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Mr. Jonathan Sayeed (Mid-Bedfordshire) (Con): Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman could go further in his questioning. Just after the September dossier was published, the Evening Standard and The Sun took up the 45-minute claim, and interpreted it as referring to long-range weapons. That coming out in a newspaper article was clearly wrong. Should not the right hon. Gentleman's question also encompass whether the Government, having known that that was wrong, were not bound to correct it?
Mr. Cook: I am obviously more relaxed about whether the Government corrects the record in The Sun, but I am very anxious that they should correct the record in the House before it is invited to make a decision.
The hon. Gentleman tempts me to quote from the interesting response that was published yesterday by the Government to the Intelligence and Security Committee, in the course of which the Government say:
- "In March 2003"—
- "the Joint Intelligence Committee stated that intelligence on the timing of when Iraq might use the CBW was inconsistent and that the intelligence on deployment was sparse. Intelligence indicating that chemical weapons remained disassembled and that Saddam had not yet ordered their assembly, and that was highlighted."
My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister properly took credit for the fact that the Government allowed the House to vote before British troops were committed to action. I offer personal credit to my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary, who was always a robust advocate of the right of the House to vote on action before it took place. But if we are to take credit for the House having the right to decide, it becomes very important that the House had accurate information on which to make the decision. At the very least, the majority in the House would have been much reduced if we had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction.
It may well be, as the right hon. Member for Bracknell (Mr. Mackay) said, that there are Members who would have chosen to continue with invasion even if they had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and they are entitled to that view. But the situation then becomes a choice, not a necessity. We now know that we did have the time to let Hans Blix finish the inspections, and had we done so we would have found out that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and there was no threat from Saddam.
It has become fashionable to talk about the judgment of history. I do not know what history will say about our decision to choose to go to war, but we already know enough to conclude that history will judge that we did not need to go to war.
4.20 pm
Mr. Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con): We have just heard two distinguished contributions from the right hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley), but I hope that they will forgive me if I refer back to an earlier contribution by the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) who was much maligned and vilified for his questioning on the Foreign Affairs Committee at the time. I am poles apart from him politically, but I want to place on record the fact that I greatly respect what he did then, and does every day, as a parliamentarian. He deserves our respect, and he should know that he has support across the House.
I want to focus on key questions that were left unanswered by Hutton and which I hope will be answered by the next inquiry—and if not, by the Government. First, however, I shall put on record the fact that I voted for war on 18 March despite the fact that after carefully reading the dossier and the Blix report, I had come to the conclusion that there almost certainly were no weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein, and certainly none that constituted a current and serious threat to this country.
Close reading of those documents also made it clear to me that Saddam had in the past possessed and used those weapons, he had the current intention to possess them, and if we withdrew and sanctions collapsed, he would in future, in all likelihood, get them and become a danger. So I voted, knowing that there were no weapons but believing that it was possible to justify war to change the regime and pre-empt a future threat. I think that the Prime Minister was doing the right thing but giving the wrong reason, and it is important that we hold him to account for the reasons that he gave, lest a Government in future feel free to do whatever they like for the wrong reason.
The first question that we ought to ask is why the Government placed such enormous reliance on the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction. It is clear that the decision to go to war did not follow from a study of the evidence of the existence of those weapons. The right hon. Member for Livingston said that it was the other way round: the decision came first and then the evidence was assembled to justify it. We know that because the key piece of evidence on which the Government relied so much that they put it in the dossier four times—the 45-minute claim—was not available to them when the decision was made but only at the last minute after they decided to produce the dossier.
The reason why the Government based the case for war on Saddam's supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction was, as so often with this Government, presentational. They chose the argument that they believed would maximise support, particularly among their Back Benchers and in the United Nations. They chose it not because they believed it to be true but because it would maximise support. They thought that war to disarm Saddam of weapons of mass destruction would play well with the many Labour Members who have belonged to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and could be expected to support disarmament of all kinds. We know that that did not work: so many of those Members opposed their Government's decision that if this party had not joined the Government in the Lobby they would have been defeated and would have fallen.
The second question that we have to ask is whether, if the Government had known or been willing to accept at the time that there were no weapons of mass destruction available to Saddam, the war would have been legal. I made it clear that I voted for it as a war of regime change and pre-emptive action—a contentious position. Some argue that any war to change a regime is forbidden by international law. That seems a rather odd argument, given that we had already changed the regime of one third of the country. When we did that in Kurdistan and the Marsh Arab areas by military action and overflying, no one seemed to challenge it. If it was right to do that in a third of the country, I cannot see why it should be wrong in the other two thirds.
Others argued that one could not take military action to pre-empt a future threat, as if we should sit here and wait until Tel Aviv had been nuked or Portsmouth poisoned. If we have the power and can take pre-emptive action, there may be occasions when it is justified. The issues need to be established clearly,
because the same arguments may be deployed again with respect to other rogue states in apparent possession of, or threatening to possess, weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Calum MacDonald (Western Isles) (Lab): When we discussed authorising the war in March, I cannot recollect anything being said about regime change or pre-emptive action. The motion simply said that Iraq was in repeated breach of UN resolutions, notably 1441, and Dr. Kay's assessment of the work of the survey group was:
- "In my judgement, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group . . . Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of resolution 1441."
Mr. Lilley: The hon. Gentleman raises an important issue, which concerns the role of the Law Officers, who I suspect played an important part. We have seen their truncated conclusion, but we have never seen the full opinion or the submission on which it was based, and we do not know the extent to which they relied on that submission. That information should be available to the new inquiry, to establish whether the existence of weapons of mass destruction was relied on in their analysis.
We have to question the accountability of the Law Officers. They are very powerful, and once they have opined, a Cabinet is bound by that opinion. No Cabinet could afford to go against such an opinion for fear that it would be found to have done something that its own Law Officers said was illegal. In many cases that is all right, but international law is highly fluid, uncertain and subjective. In asking for an opinion, one is effectively making the Law Officers' subjective assessment binding on Government. We have to ask whether that is the right way to reach conclusions in such uncertain areas.
We need to ask whether Ministers or the intelligence services were to blame if intelligence was wrong. Ministers are responsible even for the advice that they take, so they have a duty to probe, question and evaluate that advice and get it right, as the right hon. Member for Livingston did—and even I, in my humble way, outside, could reach the same correct conclusion. In my experience, the worst decisions in Government are made when Ministers fail to question things because they are as enthusiastic as the officials, and officials fail to draw their attention to the problems, because they perhaps have an interest in heightening the appreciation of a certain risk or threat.
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