequate policy of containment, with, potentially, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dying as a result of a policy that we knew to be flawed, but which, apparently, the former Foreign Secretary thought should have continued. As the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning) said, we would have withdrawn our troops from Kuwait—and presumably from the no-fly zones, too—thereby allowing a resurgent Saddam to take an ideological leadership position and again threaten his neighbours in Kuwait, Iran and Saudi Arabia. We know that he used chemical weapons not only against his own people but against the Iranians, and would have wiped Kuwait off the map.
Those were the realities, and those were the stakes that we were playing for. I say that as somebody who in 1988 campaigned against the policy of a Conservative Government who were co-operating with military sales to Saddam's regime. I say that as somebody who invited Kurdish leaders to my constituency, including Barham Salih—now prime minister of the Iraqi Kurdish autonomous area—when he was the London representative of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. That was before I was even elected as a Member of Parliament, when I worked in the Labour party's international department.
I make no apologies; I have supported regime change in Iraq for 25 years. When I was a student, I was a member of an organisation called the Committee against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq. There has been a legitimate, non-right-wing republican agenda among many people on the left hoping for regime change in Iraq, and if we had followed the route advocated by some people whom we have heard today, that regime change would not have happened.
It was suggested by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short) that we should have found another way of putting right the wrong. The Iraqi people tried to put right the wrong in another way. They rose up in 1991 and the Shi'a Marsh Arabs were brutally suppressed and killed, while the Kurds were driven into the mountains. The Iraqis tried to assassinate Saddam Hussein on many occasions. Why were there all those lookalikes, those people who had plastic surgery and who went around pretending to be Saddam Hussein? He had to have them because he was detested by his people.
Mike Gapes: I will give way, but I hope that I will get some injury time.
Llew Smith: I, too, was one of the people who campaigned against Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. Does my hon. Friend recognise, however, that we were informed by the Government that we were going to war with Iraq not to achieve regime change but because it had weapons of mass destruction and was capable of delivering them within 45 minutes?
Mike Gapes: There were many reasons why the military action came about. One was that, according to
UN Security Council resolution 1441, Saddam had not complied immediately and unconditionally with a number of resolutions over a 12-year period. A second reason was the report produced in December by the Iraqi Government in response to that resolution. It was totally inadequate and was shown within a few days to have concealed certain things. A third reason was that, as the Blix report revealed, Saddam had failed—amid a cluster of unanswered questions—to list all the things that had been done to destroy weapons such as anthrax and botulinum. All those things were alleged to have been got rid of, but no evidence or documents were produced.We know that since the conflict, the Kurdish forces in the north of Iraq have discovered some mobile vehicles that are still being investigated to discover whether they are mobile biological weapons facilities. That was reported on 8 May. We also know—this has to be placed on record—that when we talk about chemical or biological weapons, we are talking about very small quantities of materials that can be held in tanks in the back of vehicles or buried underground so finding them without co-operation is difficult.
This is the essence of the point about the Security Council resolutions and the fact that the Saddam regime did not co-operate. Within only nine months of South Africa saying that it was not going to be a nuclear weapons state, the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors had gone in, with the full co-operation of the South African Government, and had been able to declare the country nuclear weapons-free, because it had got rid of its weapons and told the inspectors how it had been done. The Iraqis never did that.
Given the nature of the Iraqi regime, the lies that we know were told between 1991 and 1995, the defecting son-in-law Kamal—who then went back—and other information that was revealed by other sources, it is clear that the UN was lied to throughout the 1990s. We now find that we have not been given any information on what happened to various items detailed in the reports that Hans Blix produced in March.
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