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Sir John Stanley: Let me finish. If that was the deal that was done, that should most emphatically have been disclosed to the House of Commons on 18 March last year.
Mike Gapes: The right hon. Gentleman has said that going to war to change the regime would be illegal. Is he saying that, when this Government went to war in Kosovo, that was illegal without a United Nations resolution, that the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia was illegal, and that the Tanzanian intervention in Uganda was illegal? Is it not more complicated than is being suggested?
Sir John Stanley: The answer to the hon. Gentleman's specific question on Kosovo is that the war in Kosovo was legal because it was justified in international law to prevent a looming humanitarian disaster—that is how it was justified by the Government. That was not the justification for the intervention in Iraq. I would have no complaint if the Prime Minister had come to the House and said, "We are seeking the House's approval for going to war to change the regime, even though it is not legal. We are seeing whether the House would support us on that basis."
I turn to the issue of the intelligence. The right hon. Member for Livingston said that we should never go to war on the basis of an intelligence assessment, but this is the one war in modern times in which there was no incontrovertible, factual event such as an invasion or looming humanitarian disaster. There was only the basis of an intelligence assessment.
The Government have exposed themselves to some genuine criticism on two scores in particular. First, this Government, for whom the Prime Minister ultimately has to take responsibility, have interleaved the machinery of intelligence with the machinery of presentation in a way that has happened under no previous Government, Labour or Conservative. The Select Committee on Foreign Affairs highlighted that aspect at a relatively early stage, in our report of July last year. We drew attention to the fact that Alastair Campbell was chairing an intelligence committee, and we said that that was quite wrong.
In addition, it is extremely illuminating to see what has emerged from the e-mail traffic between No. 10 and the Joint Intelligence Committee that has now been publicised both in the Hutton report and the Butler report. Although sofa government has all the supposed benefits of no minutes and therefore not too much in the way of personal accountability for decision taking, the e-mail traffic has exposed in a real way how this Government have operated.
One of the most significant e-mails was sent on 11 September 2002 by a member of the JIC assessment staff, who sent the following to the intelligence agencies:
"Dear all
We have now received comments back from No 10 on the first draft of the dossier. Unsurprisingly they have further questions and areas they would like expanded."
Those areas were listed. He then came to item No. 4—and I hope that the House will listen carefully, as this is meant to be a process in which the participation of No. 10 related only to presentation:
"Can we say how many chemical and biological weapons Iraq currently has by type! If we can't give weapons numbers can we give any idea on the quantity of agents available!"
I suggest that that is not presentation, but political pressure for intelligence information. In no circumstances should that be allowed to happen. The e-mail ends by stating:
"No 10 through the chairman want the document to be as strong as possible within the bounds of available intelligence. This is therefore a last (!) call for any items of intelligence that agencies think can and should be included."
When I read those words, they conjured up in my mind a slightly manic intelligence version of the parable of the rich man's feast, in which the intelligence agencies were asked to go out into the highways and byways to search for every available scrap of intelligence to be invited into the September dossier. That is no way to run the interface between Government and the intelligence machine.
I thought that Mr. Michael Herman, former secretary of the JIC, hit the nail on the head in that excellent "Panorama" programme that went out recently:
"I suspect that if the Joint Intelligence Committee gets too close to ministers, then there is this temptation of providing intelligence to please."
I fear that that is what may have happened here.
Finally, on the question of ministerial scrutiny, I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks. The degree of scrutiny of the intelligence leaves much to be desired, not least on the 45-minute claim. How extraordinary and reprehensible it is that the Prime Minister took this country to war without having asked to which Iraqi weapons system the 45-minute WMD claim related. That is unbelievable, and I would have to say that it is gross negligence. Talking about negligence, that information was known by the chairman of the JIC, Mr. Scarlett, back in September 2002, before the war started, and by the Secretary of State for Defence, and neither of them told the Prime Minister. I believe that that is very serious indeed.
4.54 pm
Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow) (Lab): On 26 September 2002, Peter Brookes, the cartoonist of The Times, depicted me in my place in my Chamber—as I am at the moment—holding up a copy of "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government" and exploding:
"Why didn't it make the Booker fiction prize shortlist?"
I say that because there has been a great deal of hindsight. Some of us suspected the dossier from the word go. In my case, that was partly because I had been to Iraq in 1993 and 1998 and thought it impossible that that much run-down and disorganised community could offer any kind of threat.
It is also a matter of fact that I asked 133 questions—mostly attempted orals—of the Prime Minister between 1997 and the present day on Iraq. I say that not because I think that my views or those of my friends should have been accepted, but because surely that should have led
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to proper scrutiny. One must ask oneself what is the effect of all the activity of Members of the House of Commons. There are two relatively junior Ministers, and not one member of the Cabinet, in the Chamber for what is billed as a key debate.
I suspect that part of the problem with the ineffectiveness of Parliament is to be found in paragraph 611 of the Butler report—my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) read out the first part of it, but did not complete the second part. The second part of the paragraph says:
"However, we are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the Government's procedures which we saw in the context of policy-making towards Iraq risks reducing the scope for informed collective political judgement. Such risks are particularly significant in a field like the subject of our Review, where hard facts are inherently difficult to come by and the quality of judgement is accordingly all the more important."
The fact of the matter is that it was the policy objectives that drove the intelligence, whereas the intelligence should have driven the policy objectives—the situation was wrong vice versa. The dossier was really part of a post-decision-making process, and the Prime Minister's statement on its publication simply reinforced the impression of more authoritative intelligence than that which in fact existed.
I fear that the situation in Iraq has become a war of liberation and that, for many, we are the enemy. I wish that I shared the Prime Minister's confidence in Dr. Allawi.
The question is what is to happen now. We cannot go on acting as if nothing has happened. The Butler report is almost like that onion that one peels—the more one looks at it, the more serious it becomes. We simply cannot have business as usual, and even if we wanted it, the daily news from Iraq would not allow it.
Ten years' leadership of the Labour party is enough for any person, so the Prime Minister should really consider making way for someone else in such circumstances, and against the background of Butler, and set in motion the due processes of the party.
I end by recalling when I sat in my place in the Chamber on 17 June 1963 and listened as a very young MP to the then right hon. Member for Flint, West—Nigel Birch was his name—offering Harold Macmillan the words of the poet Browning from "The Lost Leader":
"Let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation and pain.
Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again!"
That is the consequence of the Butler report.
4.59 pm
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