Examination of Witness (Questions 63-79)
CLARE SHORT
MP
17 JUNE 2003
Q63 Chairman: Can I say first, my
apologies for the short delay in starting. There is a lot of ground
to cover and we hope that you will be able to help the Committee
in our inquiry on the decision to go to war in Iraq. You have
been quite trenchant in your criticism since, I notice, for example,
the conclusion of your article to the New Statesman on
9 June where you say in terms, "My conclusion is that our
Prime Minister deceived us". Do you still labour under that
sense of deception?
Clare Short: I am afraid I do
very sadly and I think it is a series of half-truths, exaggerations
and reassurances that were not the case to get us into conflict
by the spring and I think that commitment had been made by the
previous summer. I think nothing else explains the failure to
allow Blix to complete his process and the way in which certainly
I personally was deceived and I think the country was deceived
about what the French decision was, the claim that the French
said, "No second Resolution of any kind", when it is
absolutely clear now that President Chirac said, Blix must be
given enough time to complete his inspection process, but if disarmament
is not achieved through the Blix process, then the matter will
have to come back to the Security Council, and then war would
be inevitable.
Q64 Chairman: I am sure colleagues
will take up some of those other points, but you mentioned that
the decision had been made in the summer. That is the decision
between the Prime Minister and the President on going to war?
Clare Short: Yes. The reason I
say that is that three extremely senior people in the Whitehall
system, whom I will not name, said that to me very clearly and
specifically, that the target date was mid-February and later
extended to March because of a difficulty with the Turks and so
on and to give our Prime Minister a little more time, but at that
time we were being assured, and I personally was being assured
by the Prime Minister, that we were committed to a second Resolution.
Q65 Chairman: So you think that come
what may, following that decision in the summer, war would inevitably
have followed?
Clare Short: I think short of
Saddam Hussein coming out with his hands up or going to Saudi
Arabia or something, they were committed to war. The question
is and everyone must ask themselves this question, why, when Blix
got 64 ballistic missiles, some say, 70 dismantled—that
was a considerable amount of disarmament—and yet his process
was truncated. So he was succeeding, yet he was not given the
time he asked for, and the question is why? Now, we were told
that you have to threaten war in order to avoid war and I accepted
that. That is how we got Resolution 1441. Therefore, you have
to deploy some troops to threaten war and then we are told that
the troops cannot sit in the desert because they have been deployed
and we have to go to conflict, and the Blix process was truncated.
Why were we all working to a target date which did not permit
enough time for the Blix process to be completed?
Q66 Chairman: Well, I am not totally
following you. Let's say, for example, after 1441, which gives
"a final opportunity", after which there would have
been "serious consequences", if Saddam Hussein had recognised
that this was indeed the final opportunity, the troops were massing
at his frontier, if he had then published a dossier on 8 December
which was followed and he had co-operated with Blix, do you think
the coalition would still have gone to war?
Clare Short: When 1441 was passed,
because of course that was a resolution that was put together
in the normal way that takes place in New York with a long process
of negotiation and amendment so you get buy-in and you build consensus
and indeed get unanimity, we and others assured the Security Council,
because there was some dispute and the French wanted to make sure
that the matter would have to come back to the Security Council,
if there was to be an authorisation of military action, and verbal
assurances were given that the matter would have to come back
to the Security Council, and then Blix achieved considerable disarmament
and made it clear himself that he needed more time. After all,
it was not until November that it was passed and you have to get
the weapons inspectors into Iraq and get them there with all their
equipment, and there was the question of sharing intelligence.
I was seeing our intelligence agencies at that time and they were
saying that the scientists' records and laboratory equipment and
so on were hidden and being hidden across the country and they
knew where it was, and I was arguing with them, "Why don't
we give the information to Blix then and facilitate Blix going
to the houses where things are hidden?", so there was not
very much time between 1441 being passed, Blix getting in, getting
started and getting going. If you remember, he complained that
he was not getting much help with intelligence information and
then the UK was more helpful. Then he was making progress in achieving
a destruction of ballistic missiles and he made it clear that
he needed more time and then suddenly the Resolution or the draft
saying that 1441 had not been fulfilled was tabled and the whole
process was brought to an end. We were misled about the French
position and everything was blamed on the French, but I happened
to talk to Kofi Annan on the telephone around that time about
the situation in the Congo and he said, that it was absolutely
clear that the majority of the Security Council thought that Blix
needs more time. Now, this is a very serious matter and I understand
how serious a matter it is, but I am afraid, I am very sorry that
this is my conclusion.
