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Sir John Stanley: The Foreign Secretary says that I parodied his words. Yesterday, he said:
- "the intelligence assessments that were provided formed part of the background, but they were not the heart of the argument and never were."—[Official Report, 15 July 2003; Vol. 129, c. 162.]
As for our armed forces in Iraq, who had to put their lives on the line for the war, let me draw the Foreign Secretary's attention to a paper placed in the House of Commons Library at the time: the Government's own paper entitled "Iraq: the Military Campaign Objectives". The very first paragraph states:
- "The prime objective remains to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction and their associated programmes and means of delivery, including prohibited ballistic missiles, as set out in the relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions".
I want to say something about those assessments, and, in particular, the key assessment placed before the House in the dossier of September last year. I start with the issue of uranium from Africa. That was no minor issue but a central plank of the Government's assessment that Saddam Hussein's regime was attempting to recommence its nuclear weapons programme. What we know about the uranium from Africa story is that Mr. el-Baradei revealed to the UN in February this year that the Niger allegations were based on forged documents. We now know, from the work of the Foreign Affairs Committee—it is mentioned in the Committee's report—that the insertion of the story about uranium from Africa was, like the 45-minute claim, a suspiciously last-minute insertion into the document.
Significantly, and remarkably, we learned last Friday for the first time, from the letter that the Foreign Secretary released to the right hon. Member for Swansea, East, that the CIA had expressed reservations to the British Government at the time that the September dossier was published about the inclusion of the claim about uranium from Africa. The Committee has taken evidence from the Foreign Secretary on that point and on the source behind the statement in the dossier. All that I can say in this public forum is that we await with great interest the views of the Intelligence and Security Committee on the adequacy, or otherwise, of the source for that information.
The 45-minute claim is of huge significance, not because of the Campbell allegations, which—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) said—have been a smokescreen and a diversion. It is important because the Government highlighted that claim in the September 2002 dossier. It appeared no less than four times—in the Prime Minister's foreword, in the executive summary and in two other places. That 45-minute claim underpinned completely the Government's claim for the immediacy of the need to take military action. Those who voted on 18 March had to consider carefully their position if they failed to support the Government, given that they had been advised by the Prime Minister, with access to all the information available, that Saddam Hussein was a dictator who had used WMD before and now had them ready and available to use within 45 minutes. That was a significant claim.
The Foreign Affairs Committee took evidence in public and in private, and of course I cannot reveal what was told to us in private. However, I am entitled, as an individual member of the Committee, to offer my own personal conclusions on the validity of the 45-minute claim. My conclusions are, first, that the intelligence base for the claim was very narrow and, secondly, that the accuracy of that intelligence base could not be guaranteed.
It remains to be seen whether that intelligence will be validated on the ground. I do not rule out the possibility that the Iraq survey group may discover, hidden in some clever and fiendish way, chemical or biological weapons ready to use and located within 45 minutes of the
appropriate delivery systems in place in Iraq at the relevant time. However, if no such discoveries were made, that would not surprise me in the least.
Mr. Dalyell: Can the right hon. Gentleman say anything about the deterioration of any chemical weapons that Iraq may have had in the late 1980s or early 1990s?
Sir John Stanley: That is an issue on which we took public evidence. The published volume of evidence contains some interesting evidence from an expert witness who worked at Porton Down and has great experience on the issue.
The third question is the biggest: the key issue of whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction, especially chemical and biological weapons, irrespective of whether or not they were within 45 minutes of being ready to use. On that issue, the Committee concluded that the jury is out. I was amazed that the Prime Minister, before the Liaison Committee and in answer to the right hon. Member for Swansea, East, said that the jury was not out. I do not understand on what basis the Prime Minister made that statement. The jury is clearly out, because no chemical or biological munitions have been found, and that is a key issue.
As of today, nearly four months after we invaded Iraq, none of the central intelligence assessment claims in the September 2002 dossier has been validated on the ground. No evidence has been uncovered that Saddam Hussein was restarting his nuclear weapons programme. We have no evidence of imports of uranium from Africa or of continued production of chemical and biological weapons. We have no evidence of up to 20 longer-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching British bases in Cyprus or of chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed within 45 minutes. We have no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction at all so far. Perhaps that will change with some dramatic discovery by the Iraq survey group, but if by the time it has completed its work we are in the same position as today, it will raise serious personal issues for the Foreign Secretary, the Secretary of State for Defence and the Prime Minister.
