Debate on the Address

The Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) made a thoughtful speech, and I agreed with much of it. There has been a remarkable consensus across the Chamber and it has been a real pleasure to listen to many of the speeches. However, I risk shattering that consensus a little by taking issue with the Foreign Secretary’s statement that there have been some 60 debates on Iraq since 2003, in response to my questioning why the Prime Minister does not come to the House and lead a debate on current and future policy on Iraq. Most of the debates that the Foreign Secretary mentioned looked back into the past. I ask the Minister to understand the deep sense of frustration in the House because the Government refuse to allow a full and proper debate on the future of Iraq, as illustrated by the number of speeches that have dealt with Iraq in this debate. It is absolutely disgraceful that the Prime Minister refuses to come to the Chamber and discuss current policy when he is more than prepared to contribute to the Iraq study group’s deliberations and to other deliberations around the world. It was the Prime Minister who led us to war, and given the deteriorating situation in Iraq it should be the Prime Minister who comes to the House and leads a debate on the subject. Everybody outside this place is discussing the issue, including politicians in the US. We in this House need urgently to be part of that debate, yet the Prime Minister refuses to make himself answerable to the House of Commons and that has to be wrong. That is wrong for a number of reasons, the first being that the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate. Whether one agrees with the Iraq body count estimate of 47,000 Iraqi civilians killed or The Lancet estimate of 650,000 civilian dead since 2003, it cannot be disputed that the situation is getting worse. October was the worst month on record. Meanwhile, each week thousands of people are being displaced in Iraq by sectarian violence, and they are then gravitating towards their own ethnic groups. Whatever policy we are pursuing in Iraq, it is clearly failing—yet the Prime Minister still refuses to come to the House and account for Government policy. The policy must be wrong when we consider the extraordinary intervention of General Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the British Army. We should not underestimate that. From their earliest training, soldiers are taught not to disagree with or contradict the elected Government of the day, yet Britain’s top general did just that. He made it clear that the presence of British troops in some parts of Iraq is exacerbating the situation. He also said that the Army was stretched to its limit and meeting challenges on the hoof. The Government must tackle that. Why are troop deployments allowed to continue when they exacerbate matters? Why did the general feel that he had to air his concerns to the media? Is there a lack of communication between the Army and the Government? That has implications for servicemen’s lives and Parliament has a right to ask the Government to tackle those matters. Again, the Prime Minister refuses to come to the House and be answerable for Government policy. The policy has got to be wrong because there is no clear strategy for moving forward. At a press conference last month, General George Casey and the US ambassador in Iraq pushed for a national compact. Almost simultaneously, our Foreign Secretary conceded in an interview at least the possibility that Iraq could be broken up into three parts. Then, President Bush stated that Iraqi forces could take over in a year. Meanwhile, the Iraq study group is apparently seriously considering suggesting that Syria and Iran become part of the solution. Having listened carefully to the Foreign Secretary today, I remain unsure of the British Government’s position on each option. Let me be clear: like others who spoke before me, I am not in the camp that supports an immediate withdrawal or believes that we should cut and run. That would simply compound the original error of invading. However, we need a clear strategy, which is currently lacking. Simply saying that we will stay until the job is done or that we will not cut and run is not a strategy. What exactly is the job? Clearly, the original US vision of a liberal western-style democracy has failed. The Chief of the General Staff has clearly stated that we should lower our ambitions in what we hope to achieve. What is the objective? What is the job? By not answering the questions and not leading a full debate in Parliament on the matter, the impression is given that the Prime Minister is simply ducking the issue and that we shall stay until President Bush gives us the all-clear to leave. That is not a sound policy for this country. We must also remember that a strategy is not the same thing as a timetable. Parliament needs to press the Government and the Prime Minister on their thinking on those matters. The decision to go to war belongs to the past. Given that the Prime Minister’s justification for war—Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction—has been proven false and that matters are deteriorating, there is no hypocrisy or opportunism in wanting to hold him to account on the current position. More important are the present and the future. Parliament is failing in its duty if it does not question the Government about a policy that is costing many lives and clearly not going according to plan. Indeed, unless we have a full and proper debate led by the Prime Minister, Parliament runs the risk of repeating its original mistake in not examining or scrutinising the evidence closely enough when it followed the Executive’s will to go to war. The issue has been given added urgency by the growing evidence to suggest that our invasion and bungled occupation of Iraq exacerbates the terrorist threat in the UK and overseas. We have seen various reports in this country and the US, as reported in The New York Times, which have not been contradicted or denied by the respective Governments, suggesting that the link between continued occupation and terrorism is very real. US and British policy in this region as a whole has been marked, I would suggest, by double standards, poor assessment of intelligence and bloodshed over the years. The Prime Minister tries to justify our involvement in Iraq by saying that Saddam Hussein has been removed, but we cannot go goose stepping around the world and invading countries because we think that they may present a threat and then, on discovering that they do not, justifying our actions by claiming that the world is now a safer place. That is the law of the jungle: it is illegal and contravenes the United Nations convention. One day we will have a foreign policy of which we can be proud—one that will take a principled stand on what is good for the peoples of the region and good for peace around the world. It will be one that will not slavishly follow the whims of a particular faction in the White House, which cannot even muster international support. I speak as someone who respects the United States and its past accomplishments. For all those reasons, I believe that we need a full debate so that Parliament can properly assess the current situation in Iraq and future policy options. If the Prime Minister can discuss the position with the Iraq study group, he should be prepared to come to the House of Commons and discuss it here. As I say, it is an absolute disgrace that he refuses to do so. I just hope, Madam Deputy Speaker, that we do not have to wait too long before that happens.