Chairman: We hear that.
Q67 Mr Hamilton: Clare, to what extent
were you aware of the threat posed by Iraq prior to the events
of 11 September 2001?
Clare Short: I have been very
troubled by sanctions and the suffering of the people of Iraq
for a very long time and certainly since I took office in the
Government in 1997, and we have attempted to improve the humanitarian
programmes and the effectiveness of UN actions and to get some
relief in the way in which sanctions worked, so I have been absolutely
clear that the situation was unsatisfactory. I do not believe
it could have just been left and I did not believe in containment
both because Saddam Hussein was defying the UN, but also because
the people of Iraq were suffering so badly.
Q68 Mr Hamilton: Did you believe
that there was a threat to British interests posed by Iraq prior
to 11 September 2001?
Clare Short: No, I did not believe
that. I believed that the people of Iraq were suffering badly
and that Saddam Hussein was in defiance of the UN over the question
of working to try to achieve chemical and biological weapons.
I believed and I still believe that he did try nuclear, but the
previous inspection regime dismantled that, so I still do not
think he was an imminent threat. I think that is where one of
the exaggerations came, but I think he was, and I believe still,
that he was committed to having laboratories and scientists and
doing work and trying to develop chemical and biological weapons,
and we know that he had ballistic missiles of a range beyond that
permitted in the Security Council Resolution. My view was that
the problem needed attending to, but that there was not an imminent
threat and, therefore, we should do it right. The new urgency
which came into the US was because of September 11, and this false
suggestion that there was any link to al-Qaeda is another of the
falsities to try to get an urgency for that, so I think the right
way would have been to say, "We are going to attend to this
and we are going to attend to the Middle East". The Road
Map had already been negotiated, so we should have started off
with publishing that and started implementation and showing a
commitment to move to justice in the Middle East and then we should
have turned to Iraq, trying to keep the support of Arab governments,
and we should have tried for disarmament and we could have even
had the UN authorised military action to support the inspectors,
it seems to me. We should have tried indicting Saddam Hussein
and we should have lifted sanctions. If you take the Kosovo parallel,
and I was one who believed that we should have acted on Milosevic
earlier with all the ethnic cleansing from Bosnia and so on, but
it was absolutely right to act when the Kosovars being pushed
out of their country. And this was reversed and then the military
action stopped, but Milosevic was indicted and other action was
taken and we got him to The Hague without a full-scale invasion
of Serbia. I hope that is not too long an answer, but the point
is that I was very aware of it. My deepest concern was the suffering
of the people of Iraq and the anger that was causing in the Middle
East and I think it should have been attended to, but we had time
to attend to it right. Let me make it clear that from the beginning
of this crisis, and indeed before, I have always thought that
we had to be willing to use military force to back up the authority
of the UN, so I was not saying, "No military force at all
at any price", but I was saying that we should avoid it if
at all possible and that is the teaching on the just wall and
you have to make sure that there is no other way, and we should
have tried that. I thought for a long time in this crisis that
the UK was playing the role of trying to restrain the US and trying
to examine all other means, and I now think that we were not and
that we pre-committed.
Q69 Mr Hamilton: Well, that leads
me to a second question. Throughout 2002 there was a renewed focus
on Iraq being discussed in the media. How often was it discussed
in the Cabinet and how far do you think that the renewed focus
on Iraq was being pressed by Washington?
Clare Short: Well, I am certain
it was being pressed by Washington, and I presume you will get
the clerks to go back over the media story because it kept breaking
into our media and we kept getting an echo of the arguments in
Washington from our Prime Minister and our Foreign Secretary.
To discuss Iraq. Occasionally pre-Cabinet you are asked if you
want to raise anything, not every week, some weeks, interestingly,
and I asked to raise certain situations in Africa departmentally
and then personally Iraq in September time and the Prime Minister
at that time said that he did not want it raised in the Cabinet
and he would see me personally. I saw him when I was in Mozambique.
We went to Mozambique before we went to the World Conference on
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and that dates it in my
mind. The Prime Minister came back from that trip and, if you
remember, in one of his press conferences that he did from his
constituency, if you check the press reports, he was quite belligerent,
and he had been to the US just before that. In the Guardian
instant book, which I do not know if any of you have seen, which
was clearly written, the part in the run-up to the war, with collaboration
from the Prime Minister's entourage, close entourage, because
it was only the close entourage which were really part of this
or part of the detailed day-to-day, week-to-week activity, it
says very clearly that by September 9 they were both committed
to military action, if you just examine the record in the book.
