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Mr. Michael Meacher (Oldham, West and Royton) (Lab): The hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) has anguished his conscience before us and has portrayed the process and the leadership that took us to war in a characteristically generous and magnanimous way. I am sure that he is deeply sincere, but we have been taken to war on grounds that many people now regard as deceptive. The issue in this debate more than in any other discussion that has taken place is accountability. That is now paramount.

The most striking characteristic of the Butler report, as many hon. Members have said, is the disjunction between analysis and judgment. It catalogues a litany of failures and then pulls all its punches by declaring that in effect no one is to blame. George Tenet was sacked as head of the CIA for intelligence failures over Iraq, but John Scarlett, who is responsible for exactly the same intelligence failures in this country, is still recommended by the report for promotion, despite all the damning evidence in the report to the contrary. It is a very British establishment charade, but as an exercise in accountability, which is the crux of what is needed, it is completely unacceptable.

The facts, which I think are no longer seriously in dispute, are stark. The United States went to war over Iraq both because of oil and for reasons of American control of the middle east region, set out clearly in a "Project for the New American Century" document published for the Bush election team in September 2000. As we now know from United States Treasury Secretary O'Neill, that war was planned from the first days of the Bush Administration. Then 9/11 provided the pretext for launching it, as the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) said.
 
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The United Kingdom went to war over Iraq because President Bush wanted British support. At the Crawford summit in April 2002, the Prime Minister in effect committed to providing that, publicly pledging to stand shoulder to shoulder with President Bush. From that point on, the assessment of intelligence data conflated analysis into advocacy in order to find a rationale for the war that had already been decided on for other reasons.

David Winnick: If my right hon. Friend whom I respect and he should not take this remark personally—felt so strongly at the time, the inevitable question, which he realises I am going to ask, is: why did he not resign from the Government?

Mr. Meacher: I believed what the Prime Minister said so categorically and authoritatively. I thought that he spoke with great authority, and like so many others in this House and the country, I thought that he had access to a repository of intelligence data to which none of us has access; and that if he was so certain and spoke with such assurance, we had to accept what he said. I am quite prepared to admit that I also supported the war because I have long believed passionately in the principle of military intervention for humanitarian purposes. Yes, I believe in that, but I am deeply uneasy, as I was at the time, that there are no international criteria that give legitimacy for taking such action in many other cases, as has been pointed out.

Paul Flynn (Newport, West) (Lab): The Butler report makes it clear that what are described as excellent papers were prepared with all the caveats in them for the Cabinet Committees and members of the Cabinet to see. Butler says that they did not see those papers, and that that impaired their ability to make a correct judgment. Obviously my right hon. Friend did not see the papers, but was he aware of their existence? Does he think that, if he had read them, he might have come to a different conclusion?

Mr. Meacher: We all have to assume that, if that material had been made available, a different judgment would have been made. There is no doubt about that.

Mr. Gummer: Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that he, like many others, thought that the Prime Minister knew more than he was able to say? Is not the real problem that it all turns out that we knew more than he was able to say?

Mr. Meacher: I think that that is the case. Indeed, if I can develop my argument, I shall go on to say that that is exactly the point to which I think the House needs to give its attention.

The decision having been made to go to war, Whitehall provided a briefing that any rationale depended on being able to show incontrovertible evidence of "large-scale" activity by Iraq in weapons of mass destruction. However, because the UN inspectors left in 1998, the evidence was almost non-existent. That is the root of the problem. The CIA admitted that its resources on Iraq were "thin", and the JIC had already
 
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concluded in March 2002, as has been repeated many times in the Chamber, that intelligence on Iraq's WMD and ballistic programmes was "sporadic and patchy".

The key point is that, in the evidence put together over the crucial five months from the Crawford summit until the publication of the September dossier to justify the war, we now know that all the specific data were flawed. As we now know, the inventory of chemical and biological weapons and weapons parts that the Prime Minister presented to the House dealt with weapons unaccounted for since the first Gulf war, 12 years before. They were not presented as weapons unaccounted for, however; they were presented as weapons that were believed definitely to be currently possessed by Saddam.

Mr. Bercow: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Meacher: I shall not give way any further.

The 45-minute claim referred to battlefield nuclear weapons, but the impression was given that the threat went much wider. Accordingly, when it was reported thus—this was exactly as we saw it presented—no attempt was made to correct the misreporting, despite the belief that it was wrong. The claim that Iraq tried to buy 500 tonnes of yellowcake from Niger was still included in the dossier, despite the fact that it was known that a visit made to Niger by a former US ambassador six months before had confirmed that the claim was completely bogus.

The Prime Minister claimed to the House in February last year—perhaps my hon. Friends will listen to this point, as I think that it is quite important, and it has received virtually no attention—that the defection of Hussein Kamal, Saddam's son in law, in 1995 had revealed

"the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear programme".—[Official Report, 25 February 2003; Vol. 400, c. 123.]

But as we now know from a Newsweek exclusive a few weeks later, what Hussein Kamal actually said in his debriefing was exactly the opposite:

"all weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed."

As Butler has pointed out so poignantly, all the ifs and buts, qualifications and caveats in the raw intelligence data were dropped from the dossier, while the positive allegations were distinctly over-hyped. Sources were treated as reliable when they clearly were not, and they were not checked with the expertise of intelligence staff.

Anyone who reads appendix B of the Butler report, which I think is excellently set out, can see set out step by step how the process of massaging and accretion steadily accumulated, until we were finally told in the September dossier that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programme was "active, detailed and growing", and that the intelligence on which that judgment was based was "extensive, detailed and authoritative", when in fact, Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction at all.

Nobody—and I think that this is true—is doubting the good faith of the Prime Minister or that he sincerely believed in the policies that he was pursuing. He believed in them passionately, and I think that everyone recognises that, but that is not the issue. The issue is his judgment and his over-eagerness to take us into a war on
 
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grounds that far exceeded the available evidence. The issue now is accountability, and I think that that is now the issue for this House to exorcise. One cannot take this country into a war under false pretences and then proclaim, as Butler does, that nobody can be held responsible.

Over the Gilligan affair, which is utterly trivial by comparison, the Government made it clear that they expected heads to roll—and they did. On this matter, there are two central issues on which I think that those responsible must be held to account. One is the presentation of the evidence that persuaded the House to agree to war. Being sinuous with the truth may not be lying, but it is certainly not open or honest. Presenting a seriously misleading account of the facts may not be lying, but it is not truthful or straightforward either. The second central issue is the framework of governance that allowed the decision to be taken. Those are the key issues, and a debate on a motion for the Adjournment is not an adequate format—

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