I think it is entirely true to say that there is a nobility in the soldier’s craft and the soldier’s sacrifice, and we are grateful for that to this day. We see in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, with the humanitarian work that was done there, acts that are absolutely defensible and in which we can take a great pride. We have had a marvellous military history, and much of it showed the best of human nature. I do not disagree with the hon. Gentleman on that.
But what are we learning today? We should look at what happened in this Chamber in 2006, when a decision was made to send troops into Helmand at a time when only half a dozen of our soldiers had been killed there. We had already been there for nearly six years, since 2001. We went in in the belief that not a shot would be fired. The result was that 450 of our soldiers died there. We have yet to face up to the reality of that. Was it a mistake by us? The Chilcot report came out. A year later, Lord Chilcot has had to repeat some of the lessons that he drew from it, because those lessons have been glossed over. There has been a spinning of the reality of his conclusions. That is partly because so many people in this Chamber at the time were part of a mistake in our joining the Iraq war. We could not stop the war happening, but we could have stopped Britain’s involvement in it, which would have avoided the deaths of 179 of our soldiers.