Q70 Mr Hamilton: So you think that
by September 9 war became inevitable and that was the date?
Clare Short: I think the Prime
Minister had said to President Bush, "We will be with you",
and he had not laid down the conditions that were needed to bring
Britain's influence to bear to temper the position of the US and
to try and keep the unity of the international community and the
Security Council. I think he had committed us and he did not say,
"We will be with you on a series of conditions", trying
to operate through the UN and so on. Then I think that is why
he lost weight, that he had given commitments in Washington and
there was a feeling in Britain, in the Cabinet, in Parliament,
in the Party and the country that caused him to give assurances
on the second Resolution and the two were rather contradictory
and it conflated over truncating the Blix process and then the
big fig-leaf became, "Blame France" and misleading us
about France's position to get through that crisis of contradictory
policies.
Q71 Mr Hamilton: Finally, if I can
just add this, what did you believe were the real reasons for
the war in Iraq?
Clare Short: I think if you read,
and I have since, some of the publications of the Republican,
neo-conservatives, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney
and some of the others, they were writing from 1997 on, or that
is the earliest material I have read, and there was some sensitivity
about this, that there had been a failure to complete the first
Gulf War and leave Saddam Hussein in Iraq and that action had
to be taken. Now, I understand that, it was an evil regime and
it was in defiance of the UN, but they were very committed to
it. Then if you read the Bob Woodward book, Bush at War,
I think it is called, that was written with full White House co-operation
and it is about the run-up to Afghanistan, and you have got Rumsfeld
arguing straight after September 11 that we have to go for Iraq
and, as we all know, there was no link to al-Qaeda. Yes, it was
an unresolved crisis, but they were not politically committed.
In the Guardian book, you have got President Bush saying,
and he is saying this in September 2002 that a year ago I was
discussing with my officials the possibility of dealing with Saddam
Hussein by tightened sanctions and more containment, but now everything
has changed and it has to be war.
Q72 Mr Chidgey: Can I take you back
to some of the opening remarks that you made, particularly in
connection with the step change in policy within the Cabinet of
moving to war. I want to look at the intelligence perspective
of this and the influence that had on you and the Cabinet in coming
to that conclusion. I think everyone would agree that intelligence
is an inexact art, let alone a science. Can you tell us what intelligence
assessments were made of what was happening inside the Saddam
regime? Were you presented with a range of options, best-case,
worst-case scenarios, explanations of what was happening in Iraq,
or did it just come to you as a focused, "This is what is
happening, this is the way forward and this is what we should
be doing"?
Clare Short: Well, the first thing
you should know is that the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee
never met. There was never a paper. There was never an analysis
of options and there was never an analysis on paper before any
Cabinet committee or any meeting and it was all done only verbally.
That is quite a collapse of normal British procedures for decision-making
and I think some of the poor quality goes with the collapse in
the proper decision-making processes, I really do, and I think
that these are extremely serious matters for our government system.
I think if there had been papers and analysis, we probably would
have got—
Q73 Mr Chidgey: Well, if I can lead
you on, and I think actually you have answered the question, but
I will just ask it: do you feel the Government's policies on Iraq
in the period leading up to the war were soundly based on good
intelligence?
Clare Short: Well, let me just
say a word about intelligence because most members of the Cabinet
do not see the raw intelligence, the day-to-day bits that come
through, the reports from individuals or telephone taps.
Q74 Mr Chidgey: But you did see it?
Clare Short: I did see it all
for months because I saw it over Africa, Nepal, Pakistan and so
on and, therefore, I normally dealt with that kind of material.
Of course the raw intelligence is just droplets of information
and I think someone once said that it is like cornflakes. It is
bits and pieces and it did not say anything devastatingly clear.
It indicates that scientists from the regime say yes, experiments
are going on, and that type of thing, and then the Joint Intelligence
Committee every so often pulls it together and makes an assessment.
