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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Michael Lord): Order. The hon. Lady has had her eight minutes.

7.3 pm

Tony Wright (Cannock Chase) (Lab): There has been a certain amount of soul searching today, and I am afraid that I am about to indulge in a little more. Those of us who could not support the Government on military action had a duty to test their case not at its weakest but at its strongest. We had to set the bar as high
 
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as possible. Had we set it as low as possible, confining ourselves to details of intelligence, we can easily see why we would have run into trouble. I always wanted to make sure, however, that I tested the Government's case at its strongest. I listened carefully to the Prime Minister many times, as he spoke about the new era and

"the security threat of the 21st century".

The connection between rogue states, proliferation and terrorism meant that one had to draw a line in the sand and take a stand. I took that case seriously and was particularly anxious not to be associated with people who were naturally deemed to be in a different camp. I did not want to be thought anti-American, and certainly did not want to be thought an appeaser who wanted to sustain a vile dictator. The Government's case therefore had to be tested at its strongest.

I read the Butler report to help me to understand the policy considerations that informed the decisions that we were asked to make. Members have found that help in different parts of "What the Butler Saw", and I found it in paragraph 429, which says that in spring 2002 the Government considered two options for future action. One was a toughening of containment and the other was a move towards military action. The report says that regime change would not be lawful, and noted the difficulty in achieving UN acceptance of military action. It says that the UN

"would need to be convinced that Iraq was in breach of its obligations; that such proof would need to be incontrovertible and of large-scale activity; but that the intelligence then available was insufficiently robust to meet that criterion."

It goes on to say that that formed the background to the Prime Minister's meeting with President Bush at Crawford on 6 and 7 April 2002.

I fear that, at that point, a strategic judgment or decision was made, making it necessary to mobilise intelligence to sustain it. As the intelligence became thinner—we know from Butler that that is the case—the advocacy for military action became stronger. Eventually, that contradiction impelled the House of Commons to action, forcing it to take a view. We can see that more clearly now than we did at the time. The Prime Minister did his very best to keep the international community together, and would have liked to resolve the situation without military action. However, President Bush and his Administration could not walk away from Iraq without taking military action. The Prime Minister could have done so—it would have been a kind of victory for him—but for President Bush, it would have been a catastrophic, humiliating defeat, given everything that he had said about the United Nations and international policy on Iraq.

When former President Clinton, who was in the country last week, spoke about those matters, he paid great tribute to the Prime Minister and his efforts to keep the international community together, but he also said that in retrospect it was clear that we should have allowed the inspectors to continue their job so that we could establish beyond peradventure whether Iraq had been successfully disarmed or not. If we had established that the policy had worked, I believe that the Government would not have come back to the House for a decision. There was not a great distance between people holding different positions.
 
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Those of us who took a different view of military action were persuaded that it, or the threat of military action, was required to sustain the United Nations' position, but we believed that that position was working. It now seems that that was the case, and we could have kept the international community intact and disarmed Saddam. Indeed, we could have flooded Iraq with human rights inspectors, as that was rightly a consideration. That is my understanding of the policy considerations.

Mr. MacDonald: That was a key point of dispute between us at the time of the decision to go to war. What makes my hon. Friend think that another two months of inspections would have clarified whether Iraq had disarmed or not, when six years of inspections had not clarified that, one way or the other?

Tony Wright: The answer is that we had embarked upon a process that had that at its centre. What we did not do was to test whether it had worked or not. We now know that it had worked. That is the fundamental conclusion.

I have one more point to make, which came out of my reading of Butler. It is important for the House to reflect on it. As I read the report and many of the things that Butler said, I thought it was a vindication of what we sometimes call the awkward squad. A theme of Butler is that we did not have enough people asking the right questions as the process went along.

Mr. Gordon Prentice: The Cabinet!

Tony Wright: I will do the list, if my hon. Friend does not mind.

We did not have the right people in Cabinet asking the right questions as the process went along. We did not have the right people among the official Opposition asking the right questions as it went along. We did not have the right people in the JIC asking the right questions as it went along. One of the few heroes in the story, by the way, is Dr. Brian Jones, who was a member of the awkward squad and did ask some of the questions.

What Butler says in his recommendations—of course, mandarins do not talk about awkward squads, but I translate the high mandarin into our kind of language—is that not only do we need the awkward squad in those places, but we need to give the awkward squad institutional and constitutional protection to ensure that those considerations are raised at each point in the process. That is embedded in a number of Lord Butler's specific recommendations.

I conclude by saying that we shall never know the answer to some of—

Mrs. Mahon: May I tell my hon. Friend that that was an excellent speech? He spelled out everything I would have wanted to say, had I been called. Will he reflect on this: had we known, about 20,000 Iraqis might still be living, we might not be poised on the verge of a civil war, and the entire huge tragedy might not have unfolded in front of us? I take my hon. Friend's point about flooding Iraq with human rights monitors. We had Saddam on his knees and weakened and we could have done that.

Tony Wright: Yes, I take my hon. Friend's point.
 
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Only the historians will tell us what really happened. It is only they who will get to see the papers. It is only they who will get the real evidence that an inquiry might see, which can tease out the policy considerations, what happened when and who said what to whom. Only they will tell us the origins of the military action and what its real consequences were. All we can do is say that we probably did make a serious mistake in what we did; but having done it, we have an obligation to try to make Iraq a rather better place now than it was before.

7.13 pm

Mr. John Baron (Billericay) (Con): If the Prime Minister's only mistake in this affair is that we went to war even though it is now clear that there are no weapons of mass destruction, it would have been right to question only his wisdom. However, because it is also now clear from the Butler report that there was a very wide margin indeed between the extent to which the intelligence services qualified their remarks when reporting to the Prime Minister and what the Prime Minister told Parliament and the country, it is also right to question his integrity and credibility.

The issue at the time was not whether regime change was desirable; it was whether Iraq's weapons of mass destruction presented a danger. It is now clear to any objective observer that the Prime Minister did not accurately relay the intelligence at his disposal. As a result, the country was duped into a war under false pretences. For it is clear that the Butler report has confirmed that the JIC's intelligence reports during 2002 were full of qualifications and reservations, yet the Prime Minister clearly stated that there was no doubt that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction justified war. But we know that that was not the case.

In justifying the case for war, the Prime Minister excluded those reservations and, with the zeal of a barrister determined to win his case in court, claimed that the facts had been established beyond doubt. Even Lord Butler, operating within the limited remit of his brief, believes that the omission of the intelligence qualifications was "significant".

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