Iraq Inquiry — House of Lords, 2016-07-12
Topic: International Affairs
Frank Ashcroft Judd (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, it has been a fascinating debate and I want to make two personal observations about certain contributions. First, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Owen—I had the stimulating experience of working as his Minister of State at the Foreign Office in the 1970s—how interesting it was to hear his description of how he has changed his position. I also want to put very firmly on the record how outstanding the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, was. Although it may not have been comfortable for everybody to listen to, it was a speech that we would be very foolish not to take extremely seriously Sir John Chilcot has, rightly, produced a report that has proved to be very important to the families of the bereaved, and indeed to those who, with awful wounds, continue to fight to make a life for themselves in the aftermath of the war. It has brought all kinds of comfort and encouragement. We cannot say often enough how much we owe those people. They are the responsibility of all of us in Parliament and we must never forget that. However, I am glad that the Chilcot report has also drawn attention to the number of casualties in Iraq, because they too are our responsibility in this House, and we cannot escape that. That is why this kind of analysis is so important There has been an argument about whether the war was legal or illegal. What is absolutely clear from the report is that it far from lacked the moral and legal authority it should have had. We cannot have it both ways: if we want to be a principal player in international affairs, the UN is obviously going to be crucial, and as we like to emphasise the importance of our role on the Security Council it is doubly important to take it seriously. But it is absolutely clear, on any reading, that the UN was not taken as profoundly seriously as it should have been and was seen as an inconvenience which had to be handled I also like the way the report has brought out illustrations of the challenges that were clear for all prepared to face up to them. There was, of course, the forensic challenging of Robin Cook; that existed in the party’s own ranks, but there was more than that. I was very troubled, and said so at the time, about the rubbishing of Dr Blix, an honourable, committed and fine international civil servant who was doing an outstanding job—as was totally proved in the aftermath. Part of the reason that I so much appreciated the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, is that I was also uncomfortable that we were rubbishing the French. I hold no brief for the French Government of the time but I thought their position was abundantly clear. They wanted to let the inspectors finish their job and bring the results of that work to the Security Council and for it to decide in light of that It was not only Dr Blix and his team saying that the evidence was not there; Mohamed El Baradei from UNMOVIC also could not see it. Again, he was derided; he has been totally vindicated. Within our own Government, there was a courageous woman in the legal department of the Foreign Office who took the situation so seriously that she did the honourable thing and resigned—that was something to be taken pretty seriously Something that particularly troubled me at the time was a result of approaching Geoff Hoon at a meeting. I asked whether we were getting into a situation that we would not be able to pull out from because of the vast deployment of apparatus which was a wasting asset because time was not on our side and we would have to use it. He said to me—I do not mind repeating it in the House—"Oh, Frank, come off it, we can stop the operation as easily as go forward with it". I went away from that deeply disturbed The counterproductivity of the war was never taken as seriously as it should have been. There was an easy phrase: "collateral damage". But each person killed was a real person with a real family and real connections, and quite apart from the suffering and agony caused by that, for which we should be concerned, there was its political impact. When an American general actually said, "We don’t do body counts", I thought that what we were doing was so counterproductive it was not true On the special relationship, I will say only the following. I worked for some years as a member of Harold Wilson’s team as one of his Parliamentary Private Secretaries. We have only to look to his resolute refusal to be drawn in to military action in the Vietnam War to see that doing so did not in any way damage the special relationship. I also think of when I was serving with my then boss, the noble Lord, Lord Owen, and a quite senior American diplomat I knew came to see me at the Foreign Office, asking for a private conversation. In that conversation he was very candid. He said, "Frank, you people should know that in a way many of us in the States respect the French more than you because even though they are difficult they have views and positions. But you are always moving so fast to be more American than the Americans that you are actually shutting down arguments and analyses within our Administration. It’s not helpful" In the end, this is about people: it is about judgment, character and what strong leadership is and is not. It is about recognising that strong leadership is that which can work well in a collegiate setting—primus inter pares—and can take other people’s views seriously. It is about not always looking for supporting evidence for your prejudices but looking to challenges and meeting those as well as any other part of your responsibility.