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5.16 pm

Mr. Paul Marsden (Shrewsbury and Atcham): I am proud that the Liberal Democrats opposed the war on Iraq. There was a credible, peaceful and lawful alternative to war: pursuing the United Nations route to achieve more time for the inspectors to do their job of trying to ensure Iraq's compliance with the UN resolutions through disarmament of weapons that it was then believed to have. I do not want to rehearse the arguments for going to war. Weapons of mass destruction may well be found in future. There may be underground silos with vast arsenals of shiny missiles just waiting to be found but, strangely, after six months, an entire army of inspectors has so far failed to find anything.

Mr. Boswell: Can the hon. Gentleman suggest a reasonable deadline for deciding whether or not there were weapons after all?

Mr. Marsden: It was not unreasonable for Dr. Hans Blix to say in his evidence in March 2003 that what was required was not years or weeks but months. We are now six months down the road. Dr. Hans Blix has as

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much expertise as anybody else to pontificate on how much time is required, but a line has to be drawn at some point. If those weapons are not found by then, it is highly unlikely that they ever will be, even if the search stretches years ahead.

Tonight's debate focuses on a judicial inquiry on Iraq, and what happened in the lead-up to war. I support that call, because we need to get to the bottom of whether intelligence was misused and whether Parliament was misled. If that is the case, war was clearly not a necessity and should not have been prosecuted. I believe that Parliament was misled in what was laid before it, and that the country was misled, particularly by the media, in what the Government said at the time. We should not overlook the fact that the resulting war took the lives of more than 370 United States and British armed service personnel. It has taken the lives of at least 7,000 Iraqi civilians, and injured and maimed possibly over 20,000 more. Ultimately, the events surrounding the build-up to the war and its aftermath took the life of Dr. David Kelly. We should never forget that human aspect. What the Government were telling the country and Parliament ultimately led to those deaths, which I believe were preventable.

What sort of Government do we want? We want an open, transparent and accountable Government who are perceived as such. The British people have clearly lost faith in the Prime Minister and in the Government because of the scandal, the sleaze and the spin that have been exposed through the Hutton inquiry. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Tony Wright) eloquently set out his concerns about inquiry-itis and argued that we should not have more and more inquiries. He suggested that Parliament could do the job as well as any judge. However, we have already had two inquiries, and the one by the Foreign Affairs Committee pointed out the problems associated with such an inquiry. In the conclusions and recommendations in its July report, under point 15, it stated:

"We conclude that without access to the intelligence or to those who handled it, we cannot know if it was in any respect faulty or misinterpreted."

In point 29, the Committee went on to say:

"We conclude that continued refusal by Ministers to allow this committee access to intelligence papers and personnel, on this inquiry and more generally, is hampering it in the work which Parliament has asked it to carry out."

It is clear that Parliament cannot do the job. We need a judicial inquiry to get to the bottom of what has been going on.

Mr. Rammell: The hon. Gentleman makes great play of the comments of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Does he accept that the Intelligence and Security Committee, which had access to the intelligence information, stated:

"we accept that there was convincing intelligence that Iraq had active chemical, biological and nuclear programmes and the capability to produce chemical and biological weapons"?

Mr. Marsden: The Minister has ably demonstrated the perceived weakness of the Government's position. That Committee meets in private. We want to get to the bottom of what has been going on in a clear and transparent manner that does not jeopardise national security but answers many of the questions arising from

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the two Committee inquiries. If it is true that Parliament has been misled, we cannot be satisfied with a Committee that sits in private being quoted to justify what has gone on.

Mr. Blizzard: Is the hon. Gentleman impugning the honour of the hon. Members who sit on that Committee?

Mr. Marsden: I do not impugn the honour of the Prime Minister. I am setting out a series of questions and points to show that there are inconsistencies, that there appears to be a misunderstanding of intelligence, and that somebody is culpable. The question is who. Is it the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, or intelligence agencies that have misused the intelligence and raw data that they were given? Somebody somewhere has clearly made mistakes. That cannot be in dispute after what we have learned from the Hutton inquiry in particular, and we need to get to the bottom of it. If the House cannot do so, somebody else must.

