Iraq: Future Strategic Relationship

I know that my hon. Friend has had important engagements elsewhere and has unfortunately not had the opportunity to be in the Chamber for the whole debate. I am glad that I have given him the chance to intervene on me twice even though he has not been here. The situation of women and Christians has been extensively covered in the debate. My answer to my hon. Friend is yes, the lot of women and Christians in Iraq is vastly better than it was for dozens of years under that vile dictator Saddam Hussein. If my hon. Friend is implying that the lot of women and Christians is worse today, I challenge him to support his allegation. It is simply not true. Of course the lot of women and Christians, and that of most Iraqis, is vastly better under the present regime than it was under Saddam Hussein. The second pitfall into which we should avoid falling, and one or two hon. Members moved gently in this direction, is to say that all these things are fog of war—that why we went into Iraq in the first place is ancient history; and that some of the things mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham just happen, that we should not spend too much time on them and that we must move on. I do not believe that that is correct. I believe that the five or six years of the run-up to the conflict in Iraq and the conflict itself are an enormously significant part of our civilisation and history. I think it important for us to analyse what we did and especially what we did not do, partly because we risk doing something similar in Afghanistan and elsewhere—possibly in Pakistan. Who knows? We should analyse extremely carefully what we did not do, paying particular attention to the lack of a reconstruction plan when we went into Iraq in 2003, and we should do so in public. There should be a full public inquiry as soon as possible. The Government seem to be hiding behind the notion that it is not possible to hold an inquiry while the troops are still in Iraq. They did not adopt that stance in relation to the hugely expensive and detailed inquiry into Bloody Sunday: although our troops were still very much deployed in Northern Ireland, they decided to proceed with it. We are now committed to removing our troops from Iraq by the summer, and I hope that the Government will move extremely speedily to ensure that a detailed analysis takes place—before the House rises for the summer recess, at the very least—of exactly what happened in Iraq, and how we have handled the situation since then. As for the third pitfall, we should avoid the temptation to breathe a sigh of relief, something I have detected in some of the Government's public pronouncements in particular. People have been saying, in a vague way, ““Whew! Thank goodness that is all over. Now we can move forward. We may have to deal with Afghanistan, of course, but Iraq is under control. We are worried about Gaza and the Palestinians, but, although we had an awful time in Iraq, that is now dealt with. It's over and finished.”” That strikes me as a fundamental mistake. There are still huge elements of terrorism in Iraq: at this moment, terrorist networks of all kinds are developing and growing there. The country remains one of the conduits through which a large part of the drugs trade enters the west, and where there are drugs there is an enormous amount of money and criminal activity. The notion that Iraq represents a job done and we can now take it easy is extremely foolish. It is some 80 or 100 years since Churchill concluded that the Mesopotamian question was unanswerable, and it is as unanswerable today as it was then. If we ignore the place—if we turn our back on it and say, ““That's that; let's move on to something else””—we shall be asking for trouble, and Iraq could become the kind of place that it was before and under Saddam. Iraq is enormously important to us strategically. On one side is Iran, with Afghanistan beyond it; Pakistan and India are currently looking at each other across their nuclear buttons; there is currently Iranian support for Hamas in Gaza; and Iraq stands in the middle of all that. We hope that it is beginning to look like a reasonably stable, reasonably sensible nation, for we desperately need a stable Iraqi regime in the middle of the huge inferno which may erupt across the middle east, but we can achieve that only if from now on we provide in spades the diplomatic, political, economic and commercial support that we have been discussing. We must support Iraq in ways we support almost no other nation in the world for many years to come. Only if we do that can we hope to allow the professional classes to run their country again. After all, Iraq has always been a very professional nation, containing a group of competent, professional, intelligent people who have not been allowed to do their jobs for many years. If we provide the commercial, diplomatic and political support that they need, Iraq will stand some chance of becoming a stable, sensible, liberal democracy in the middle of a troubled region. I believe that at this moment, as we withdraw militarily from Iraq, we have an opportunity to hand the place over to the Iraqis in a sensible, democratic and supportive way. It is a superb opportunity, and we must not let it slip through our grasp.