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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. The hon. Gentleman is going a little wide of the motion that we are discussing.
Mr. Blunt: I am dealing with the subject of credibility, Mr. Deputy Speaker. If the Prime Minister comes to the Dispatch Box week after week to deal with what he described to my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham as the business of politics, and is able to play fast and loose with the truth, is it any surprise that the electorate no longer believe him when they judge his words on an issue as serious as Iraq? That is why we need an inquiry. A Prime Minister ought to command
credibility. I believe him on the issue of Iraq, however. To me, his speech to this House last September was the first time that he had commanded total credibility and presented a totally convincing case.I want the Government to take this message away. They have played fast and loose with the truth in presenting the case for their policies and the case against those of their political opponents. It is about time that the level of political debate was raised; then, when the Prime Minister needs credibility in order to make a case, he can carry the country with him and not find that there are 2 million people on the streets who do not believe a word that he says.
4.02 pm
Mr. Calum MacDonald (Western Isles): We have listened to 10 minutes of pure spin from the hon. Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt). I listened carefully to the opening speech by the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell), and to those who intervened to support the case for an independent inquiry into the intelligence available to the Government before the war. So far as I can discern, there are two basic reasons why this call is being made, and I shall deal with them in turn.
The main reason is the failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction. That is of course frustrating for anybody who wants these weapons to be dealt with, but the real question is whether we can make the logical leap that many Members seem to be making: that because of the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction, we must conclude that they do not and did not exist, and that the entire war was therefore based on a fallacy. To make that leap of deductive logic would be to fly in the face of more than 10 years of evidence, gathered not by British or American intelligence sources in Iraq, but by the UN itself in Iraq. That 10-year history demonstrates clearly how difficult it was to locate and unearth any evidence of weapons programmes.
We should remember, for example, that UN inspectors were searching for a full three years in Iraq before they discovered, in 1995, that there was a full-blown biological weapons programme. We should also remember that they discovered that programme not by stumbling across it during a search, but only because of information that they received from a senior defector: Saddam Hussein's own son-in-law, as it happens. He revealed not only the existence of the biological weapons programme, but that key documents were hidden in a chicken farm and that rocket parts were buried in the back garden of an Iraqi general. They would not have been discovered through a physical search; they were discovered only through the information provided by defectors.
Llew Smith: My hon. Friend gives credibility to the evidence given by the defector—Saddam Hussein's son-in-law—who was later murdered by the regime, so does he also accept the evidence of the same person that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction?
Mr. MacDonald: The evidence provided by that person was important, but when he returned to Iraq,
Saddam Hussein immediately put him, along with his family, to death. He led weapons inspectors precisely to where the items were located and he revealed the existence of the biological weapons programme.There is further evidence of how difficult it is to carry out a physical search in a country like Iraq. The most striking aspect of what the coalition forces have so far failed to find is Saddam Hussein himself, his two sons and his entire entourage. They have not been located and I guess that they would take up more physical space than the chemical and biological agents that we are looking for. They are certainly much more difficult to hide. I assume that Saddam Hussein and his sons cannot simply be buried in the back garden of some Iraqi general, but I hope that no one is leaping from the failure to discover them to the conclusion that Saddam and his two sons are no longer alive or hiding in Iraq. That would be a foolish conclusion to reach. It is similarly foolish, and juvenile, to leap from the failure to discover WMD to the conclusion that the Iraqi Government closed down the weapons programme after the inspectors left in 1998. They consistently avoided closing down the programme through all the years of inspections right up to 1998.
In my view, the primary task is to locate Saddam and the top party leadership, because, until we apprehend them, we will not have much chance of gaining the inside information based on the confessions of human intelligence that we need to lead us to where the chemical and biological agents are located.
The second reason advanced to justify the call for an independent inquiry is the claim made by anonymous intelligence sources to the press that No. 10 doctored the intelligence dossier, particularly in respect of the possibility of Iraq using WMD within 45 minutes. It is alleged that that was done in the knowledge that the information was false, or probably false, thereby undermining the case for war. The critics suggest that the 45-minute claim influenced or determined either the legality of the war—the point made by the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife—or its political acceptability and public support. I do not believe that either proposition is justified.
Let us deal first with the legality of war. The proposition that, because the 45-minute claim was a fallacy, the legal case for war becomes invalid is one of the most ridiculous arguments that I have ever heard in this Chamber—and it is particularly disappointing to hear it advanced by the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife. The legal case was based entirely on resolution 1441 and the older resolution 687, which the Attorney-General made crystal clear. Contrary to what the right hon. and learned Gentleman said, there is nothing in the Attorney-General's statement about imminent danger to the United Kingdom, or to any other state. It is based entirely on the fact that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Government were not complying and were in material breach of existing UN resolutions.
The argument for war was perfectly simple. The UN knew that the Iraqi Government once possessed large quantities of chemical and biological agents, a significant quantity of which had never been accounted for by that Government. The UN therefore demanded that the Iraqi Government either hand over the remaining agents for destruction or—and it is a highly important "or"—if they had already destroyed them,
that they hand over the documents to verify their destruction. That option was always available to the Iraqi Government, but they followed neither of those options, as Blix himself confirmed in his final report. Blix did hope that, given more time, the Iraqi Government would eventually do one or the other, but I believe that the judgment of the British Prime Minister and the American President was more valid—that the Iraqis would not comply however much time was extended to them. The use of force was therefore authorised and could be exercised.
Dr. John Pugh (Southport): I have tried hard to follow the hon. Gentleman's argument and he seems to suggest that the failure to find the weapons is no reason to think they do not exist. What other reason could there be, and what other reason would he accept if, as a fair-minded man, he were to reach a conclusion that they might not exist?
Mr. MacDonald: The fact that no evidence of a biological weapons programme was found in three years by UN inspectors in full cry in Iraq did not mean that it did not exist. It did exist, but that became known only after defections made the information available. Most of the breakthroughs in discovery and location have been made on the basis of human intelligence and the delivery of information, not the physical searches that the hon. Gentleman mentions.
Some Opposition Members have argued that the 45-minute claim in the dossier was the decisive factor that swung opinion in favour of war, in the House and among the public. Even the Liberal Democrat spokesman appeared to make such a claim. I confess that I was always sceptical—and I was not alone—about the 45-minute claim. Anybody who swung from being anti-war to pro-war on the basis of the 45-minute claim in the dossier needs to have their head examined.
Because I was always sceptical, I am not surprised—far less shocked—by the suggestion that the 45-minute claim may turn out to have been false. That would be a failure of that piece of speculative intelligence, but it would be a much less striking and embarrassing failure than the one that occurred before the war—as pointed out by the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife—which was the claim by British intelligence that the Iraqi Government had tried to obtain uranium ore from Niger in west Africa. That claim was supposedly based on documents that, when they were handed over to the international authority responsible, were shown to be a transparent and rather obvious forgery. That intelligence debacle, or cock-up, was much more embarrassing and worrying in its incompetence than the 45-minute saga.
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