It is always a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth).
I listened with great interest to the account given by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), who described the read before us as compelling. I have to say that I did not find it as much of a page-turner as he evidently did, but I did get as far as volume 12, which deals with the welfare of those who participated in the Iraq war. That volume brings out a number of key findings, and that is particularly important today, with the publication of the Public Accounts Committee report on service family accommodation, which is less than obliging.
The key findings raise a number of issues that are of importance to my constituents, particularly in relation to inquests involving those who, sadly, died during the conflict. The report points to the huge backlog in inquests, which was evident at the time. If we are to honour the military covenant, we really have to understand the implications of these things for the welfare of families.
However, I am pleased to find in volume 12 that there is also some good news in all of this, and that is to do with the way in which our medical services configured and prepared themselves in the run-up to the conflict. I say that because I was—I have to declare an interest—a member of the Defence Medical Services, and I served in Iraq in late 2003 in a medical capacity. Volume 12 is therefore very much a mixed blessing in terms of the account it gives of the way we prepared for and executed our duties under the military covenant.
I voted against the Iraq war in 2003—it seemed to me at the time that the case had not been made. However, I understand full well that Members on both sides of the House voted in good conscience, one way or the other. In truth, few of us were in full possession of the facts at the time, and most of us made a judgment call. However, of all the many Divisions I have participated in over the past 15 years, that is the one I feel best and most comfortable about.
The situation in 2003 stemmed from the strategic defence review in 1998 and the new chapter added to it two years later, after the 9/11 attack. In that review, we saw the reconfiguration of our armed forces into what was called a “force for good”. In other words, our armed forces would be there not simply for national defence and security, but for something much beyond that—expeditionary things of the sort we saw subsequently to good effect in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. The problem is that that was then extrapolated to Iraq—a much bigger deal—and came up against the sofa government, conspiracy of optimism and group-think that have been referred to, together with the ingrained idea that Saddam must have had weapons of mass destruction and the intent to use them, despite evidence to the contrary and despite wise counsel at the time from a number of sources. Crucially for me, the null hypothesis—the idea that weapons of mass destruction did not exist—was never constructed or tested. That was a huge failing, which I hope the structural changes that have
been put in place subsequently—particularly around the National Security Council—will now make unlikely in the future.
The right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett), who is not in her place, suggested that the concept of a just war, which is familiar to anybody who has been to staff college, is some sort of religious thing, but it fundamentally is not, and it underpins much of our law in this area. It is vital to establish the idea of a just war and to discuss whether this was, in fact, a just war. Chilcot tells us absolutely clearly that military action was not seen as a last resort. Last resort is a fundamental, underpinning precept of a just war. One cannot have a just war if one could have achieved one’s objectives by other means falling short of out-and-out warfare.
For me, that means that the Iraq war was not a just war. That matters—it really matters—because we ask our men and women in uniform to do extraordinary things and authorise them to do remarkable things. They have no choice in the matter, but they have every right to expect that we should make sure that they are not being sent on a fool’s errand or, worse, one of questionable legality or legitimacy. Instead, in March 2003, my constituents and others were dispatched to an expeditionary war that Chilcot painstakingly takes apart as disastrous and unnecessary: a war that was waged despite intelligence and other evidence that was not clear; a war whose lack of planning and provisioning cost brave men their lives; a war that was, in short, sheer bloody chaos. It was the biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez, the consequences of which we are living with today and will do for decades to come.
The author of our part in this believes he is responsible but not to blame. I do not believe that is good enough. We need to be accountable for our actions, and it is not clear to me that the right hon. Gentleman in question has yet been brought to account.
5.36 pm