2.27 pm
Mr. Ernie Ross (Dundee, West): Before I decided to take part in this debate, I thought that I would read what I had said in the debate on 24 September—in case another hon. Member raised it—and what reason I had given for supporting the Government. I talked then about someone who was a member of CARDRI—the Campaign against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq—most of his political life, who worked against Saddam Hussein and who opposed those who sold weapons to him. That person, because of his other interests in the middle east, also had a sneaking hope that perhaps Iraq could use its military influence to put pressure on the middle east peace process to bring it to a conclusion. However, he was regularly let down by Saddam Hussein, who allegedly supported the Palestinians but who did things that were against the interests of peace in the middle east and the Palestinians specifically. One need only look at how Palestinians were treated in Iraq—they were subsumed into the Iraqi army as part of the defence forces—to understand that
although Saddam sought to interfere in the peace process by rewarding those who carried out acts of terrorism on the west bank, he did not assist the peace process itself. I still had the lingering hope that he might have played a useful role, but he did not.It was obvious that things had to change in Iraq. As hon. Members said, children were dying in Iraq and people were suffering under Saddam Hussein. Getting rid of Saddam was desirable, but it had to be done in a legitimate way that was consistent with international law. At the same time, however, contradictions existed in respect of international law, Iraq, and this House.
As I said, I refreshed my memory of my previous speech, in which I made the point that
- "if we do not get the United Nations resolution, and if we do not get the inspectors back and the removal of the weapons of mass destruction, in my judgment regime change would indeed be justified—if necessary, by military means."—[Official Report, 24 September 2002; Vol. 390, c. 85.]
Towards the end of my speech on 24 September, I said that I hoped that we would get a specific resolution. I have worked in international law, with special reference to the middle east, and I am aware of how non-specific and ambiguous most UN resolutions can be. However, 1441 was as specific as it could have been; it was certainly one of the most specific resolutions that I have seen. When the second resolution was not achieved, I found no problem in voting for action against Saddam Hussein, his family and his regime on the grounds of his non-compliance.
If we learned one thing about Saddam Hussein, it was that he was a complete Stalinist and a unilateralist. He signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and the chemical weapons convention, but flouted them immediately. He agreed to the UN ceasefire in 1991, under which he was to give up nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, but then spent a decade lying, cheating, and hiding. He deliberately denied the inspectors access and did not allow them to do their job. He attempted to conceal weapons in all sorts of places, and put pressure on scientists to deny that weapons programmes were going on.
We had to bring Saddam Hussein to account. The House had debated the question of sanctions and their impact on the people of Iraq, but we had never really been able to deal with the subject. The closed nature of Iraqi society led some of us to believe that we could use the mosque system in the Muslim community to get aid to people and children in Iraq. However, that proved to be impossible. The Stalinist running Iraq was clearly capable of taking anyone on. The fear that he instilled made certain that people would never attempt to undermine anything that he did.
The Ba'ath party and Saddam Hussein exploited the oil-for-food programme for their own benefit. They denied food and essential medical supplies and material to the people and children of Iraq, including the Marsh Arabs, at great, ongoing and deadly cost. The Iraqi elite, however, were not denied food. They lived in Saddam's palaces and enjoyed a lifestyle that was revealed by the coalition forces to have been way beyond anything imaginable.
The no-fly zones were another reason why I said that I would be happy to support regime change. The zones, in both the north and south of Iraq, were highly dubious and were not legitimate under international law. I recall their being debated in this House when I was a member of the Opposition, on the other side of the Chamber. I told the then Foreign Secretary—now Lord Hurd—that there was no international law that allowed us to put the no-fly zones in place. I know that the Foreign Office considered that it could find a suitable framework in international law, but the legality of the no-fly zones is still the subject of argument.
Nevertheless, the no-fly zones saved the Marsh Arabs and allowed them to survive. Saddam was able to drain the marshes, but the Marsh Arabs survived. By the same token, the northern no-fly zones allowed the Kurds to develop a society. As my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary said in his statement yesterday, the coalition forces are now feeding 26 million people. He said:
- "Preliminary figures for June show that food rations were distributed to about 26 million Iraqis in a target population of 27 million. Food distribution is being extended to the Marsh Arabs, a people who I understand received no food at all under Saddam Hussein."—[Official Report, 15 July 2003; Vol. 409, c. 153.]
The Iraqi Kurds had been fighting among themselves, having been turned against each other by Saddam Hussein. Once they had resolved their issues, the northern no-fly zone allowed them to develop a society and infrastructure, one result of which was an improvement in the child mortality rate. When an administration was established, the first thing that the Iraqi Kurds did was to affirm the territorial integrity of Iraq. They did not attempt to move towards breaking away from Iraq, but said that they wanted to form a government. They are now part of the provisional authority in Iraq.
The Iraqi Kurds have survived because of the no-fly zones, even though those zones were illegal. The British and Americans broke international law and, in so doing, allowed the survival of people in Iraq who would not have survived otherwise. It is clear that we were dealing with a person in such complete control of Iraq that we in this House could not have allowed the weapons inspectors to continue for much longer.
I shall not comment on the Foreign Affairs Committee report. I am not in a position to do so, and I do not want to disagree with the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley). However, although he did not mean to, when he spoke about his own view of information that he had received he gave a clear indication as to what that information—to which
we are not privy—might have been. Whether he intended to or not, people will be bound to look at his speech to try and ascertain what the information was.
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