Iraq: Future Strategic Relationship

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. That is, of course, a matter for the record. I did not say that I voted against the war, but it was clever of him to pick it up. It was a three-line Whip, and the Whips persuaded me that unless I was going to resign from the Front Bench, it would not be possible for me to vote against the war. A number of my colleagues who were strongly opposed to it resigned their posts, but I accepted the Queen's shilling and continued on the Front Bench. However, I did abstain and wrote, as I think my hon. Friend the Member for North Essex will confirm, an extremely strongly worded internal memo within the Conservative party seeking to persuade it not to support the Government. My record on that is fairly clear. However, that is ancient history. I mentioned it to make the point that despite that fundamental opposition to the war, I am one of those who would agree with most hon. Members who have spoken in saying that getting rid of the vile dictator Saddam Hussein is of course greatly to the benefit both of the people of Iraq and of the people of the world. There is no question about it: the Iraq that we have today is vastly better than the Iraq we had 10 years ago. I am still not convinced that what we did was justifiable under international law, but the end result is much better than the situation we had then. I hope that people will not think that that is a case of winning both sides of the argument. I do not think we had the justification to go in, but none the less my suspicion is that the end result is better than the end result we would have had had we not gone in, if that is not too Irish. The debate is not about why we went into Iraq; it is about the future strategic relationship with Iraq. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) asked an interesting question of the Secretary of State—namely, are we talking about our military connection with Iraq in the future? If that is the case, it is fairly obvious that we do not have one, with the exception of 300 or 400 advisers, naval and military personnel and so on. I suspect that the purpose of the debate is to consider where we see Iraq coming into our strategy with regard to the rest of the world, and I shall return to that matter. There are three pitfalls into which we should not allow ourselves to fall, although a number of hon. Members did fall into them. The first pitfall, which the Secretary of State fell into to a degree, is to stand up and say, ““Didn't we do a fine job in Iraq? Job done. Now we must leave.”” One of the finest speeches that I have heard, certainly in this debate and for quite a long time in the Chamber, was by my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr. Holloway), who exploded that easy conclusion. His chronology of the conflict in Iraq over the past five years exploded the notion that what we did was right, that it was a brilliant campaign for five years, and that we can now pack ourselves on the back and say, ““Job well done. Now we can leave Iraq. Thank goodness for that.”” That notion is entirely wrong. It is not a job well done. An awful lot of fundamental mistakes have been made, and some of the things that we are leaving behind in Iraq are significantly worse than they would have been had we handled events differently. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and hope that if people read nothing else from this debate, they read his speech, which is worthy of a wider audience. It summed up the problems going forward in Iraq.