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Mr. Keetch: Is the Minister saying that it is right to give cocktails that include anthrax vaccinations? The cocktail of specific vaccinations was given, but the Secretary of State reported to the House that that would not happen—
Dr. Moonie: Will the hon. Gentleman give way again?
Mr. Keetch: The Minister will have his chance when he winds up. Many of our reservists undoubtedly fell ill as a result of the cocktail of inoculations that they were given, against the advice that the Secretary of State gave to the House.
Dr. Moonie: I would not wish to accuse the hon. Gentleman of misleading the House, but he deliberately failed to hear what I said. I said that anthrax inoculation is given with a five-day separation period from any other inoculation.
Mr. Keetch: I concede that point, but it was widely felt by reservists that the cocktail that they were given was not helpful.
Mr. Kevan Jones (North Durham): Some 45,000 personnel were deployed in the recent action in Iraq. The hon. Gentleman has mentioned two cases. Is he in danger of exaggerating the extent of the problem? With any type of vaccination, whether for travel to the Gulf or elsewhere, there is a small risk of side effects.
Mr. Keetch: That is true, but the reservists were called up so quickly that they had to have all their injections at once, including anthrax, unlike the regulars who had received their injections over time. For some of the reservists, that was a problem.
Coupled with the problems with kit that forces families reported throughout the war, the over-reliance on TA personnel, combined with the substandard treatment that they often receive, was self-defeating at best. Many of those personnel can quit when they return home, and many are doing so. Does the Minister have any figures on that?
There are also many lessons for the Ministry of Defence, and I am sure that the Government will want to address them. We understand that post-operational reports on the Iraq conflict are being compiled and that assessments will be published, as the Minister of State mentioned earlier. When the Under-Secretary winds up, I hope that he will say when they will be published. I am sure that he agrees that it is in the interests of the MOD and of our armed forces that those lessons are made public as soon as possible.
The White Paper anticipated in the autumn is to be welcomed, and I urge the MOD to use the opportunity to address some of the missing links in defence policy that have emerged since the publication of the new chapter. For example, will the White Paper deal with the security threat to the UK in the round? Since the new chapter was published, there have been more questions than answers about the role of the MOD in counter-terrorism and contingency operations. How will the proposed draft legislation on civil contingencies affect the MOD's policy planning in the autumn White Paper?
It is clear that the SDR projections have been abandoned. The White Paper should introduce new projections, or outline how the Government intend to return to the limits of the SDR. In addition, our armed forces deserve clear answers to the immediate requirements that they face in Iraq. They want to know when they are coming home, and when they will go out again. The forces as a whole, and Parliament, have the right to expect a defence policy that sets guidelines, and sticks to them.
I believe that the MOD has performed the difficult task set by the Iraq crisis admirably, but it must be governed by a clear and sustainable policy. The men and women of our armed forces deserve nothing less.
4.11 pm
Tony Worthington (Clydebank and Milngavie): I start by congratulating the armed forces, as every contributor to the debate has done. It has been my privilege to see their contribution in crisis situations in various parts of the world. I am thinking particularly about Sierra Leone, where lots of other troops were involved. That was a mess, which our forces quickly rescued, and it is clear that they have performed very well in Iraq.
I am disturbed by the clear feeling that the war in Iraq has been won. I am struck by the fact that the six day war finished in 1968 but is clearly going strong 35 years later. Whether the recent war in Iraq can be considered a success depends on what we make of the situation there from now on. My remarks will concentrate on the fact that the task of running post-war Iraq has not been handed over to the UN or to civilians. Iraq remains under military control, and we must look at the way in which our forces are deployed.
My right hon. Friend the Minister of State made a very good speech that lasted an hour, but it was notable that he made no mention of the US. The debate has made it sound as though the war was a discrete British war, even though we were the junior partner in a coalition. That is something that I want to consider.
Britain failed to change a decision by the US. As a result, the UN has largely been excluded from the reconstruction phase. In the US Government, the Pentagon and Donald Rumsfeld won the battle about who was to control the reconstruction phase. That battle was won in February, and the result was announced in Congress, but it was in a sense ignored or denied in this country when the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance was set up under the retired general, Jay Garner.
That episode was a fiasco. The General Garner phase went very badly wrong, and a civilian, Paul Bremer, was brought in. He immediately reversed much of what Garner had said. For example, the Iraqis thought in May that they would be well on the way to having an Iraqi Government, but we are now in a Pentagon-run reconstruction phase, with a coalition provisional authority in which we are the junior partner. Much of my speech will be concerned with finding out from the Government exactly how the CPA works, and determining what our contribution to it is. I know that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary will not be able to answer me in detail today, so I hope that he will write to me. Just how are our armed forces involved in the CPA, which was previously ORHA? That has never been covered in a statement to the House, although, on two occasions, we were promised an explanation.
