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5.28 pm
Mr. George Foulkes (Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley): I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on this subject in the House, having had the opportunity to do so elsewhere.
Like the Foreign Secretary, I thought the speech of the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) reasonable and sensible, as most of his speeches are. I believe he genuinely accepts that the Government are taking on board most of his views. Others, however, do not seem to accept that. They do not seem to be listening to what the Foreign Secretary, the Defence Secretary and the Minister of State, Department for International Development are saying. I am reminded of the old phrase "none so deaf as those that will not hear". I think that some Members, and some people outside, do not want to hear of the progress that is being made.
The most remarkable progress being made, in the circumstances, is the development of political pluralism. We have a governing council, and we now have a Cabinet with, at last, a Foreign Minister who speaks on behalf of Iraq. I have heard him on the radio. He is not one of Saddam Hussein's puppets. That is tremendous. The governing council represents people who used to be exiles, and people who stayed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein in the face of great difficulties—people of all creeds and backgrounds. But of course, we have to make progress, and as the Foreign Secretary rightly said, the United Nations has a vital role in preparing for, supervising and supporting the elections. I was delighted to hear the Foreign Secretary say that the Iraqi governing council will work out the timetable for those elections and for the transition to democracy. That seems right, and it will of course need the support of the coalition, at least in terms of security. So progress is being made on democratic development as well.
The resolution gives rise to the question of the command structure, and in that regard I again agree with the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife. Yesterday, the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) yet again made a fool of himself in his flat-footed way. He believes that everything is black and white. The shadow Foreign Secretary will remember the old days of cowboy and Indian films, in which the cowboys always appeared in white and the baddies always appeared in black, just so that people could identify them. That is the simple world of the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan.
When it became clear yesterday that everyone but the hon. Gentleman agreed that the force will not be blue-helmeted—even Kofi Annan says that the force will be not a UN one but a multinational one—the rug was pulled from under his argument. When I asked him who, other than the Americans, could lead such a multi-national force—I suggested that perhaps the Lithuanians or the Poles could—he had no answer. It is a pity that innate anti-Americanism suffuses the views of
certain Members, who are to be found not only on the Opposition Benches—there are one or two on the Labour Benches as well, my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Kelvin (Mr. Galloway) being one of them.
Mr. Salmond: Given the right hon. Gentleman's view of the world, I am sure that he always has a white hat on. Some 24 hours after yesterday's debate, even he should have stumbled across the fact that the question is not whether there is a unified command structure, but to whom it reports. If he can, will he tell us now whether he thinks that a unified command structure—whichever the lead country—will report to the White House or to the Security Council? If he can answer that question he will, at last, rise in my estimation.
Mr. Foulkes: Like many of the critics, when the hon. Gentleman is defeated on one matter, he changes the subject. He has moved the goalposts: yesterday, he was talking about the military command structure, and it is of course sensible that the US lead that. Remember that anything that the hon. Gentleman says must be put in the context of his comments on the liberation of Kosovo, when he described the Government's action as an unpardonable folly. What he said was an unpardonable folly, as he will live to realise.
Mr. Salmond: Whom will the unified command structure report to: the White House or the United Nations Security Council? That is the question—can we now have an answer?
Mr. Foulkes: The situation is much more complicated than that. It is a matter for the Government to answer, and I am sure that the able Minister, who is doing the job that I used to do a few years ago, will have a reply.
Mr. Foulkes: I shall continue, as a lot of people want to get in. On reconstruction, again, there are none so deaf as those that do not want to hear. On Monday, the Foreign Secretary made a statement on reconstruction—about hospitals, schools and everything that is improving. The shadow Foreign Secretary wants a neat plan to be drawn up. That is the latest soundbite that he has come up with—it is the Conservatives who are the original spinners. I must disagree with his proposal because any plan needs to be flexible. It must take account of the security situation, and of the sabotage of the oil pipelines and water supply. Such incidents have set back some of the existing plans and the progress that needs to be made.
People criticise the security forces for being unable to deal with some of the atrocities that have taken place. They ask how such things can happen. Of course they can happen in a country with Iraq's history. They even happen—tragically, as we saw yesterday—in Israel, a country with the most sophisticated intelligence system and a strong security and defence system. Israel could not guard against suicide bombers. How can we expect the embryonic state of Iraq to do so?
Mr. Ancram: This is not an academic question, but one that is real for people in Iraq. Somebody put it to me in this way: how can countries that put men on the moon 30 years ago not turn the lights back on in Baghdad and Basra in
four months? All people are asking is to be told whether there is a plan. I have asked about something even more fundamental, the contracts for reconstruction that will put the lights back on Baghdad and Basra. That is what people want to know and we in this House must answer.
Mr. Foulkes: The right hon. Gentleman will get an answer; I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister will give it in his reply. Fortunately, when the Americans were putting men on the moon, they did not have terrorists and Saddam Hussein supporters sabotaging their efforts. I welcome the conversion of the shadow Foreign Secretary and the Tories to involving the United Nations, the United Nations Development Programme, the World Food Programme and all the agencies that are doing a good job in the reconstruction of Iraq. It was the Tories who took Britain out of UNESCO—not an indication of co-operation—and it needed a Labour Government to bring Britain back into it. We need no lectures on supporting the UN from the Conservatives.
Mr. Mark Hendrick (Preston): Will my right hon. Friend comment on the fact that if a plan and timetable were made available, it would be an invitation to terrorists to derail that plan?
Mr. Foulkes: I do not need to add to that extremely good point.
We have been asked why the French, Germans and Russians should now help in reconstruction. I can understand that they do not want to support any kind of resolution that retrospectively approves the action taken by the coalition; that is logical. But if they are really concerned about the interests of the people of Iraq, they must want to help reconstruct that ravaged country following the decades of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Surely any country with concern about poor, under-privileged and disadvantaged people will want to do that and I hope that they will take account of that.
Like many hon. Members, my attention has been diverted from some of the main issues by the Hutton inquiry. I wish to put on record here, as I have done elsewhere, that most of my colleagues and I voted for action in Iraq not on the basis of one paragraph in one dossier. The 45 minutes claim appeared in only two out of thousands of parliamentary questions. I invite the critics to go back to the debates on Iraq and see how many times that matter was mentioned; it was not put forward as the reason for action. There was a range of other things and not just intelligence information: the continual flouting of UN resolutions by Saddam Hussein, the invasions of Kuwait and Iran and the killings and torture. Regime change was not the legal justification for action, but it is a very desirable outcome of it.
Mr. Simon Thomas: The right hon. Gentleman is correct of course in what he says about the 45 minutes claim in its specifics, but surely even he—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order. I remind all hon. Members that the motion deals with the role of the UN in the reconstruction of Iraq rather than the question of the 45 minutes.
Mr. Thomas: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, I shall bear that in mind. I wanted to remind the right hon. Gentleman of a wider point, which I hoped would be in order—that the resignation speech of the right hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook), the previous Foreign Secretary, absolutely demolished the case for war. Surely the right hon. Gentleman took that into account and we should—
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