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2.52 pm
David Cairns (Greenock and Inverclyde): In the last few moments of his speech, the hon. Member for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin) let the cat out of the bag. He said that he agreed with the Government, he thought that what we did in Iraq was right and getting rid of Saddam Hussein was right. He just does not like the Government. He does not like the fact that we did that and he is going to find some reason to oppose it.
Earlier, the hon. Gentleman made a disgraceful slur against the patriotism of former Labour leaders by saying that they would not have supported military action. I think that I have to go back to George Lansbury to find a Labour leader who did not support British troops—[Interruption.]—other than Suez.
Dr. Julian Lewis: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
David Cairns: The hon. Gentleman may be about to mention that subject, but I recommend him not to drag it up at this point if he wants to keep me with this case.
Dr. Lewis: The hon. Gentleman has guessed wrongly. One thing that is worth remembering about the Falklands is that at the time there was a man who was about to become Labour leader—Neil Kinnock—who wholly opposed that expedition and said so publicly at a time when our troops were being deployed.
David Cairns: This really is the stuff of desperation. The Conservatives make an allegation that turns out to be complete nonsense and then they scan the Labour Back Benches for people who were about to become leader of the Labour party and might have supported it. They should think before they make those absurd allegations.
I join the long queue of people who are thanking and praising the Foreign Affairs Committee for its reports. The Chairman said, I think with a little irony, that everyone was standing up to praise the report but going on to say that it was inadequate because the Committee did not have access to the information, because there should be a further judicial inquiry or whatever.
For someone such as myself who is a new Member of Parliament and approaches these issues with trepidation in the presence of people who know far more about them, the report was an extraordinarily useful primer into the workings of the intelligence agencies and the way that intelligence is gathered, filtered and compiled. It is an excellent case study into how that happens. I am sure that everyone here has read it, but I commend it to people outside who have not done so. The Committee asked some specific questions of the Government and I was pleased to hear my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary assure the House that he would deal with those within the two-month period that he has to respond in full to the report. We will await his reply with interest.
In an excellent speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross) did well to remind us of the broader context within which the decisions were taken. After all, the report is entitled "The Decision to go to War in Iraq", not "Finding out whether a dossier was dodgy", nor is it about a particular claim about 45
minutes. It was about the decision in the broadest sense and my hon. Friend did well to bring us back to what really matters.The United Kingdom did not pluck Iraq out of thin air or stick a needle into an atlas and say, "There's a country that we do not like. We'll manufacture evidence to make up some sort of case for deposing a leader who is inconvenient to us." That simply did not happen. As my hon. Friend reminded us, we must remember the 17 UN resolutions on Iraq and the action that had been taken up to that date—the no-fly zones as well as the sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime. It was not the UK's intelligence services alone that were making allegations about weapons of mass destruction—it was not only the United States intelligence services that were making those claims.
I am not one of those hon. Members who is in the habit of hanging out with members of the intelligence and security forces—at least, not that I am aware of—but I recently had an opportunity with some colleagues to meet a former head of the very well-known national security service of another country. I appreciate that this story is anecdotal and that there were no minutes, so hon. Members cannot challenge whether what I am saying is true, but I asked that gentlemen, who has many years' experience in the field, whether the weapons of mass destruction existed, whether we were duped, and if they did exist where they were. He told me in clear terms that I should be in no doubt that the entire world intelligence community had those doubts, knew that Saddam Hussein had been developing weapons of mass destruction and was continuing that programme with varying degrees of success. As we know, he had attempted to implement it in various ways with varying degrees of success.
Therefore, it was not a case of the UK acting alone or acting with a right-wing American President; it was the expression of the entire world community, which culminated in resolution 1441. That resolution was passed unanimously by countries including France, Russia and Syria, and it was acknowledged that there was a genuine threat from Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. That is important. This was not a huge propaganda exercise got up by Alastair Campbell—he is not that powerful or influential. The Conservative party is throwing up a smokescreen by pursuing that route.
At heart, we are all—the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley), the hon. Member for West Derbyshire and my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West—reflecting on why we voted to go to war. We are asking ourselves, "Why did I cast that vote? What was the evidence base upon which I cast it?" Two dossiers were uppermost in my mind when I cast my vote in support of military action. I read them very carefully and they swayed me. I regret to tell my hon. Friend the Minister that they were not the dossiers of September and February that the Government produced; they were two distinct dossiers. One was a Command Paper that put together all 17 of the UN resolutions against Saddam Hussein one after the other, with their 29 separate obligations on Iraq and Saddam Hussein, the majority of which had been unfulfilled to that point. Reading those resolutions consecutively brought home powerfully to me that the entire world
community was concerned about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Of course, the resolutions culminated in 1441.The right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) told us that he thought that the fact that the Government were attempting to secure a further resolution after 1441 demonstrated that they were not convinced of the legal basis given by 1441 for going to war. I refute that—that is not my understanding of why the Government were attempting to secure a second resolution. They openly said that it would be politically preferable to have that position explicitly set out in a new resolution. [Interruption.] I recommend that my hon. Friends who are dissenting from that view consider what was said at the time by my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn), who argued very cogently that we were voting not to go to war, but to support resolution 1441. He said very clearly that he would not vote for that because resolution 1441 provided a basis for further military action. He was opposed to that then, and it was a very principled stand to take. I listened to him and argued with him at the time, but not about whether resolution 1441 provided a basis to go to war, as we agreed about that.
Jeremy Corbyn: Does my hon. Friend not recall that the Prime Minister asserted very strongly that not only would he go for a second resolution, but that he intended to get one and that, after he failed to get one, he told the House in terms that we were going to war to disarm Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction, which has so far proved—how shall I put it—difficult to justify?
David Cairns: I was agreeing with my hon. Friend right up until the last point that he made. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister should be congratulated on trying to go for a second—or an 18th or 19th—resolution and on the way in which his influence on the American President brought him into the whole process at the United Nations in the first place, so I do not accept that resolution 1441 provided no legal basis for the military action that was taken.
I mentioned two dossiers, and the Command Paper was uppermost in my mind at the time of going to war. The second dossier is the last report of the weapons inspectors, which was produced in early March and runs to 167 pages in the original version and 173 pages in the final version. Reading that document—page after page about the Iraqi regime's non-compliance with the weapons inspectors—helped to convince me that that regime would simply never comply with the weapons inspectors because it had no intention of ever doing so. That put the regime in clear contradiction of UN resolution 1441, which provided a basis for such action.
Either way, we cast our votes on whether or not to engage in military action on that fateful night, certainly in the knowledge that, as the hon. Member for West Derbyshire said, if we voted for war and war came, there would be casualties and deaths. I put it to him and to hon. Members who voted not to go to war that, if we had not gone to war and deposed Saddam Hussein, people would have died in any event, perhaps in even greater numbers than died in the short conflict. We must not forget that vital point.
Of course, the judicial inquiry issue is the gravamen of the motion. I found it extraordinary that the right hon. Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) complained that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary spent so much time addressing that issue when that is what the motion calls for. The entire motion is one long preamble, with a specific call at the end for an independent inquiry. My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary demolished that case in his very effective speech, but the right hon. Gentleman simply said in response that it was unfair that my right hon. Friend addressed the judicial inquiry issue.
The only time that Opposition Members mention judicial inquiries is when they are asking for them to be stopped, and the hon. Member for West Derbyshire complained about the cost of the Saville inquiry and the length of time that it has taken.
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