Bremer's powers in running the CPA are enormous. There are seven directorates for everything that a sovereign state would cover—matters such as education, health, police, religious affairs, oil, agriculture, planning and trade. Bremer has responsibilities similar to those of the House. In addition, an international co-ordinating council has responsibility for liaison with bilateral donors, NGOs and, lastly, the UN.
Bremer's main means of implementing Pentagon policy are soldiers on the ground. For our purposes, and in relation to the debate, that means that our forces in Basra are responsible for implementing his policy. Our weakness is that our obsession with weapons of mass destruction meant that the House did not consider the post-victory situation. We did not consider what we would do with our armed forces after they had swept away the Iraqi army.
When I asked about that, the Prime Minister said that no decisions had yet been taken, but he thought that
- "the role of the UN had to be well protected in such a situation".—[Official Report, 25 February 2003; Vol. 400, c. 137.]
- "we are in intensive discussions . . . I have no doubt that there will have to be a substantial UN involvement . . . rather than speculate about what might happen, I assure my hon. Friend that we will declare those plans to people as soon as we have them properly worked out."—[Official Report, 5 March 2003; Vol. 400, c. 818.]
The implications for our armed forces are considerable. They have to work in a situation to which we have agreed. Strangely, there has been no reference in the debate to the fact that the reconstruction phase started with a fiasco—the looting that the troops seemed unwilling or unable to stop. Buildings and infrastructure were preserved by expert bombing during the war for expert looting during the peace.
Our forces are in an unsatisfactory situation. I do not believe that the Government desire our armed forces to be the lead figures in the reconstruction phase, but that is what is happening. The Select Committee on International Development, of which I am proud to be a member, is taking evidence from non-governmental organisations and others about the situation in Iraq. Evidence taken towards the end of May from one of the major organisations, Care International, about its experiences with ORHA states:
- "The Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance has taken upon itself the mantle of coordinating the international response.
This body has no clear mandate for its operation and is staffed by a confusing mixture of military and civilian appointments. Housed in one of Saddam's former palaces, it is operating as if in a bunker, impenetrable to outside contact and with no avenues for dialogue with NGOs and civil society actors. While we have had sight of an organisation chart for staff of ORHA, our staff in Baghdad have found it impossible to make contact with any of them."
All that leads to a great many questions about the use of our forces in Iraq. The first relates to their numbers and replacement. As several hon. Members have said, if we were near overstretch some months ago, where are we now? The Minister referred to 20,000 troops having left Iraq now, but he did not say how many were still there and how easy, or difficult, it would be to maintain the strength of our forces there. We will be there for at least a year—that is the commitment; it is written down—but I have met no one who reasonably thinks that our commitment will only last that long.
This is particularly difficult for two reasons. Others are not available to take the place of the British in Iraq. First, for political reasons, many people do not want to be involved in what they saw as our war. Secondly, there is a continuing, severe shortage of quality troops in the world whom one would trust with that extremely difficult policing situation. So I ask the Minister how will the Secretary of State increase or refresh the forces that he has on the ground? They will be very tired by the physical and emotional fatigue that is caused by war.
I was struck this week by a fine article by Fergal Keane, who wrote about his experiences with the American forces. In American-controlled towns, he saw
- "an army that is afraid of the people it says it wants to protect; an army that looks and often acts as if it has arrived in a spaceship, speaking a different language and praying only for the moment that it can go home. Iraq scared them."
We are said to be better and to do the job better—I believe that to be true—but we are tied to the fact that we are in the coalition provisional authority. I want to know how much freedom our forces in Basra have in that relationship to do things differently. For example, if they decided fully to involve the UN organisations in Basra, could they do so or is there a one-size-fits-all situation throughout Iraq?
Was it a wise decision by Bremer, as the administrator of Iraq, to dismiss the 500,000 soldiers of the Iraqi army and send them all off, with their AK47s, into the community, without any plan for their rehabilitation? Iraq is a country stuffed full of arms anyway. Did Bremer consult us about that? Did we have any say about it? Did we agree to discharge the army? That was not our approach in Sierra Leone, where, very wisely, we set up the most complex, detailed and well-planned system to disarm and rehabilitate soldiers.
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