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Mr. Salmond: The polls are not good reading for the right hon. Gentleman either. I suspect that he should worry about a Prime Minister who cannot even venture safely into the royal enclosure of the Braemar gathering. I suspect that the reason for that is the deep-seated resentment of people of all classes and types. They deeply resent being gathered into a conflict on a trail of deception. If the Government want to recover any sense of regard among the population, instead of trying to smooth lines and pretend that things are not as they are, they should genuinely eat their pride, go back to the UN and start to make this process legal under international
law, as it always should have been. I hope that we will hear, in the summing up of the debate, that the Government will now embark on that course, which many of us would have advised many months ago.3.3 pm
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North): I welcome the debate because it is an opportunity to discuss the situation in Iraq, and I suspect that we will have to discuss that for many months, if not years, to come. I cannot see the British and American Administrations easily withdrawing from that situation or being prepared to agree to a UN operation, as the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) has outlined, because that goes to the heart of the problem: the politics of the US Administration, led by George Bush, who are deeply antagonistic to any kind of internationalism or multilateralism. Indeed, since US companies have already signed up a large number of contracts of behalf of the temporary administration in Iraq, I suspect that things will carry on like that.
Mr. Foulkes: Does my hon. Friend know which Administration brought the US back into UNESCO and paid the back fees to the UN that President Clinton unfortunately had refused to pay?
Jeremy Corbyn: It was indeed the Administration led by George Bush, who were then vainly trying to get UN support, but I am rather surprised that my right hon. Friend, with such a long and distinguished record in international affairs, should seek to defend the most right-wing US Administration we have ever seen.
Mr. Jon Owen Jones: Has my hon. Friend considered the fact that, with the forthcoming elections in America, the Government might find themselves in the very peculiar position of supporting the viewpoint of the Republicans in the US, while the Democrats are attacking the cause for war?
Jeremy Corbyn: It is extremely perceptive of my hon. Friend to raise that issue. Watching the debate in the Democratic party in the US, it seems that the stronger the anti-war position adopted by the candidates, the more support they get and the more likely they are to gain the nomination. Come the primary elections next year, the British Government will be in the strange situation of being lined up with George Bush against a Democratic party that will, I hope, adopt some kind of anti-war position, and it may do so because a large number of ordinary people in the US are also deeply upset about the policy in Iraq and also deeply opposed to the military intervention there.
I twice went to the US earlier this year to take part in anti-war activities, and I was very interested in the large number of ordinary people who journeyed through appalling weather to Washington to demonstrate in January. Some of them held placards saying, "40 million Americans go without any health care, yet our Administration can afford to go to war in Iraq." The same things were said in San Francisco and other parts of the country. There is a massive anti-war movement in the US, as indeed there is in this country.
I intervened on the Liberal Democrat defence spokesperson, who kindly gave way while on that subject, but I have watched the Liberal Democrats in
operation, as we all have for many years, and they seem to have developed a fine art of making statements in the House and opposite statements on the streets of this country—something called Liberal Focus teams in operation on the ground. The hon. Member for Hereford (Mr. Keetch) himself said that the Liberal Democrats now support the position of British troops in Iraq and that they support the increase in British troops in Iraq as well as other things surrounding the war. Yet, on the ground, Liberal Democrats go around claiming, where it suits them, that they are the anti-war party in this country. I am not proud of the position that the British Government have adopted because I deeply disagree with it, as I have made clear on many occasions, but I wish that the Liberals would just be clear about what their position actually is.
Jeremy Corbyn: I welcome the hon. Gentleman's intervention.
Mr. Keetch: I want to ask the hon. Gentleman a simple question: does he favour today the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq?
Jeremy Corbyn: Yes, I do favour the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, and I favour supporting the development of a civilian Government in Iraq, if necessary, with UN support. What I see in Iraq at present is a British and American occupying force—that is what it is in legal terms—and I see the Americans gaining contracts from that for Halliburton, Bechtel and many others, all of which happen to have funded George Bush's election campaign in the first place. The British Government are totally complicit in that whole operation. When George Bush says that he is not prepared to agree to UN control of forces in Iraq, what is the position of the British Administration? They say that they are in favour of the US and UN, but they are incapable of influencing that policy.
I want to raise one or two other issues briefly, because this is a short debate. We have to ask ourselves some questions about how we got into this position. Was Iraq the real, credible and present threat that was claimed in the early part of this year? We were told, in terms, that there were weapons of mass destruction. We were told that there was a real, credible and present threat from Iraq. When will the Iraqi survey group report? When will we know definitely whether there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? When will we know about all the weapons that Britain sold to Iraq in the first place some years ago?
If it is right and proper, as it is, for Lord Hutton to conduct an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. David Kelly, why is it not appropriate to hold an independent judicial inquiry into all the circumstances leading to the war in the first place, the pressures that were put on and the political decisions that were made to take us into that conflict? It is only right and proper that the British public should know in whose name the war is being fought and who is benefiting from it.
I have observed from reading websites and information and from talking to people who have come back from Iraq that it is a country with varying degrees of insecurity. Some areas are considerably worse than others. Many poverty stricken and unemployed former Iraqi army soldiers, who were given their weapons but no money and told to go away from their barracks, are running amok throughout the country. I also observe increasing opposition to the British and American presence in the country, but the insecurity does not extend to the oil wells and oil refineries. Huge efforts are put into protecting the oil pipelines. The argument that the war was for oil is only part of the truth—it was not the only reason, but it was a major factor. I suspect that in the long run we will get a large north American base in Iraq and a long period of instability in the region, because if one reads the musings of Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney and all the others, the project for the new American century is all about such wars and the imposition of American bases in different places throughout the world. Is that really the kind of world in which we want to live in the long run? Is that really a sane, safe and secure way to look at the problems that are facing the whole globe?
Richard Younger-Ross: The hon. Gentleman referred to insecurity in Iraq. Can he say whether that insecurity would increase or decrease if British troops were withdrawn tomorrow?
Jeremy Corbyn: I suspect that the insecurity is serious or very serious in some parts and less serious in others. If British troops withdrew, I suspect that there would be a change to the atmosphere because the Iraqis would have an opportunity to develop their society themselves.
Is there to be a situation in which we put in more and more troops to protect their security? I heard the Defence Secretary yesterday defending the increase of 1,400 troops in Iraq—a few more are going. Successive generals used exactly the same arguments during the imposition of more American forces on Vietnam throughout the 1960s and 1970s. They said that the troops needed to be there for their own protection. Several hundred thousand troops ended up there, and there was ignominious defeat and failure as well as a huge loss of life among Vietnamese and American people. I am frightened that the same situation is developing in Iraq.
Mrs. Mahon: Does my hon. Friend agree that when the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan, it did so quickly and had a fairly successful entry to the country? Ten years later, when it came out, the red army was defeated and Afghanistan in such a state that the Taliban were able to take it over. It is easy to conquer a country, but what happens afterwards must be considered.
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