Should the Iraq war inquiry be held in public? Every sinew of me says yes. As a minister at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office during this period I read many, not all but many of the relevant documents, and had endless conversations with other governments in the period running up the conflict. I am reasonably sure that there is no secret hidden away that will alter anyone’s view of the conflict. Every government I spoke to before the outbreak of the conflict believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. They disagreed over the means to deal with him but neither Jacques Chirac nor Gerhard Schroeder, nor the French or German intelligence agencies questioned Saddam’s desire to develop WMD.
Those who believe it was wrong to take action to enforce UN resolutions and remove Saddam Hussein will rest convinced of their belief. Those who think that removing a dictator and tyrant who had killed 2 million Muslims and gassed his own people will be unlikely to change their minds.
The deaths of Iraqis after the spring of 2003 are attributable to those forces – Jihadi Islamist extremists, Iran-backed Shia militants bent on killing Sunnis, other groups backed by Al Qaeda and those private armies of killers abusing the religion of Islam who have been in place since the 1980s, financed by individuals in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere as part of the global jihad against democracy. This inconvenient truth is ignored by those who want to blame the deaths in Iraq since 2003 on western democracies just as they argue today that the Taliban killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan are the fault of President Obama and his decision to increase US military presence there. I am glad the inquiry will look into the military action against Iraq prior to 2003. Robin Cook, as foreign secretary, put together the coalition that started the bombing of Iraq in 1998 to stay Saddam’s hand in killing Kurds.
The issue is not about historical facts but about political judgement. To listen to Nick Clegg in the Commons yesterday was to hear a man who was not interested in an inquiry into what happened. He, and to be fair to the thousands who marched against the war, have made up their mind. All they want is a confirmation of guilt. Clegg also insisted that politicians should sit on the inquiry. I am not sure in today’s climate that MPs should clamour to be on the commission. Clegg and Cameron may have their placemen in mind, just as I am sure Gordon Brown could find Labour MPs to balance them. But will a ding-dong between party politicians nominated by Clegg or Cameron help?
The other big question is whether those called to give evidence should do so in public and whether they should do so on oath. If the latter, witnesses can reasonably demand to be represented by lawyers as what should be a truth-seeking inquiry becomes more of a court or a tribunal sitting in judgement. If lawyers are involved as in the Saville Inquiry into the Derry Bloody Sunday killings the process will take years. Saville has sat and cost millions in lawyers’ fees. The Derry deaths are dwarfed by the enormity of the Iraq conflict. So for a full public inquiry taking evidence on oath from witnesses buttressed by lawyers opens a vista to a process that can take years and years.
In addition, all the governments and foreign agencies whose papers can be revealed to a commission on inquiry which will not breach confidences would have a very different line if the most confidential communications were to be made public. It is not clear what the legal status is of diplomatic communications transmitted on the basis that they remain confidential. The present inquiry can see all these papers and help form a judgement. I am not sure any government in the world would talk to Britain in trust and in confidence on the basis that its communications were to be made public. So the call for a public inquiry actually vitiates the demands of those making the call. A full public inquiry would be a lawyers’ dream and would not be allowed to disclose vital communications.
That said, I hope the Iraq inquiry does agree to hold some sittings in public and interview key players, if they agree, in public. And for every politician or civil servant questioned I hope Iraqi civil society representatives are allowed to speak. They were ignored by democracy as they suffered under Saddam’s tyranny. They have been ignored by many as they have fallen victim to the all-out assault on the elected Iraqi government by its state-sponsored and jihadist Islamist opponents. Let us hear from the people of Iraq as much as from our own politicians and officials.
What a load of neocon reprintery. Denis, you are a long way to the right of the Democratic Party leadership on this one.
I noticed in all of the glory talk above about how good it has been to remove Saddam that you failed to mention how many have died in comparison, given that we played a part in facilitating the total breakdown in Iraqi civil society, not to mention polishing off large numbers of civilians and the infrastructure which preserves them in the initial ‘shock and awe’ scenario.
Thousands of innocent Iraqis are still living without basic resources such as electricity and clean water, even though this conflict has lasted longer than World War Two.
The density of killing since the neutering of Iraqi has been a murder rate Saddam could not have even dreamed of.
And where the Iraqi economy would once have been able to remedy much of this situation, the profits of its vast national resources are now being sucked away by foreign companies under an American enforced oil privatisation law. Which makes an argument from the point of view of the extreme left an eerily credible one.
I can understand that these things might not be your moral priority now, or have been your moral priority before the war. Fair enough, we disagree.
But your attack on the straw men of Saddam support (the vast majority of anti-war people had nothing but contempt for him) is something I, as someone who opposed the war passionately, find rather insulting.
Bar perhaps George Galloway (and I mean perhaps, George’s lawyers), we all believed Saddam should have been got rid of. The question was not ‘remove Saddam, yay or nay’. Opposition was on the basis of how he should be removed, and who should be the people doing it.
On WMD, it was quite clear to me when the US refused to re-introduce weapons inspections (at the request of the Iraqi dictatorship, no less) that the WMD argument was hokum; and there is a whole separate debate about whether the resolution you cite gave legal authority for the use of force, particularly given that for it to have done so it would have possibly needed legal priority over the United Nations charter.
In my view, supporters of the war have little moral or legal ground to stand on, but it is even worse than that when people on weak ground themselves dismiss the arguments of their opposition in such a crass fashion.
Though your arguments seem weak to me, you won’t find me using arguments equivalent to your implication that the bulk of anti-war people support dictatorial brutalism.
It is precisely an opposition to brutalism that leads people to hope that the appalling spectacles of shock and awe, white phosphorous, societal dismantlement and forced privatisation from and occupying state are never repeated.
I promise that had paragraphs in when I typed it.
Denis MacShane is absolutely right about the Iraq war, Tom’s opposition to it is like those who are against cancers being cut out for fear of post-operative complications. Yes there were complications in the post-war period caused mainly by the sheer depravity of an enemy targeting civilians and anything that made the lives of the Iraqi people better., But make no mistake about it, Saddam’s regime was like a cancer; it might have be contained for a certain period but it could break out again at any time in an even more virulent form. The point about the war, as Olver Kamm has noted is that we were able invade at a time of our choosing. Had we left it, as the anti-war movement would have preferred, there is little doubt that that Saddam would have developed his WMD capability to a point where he could have become invulnerable to attack (as North Korea might now be) and therefore be free to continue his repression of the Shias and Kurds behind closed doors. The anti-war brigade may have slept happier in their beds but I’m not so sure about the Iraqis.