Could I say to the Committee that I think you should press to
see the material. The reason for secrecy is to protect sources
in Iraq. The whole situation in Iraq has changed and I think most
of the material you could now safely see in terms of there is
no one who would be threatened by your seeing it given all the
changes. I did ask, and this is relevant, Defence Intelligence
for an assessment because I knew they must be making an assessment
in terms of the threat to our troops, the chemical suits and what
kind of drugs they had to take and so on, and obviously my responsibility
was thinking about the people of Iraq, so if there was a risk
of chemical and biological weapons being used so that our troops
had to be protected, what about Iraqi civilians? So I was asking
for the best possible assessment that defence intelligence could
make, and all the other stuff was coming from SIS, of that risk.
A paper was prepared, saying, and I am speaking from memory of
course, that there is a risk, and it was thought not to be very
high, but it was definitely there, which I thought was a very
serious matter. Then I had a number of individual briefings from
SIS which the Prime Minister authorised partly because I was so
troubled by the whole process and he was trying to keep me inside
the tent at that stage. The view that was taken by the person
that briefed me after Blix started his inspection was that the
scientists, their work and whatever they had was being hidden
and the risks of use were less. That is my summary.
Q75 Mr Chidgey: That is very helpful.
If I can stick on that point, one of the issues which certainly
troubles me from the evidence we have taken over a long period
of time on this issue is the difficulty of actually locating and
finding stocks of chemical weapons, particularly anthrax, of less
than 1,000 litres, impossible to find. I have been wanting to
try to find out whether the Government was actually briefed on
this particular issue of how difficult it was to find these weapons
and, therefore, it was clearly very difficult to remove the threat
and whether then the policy formulation process moved on so that
the only way to remove the threat is in fact to remove the perpetrator
of the action and, therefore, the regime. Was that part of the
step change or not?
Clare Short: No, it was not like
that. The first proper open discussion was in October some time
when members of the Cabinet just gave their opinions about the
whole situation in the Middle East. After that, most weeks there
was a discussion and indeed I often instigated it, but it was
what I call "guided discussion". It was, "So what's
the latest?" and by then there was a compliant atmosphere
in the Cabinet and it was clearer and clearer where things were
going and there was a kind of loyalty, so it was arranged at one
point that small groupings of the Cabinet would go for briefings
with the Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and we went
in groups of two or three. I think for most members of the Committee,
but you would have to check with them, they did not see even the
Joint Intelligence Committee assessments, all of them.
Q76 Mr Chidgey: So you were never
advised from the intelligence reports that it was impossible for
them to give you an assessment which told you that the Government
could successfully remove or could not successfully remove the
threat from chemical and biological weapons through the inspections
process?
Clare Short: There was never a
discussion in Cabinet at that kind of level of detail.
Q77 Mr Illsley: You have just covered
some of the issues that I want to raise actually, but I will try
and press you a little bit more on this. In particular, you have
just told us that you saw Joint Intelligence Committee reports,
the raw intelligence material and the assessments because you
asked for them, particularly in relation to Africa.
Clare Short: Well, I had a relationship
with that material and I saw it regularly. I made a point of seeing
everything on Iraq.
Q78 Mr Illsley: So you actually saw
the assessments. You have also said there that you were putting
in comments along the lines of, "Why aren't they putting
this to Blix to tell him where to go?", so was anybody taking
any notice of that? Were your comments accepted?
Clare Short: Well, this is why
I reached this sad judgment that I reached. I also saw the Prime
Minister personally quite frequently and this question of when
Blix asked for more help, if you remember, and again I am speaking
from memory, but I am sure this is a matter of record in the media
at that time, Blix asked for more help with the intelligence,
and the UK said, yes, we would give him more intelligence, and
I know I had a personal briefing from SIS at that time. They told
me that the UK had got better intelligence than the US because
of our links into Iraq and that there were brave Iraqi scientists
and so on who were giving us information and we knew about books,
records and equipment being moved to people's houses. I tell you
this because it is an important exchange. I said to them—in
that case, let's give Blix the information. Let's give him the
helicopters or whatever he needs. Let's get that house raided.
Let's go there, let's find it", and I had that conversation
with the Prime Minister also, and he said, "Yes, yes",
but it did not happen, did it?
Q79 Mr Illsley: Do you think they
were stopped from giving that information to Blix?
Clare Short: I think it is a matter
of record that Blix said, but again I am speaking from memory,
that in one of his reporting sessions to the Security Council
he had started to have more co-operation from the UK, but still
not from the US. Again I am speaking from memory, but he has said
more recently that it all led nowhere and they chased it and there
was nothing there when they got there.
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