There seem to be three main reasons why the Government said that they would go to war. The first was that there was a "current and serious threat" from weapons of mass destruction. Secondly, the United Nations resolutions, especially resolutions 678 and 687, had to be enforced to allow the UN inspectors unfettered access in Iraq. Thirdly, human rights abuses were going on in Iraq under the regime of Saddam Hussein. Lest the Government try to argue that Iraq's contravention of the UN resolutions was the main reason for going to war, we should refer to the March 2003 document entitled "Iraq: Military Campaign Objectives". It said:

"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".

That was the Government's main reason for saying that the country had to go to war. Two weeks before the publication of the September dossier, the Prime Minister said:

"Let it be clear that he"—

that is, Saddam Hussein—

"must be disarmed."

I remind hon. Members of the night of 18 March, when we all voted. Although I respect those who say that war was necessary, the motion before the House clearly stated:

"That this House . . . recognises . . . that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and its continuing non-compliance with Security Council resolutions, pose a threat to international peace and security".

It went on to authorise

"all means necessary to ensure the disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction".

Mr. Michael Connarty (Falkirk, East): Presumably, the hon. Gentleman had already reached a conclusion and voted against the war because he did not believe what he was told in the motion. Since, like me, he did not accept the Government's argument, why have a judicial inquiry?

Mr. Marsden: I do not think that many hon. Members would change their view, even with the benefit of

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hindsight, but that is not what this is about. The public need to be certain that they were not misled, that the facts were put before them as accurately as possible, and that no one in the Government actively tried to mislead them. We must give back to the public confidence in the way that Parliament works, particularly in relation to the intelligence services and how the intelligence was used.

In his winding-up speech on 18 March, the Foreign Secretary repeatedly said that disarmament by force was the only way forward and that active disarmament of the regime was required. Towards the end, minutes before the vote, he said:

"Saddam will not disarm peacefully."—[Official Report, 18 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 902.]

Anybody listening to that would have concluded that our prime motivation was to do what was required to end the regime.

Only eight of the 50 pages of the fateful September dossier are on human rights: its main thrust concerns weapons of mass destruction. As the Foreign Affairs Committee found, prominence was given to all sorts of claims that are now being discredited and backtracked. In the foreword, the Prime Minister writes:

"I wanted to share with the British public the reasons why I believe this issue to be a current and serious threat to the UK national interest . . . Saddam Hussein is continuing to develop WMD . . . What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons".

The policy seemed to be one of trying to frighten people. Although the Prime Minister may have genuinely believed those words, we have to ask on what intelligence they were based.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) asked whether that same intelligence was given to the Attorney-General in order to try to justify the legality of war. If so, given that it was clearly flawed, the House deserves to know what the Attorney-General said. In the light of subsequent events, he may have reflected on it and come up with a different viewpoint.

The executive summary of the September dossier stated:

"As a result of the intelligence we judge that Iraq has: continued to produce chemical and biological agents".

It goes on to consider the command and control arrangements for the use of chemical and biological weapons. Page 6 discusses the development of missiles

"capable of reaching UK Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus".

The dossier was explicit about the genuine belief, based on intelligence—or so we were told—in a threat to the United Kingdom national interest. Hindsight tells us that that was patently not the case.

The September dossier made four mentions of the 45-minute claim. They were clearly based on a single source, yet they were given great and unjustified prominence. The same applies to the chemical and biological weaponry that was supposedly available to Saddam Hussein. The dossier gave numerous examples of Iraq having

"useable chemical and biological weapons capability . . . Iraq can deliver chemical and biological agents . . . and ballistic missiles".

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The Foreign Secretary described the discredited February dossier as "a complete Horlicks" but the Prime Minister said that it provided further intelligence. There are genuine questions to be asked about how the intelligence was captured and whether it was misused and misunderstood, thereby misleading Parliament.

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