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Disarmament DocumentationBack to Disarmament Documentation 'I am bound to say that I was surprised by that answer', former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook on Tony Blair and the '45 minute' claim, February 4Excerpt from a Debate in the House of Commons on the Hutton Inquiry Report, February 4, 2004. 4 Feb 2004 : Column 772 Richard Ottaway (Croydon, South) (Con): The Prime Minister says that all the intelligence about the 45 minutes was made available. As he will be well aware, it has subsequently emerged that this related to battlefield weapons or small-calibre weaponry. In the eyes of many, if that information had been available, those weapons might not have been described as weapons of mass destruction threatening the region and the stability of the world. When did the Prime Minister know that information? In particular, did he know it when the House divided on 18 March? The Prime Minister : No. I have already indicated exactly when this came to my attention. It was not before the debate on 18 March last year. The hon. Gentleman says that a battlefield weapon would not be a weapon of mass destruction, but if there were chemical, biological or nuclear battlefield weapons, they most certainly would be weapons of mass destruction. The idea that their use would not threaten the region's stability I find somewhat eccentric... 4 Feb 2004 : Column 825 4.10 pm Mr. Robin Cook (Livingston) (Lab): In nothing that I have said in the House or outside it about Iraq have I ever questioned the good faith with which the Prime Minister believed in his case. I therefore welcome unreservedly the clear conclusion of Lord Hutton that the Prime Minister did not lie. Indeed, if I may say so to my colleagues, my frustration in those last few months before the war was not any suspicion that my right hon. Friend was acting duplicitously, but the sheer 4 Feb 2004 : Column 826 impossibility of shaking his open and passionate conviction that he was correct in his view that military confrontation was the right course. We should of course remember that, at that time, those on the Opposition Front Bench fully shared the same passionate conviction. I sat beside my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister on the Front Bench during a number of the exchanges, and frankly, the only challenge that he got from the then Conservative leader was a competition to see who could be more enthusiastic about a war. It does not compensate for the failure of the Opposition to scrutinise these matters at the time to have demanded over the past couple of months an inquiry into how the country ended up in a war that they fully supported. Personally, I gave up demanding an inquiry at about the same time as they started calling for one, partly because I was convinced that enough evidence was now in the public domain to make it plain that Saddam Hussein had not been a threat. Having sat through yesterday's exchange on the announcement of the inquiry, I feel that I was wise in not calling for it. All that I would suggest to my hon. Friends about that inquiry is a piece of helpful advice. I suggest that they should stop trying to pretend that our decision to call an inquiry has nothing to do with the decision to call an inquiry over in Washington. Until Saturday, the Government were resisting the call for an inquiry. By Monday, they were organising one. Plainly, the only thing that had changed in between was that President Bush had announced that he wanted the facts. It speaks volumes about the extent of our culture of dependency on the Bush Administration that as soon as they decide to have an inquiry, we too decide that it is a good thing. That goes to the heart of the origins of the war. The truth is that the Bush Administration were convinced of the case for war long before they ever looked at any intelligence. We have Paul O'Neill's observation that, at the very first meeting of the National Security Council, the invasion of Iraq was topic A, and President Bush's approach was to say, "Get me a way of doing it." The reality is that intelligence was not the origins of the war; intelligence was used as the justification for a decision that had been taken for other reasons. I welcome what the Prime Minister said today in praise of the intelligence agencies. For four years I was the Cabinet Minister with responsibility for the Secret Intelligence Service. I was always impressed by the service's detachment, and its meticulous qualification of what it offered. I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) that I never once knew the intelligence services to advocate a particular course of action. Indeed, the intelligence assessments were always so carefully balanced and full of alternative interpretations that I frequently rose from them more confused than when I had sat down in the first place. What went wrong in this case is that intelligence was used as propaganda to lobby for a war that had been decided on for reasons other than intelligence. I read with great unease the article in today's edition of The Independent by Dr. Brian Jones. I do not wish to spend time discussing whether his comments were properly handled by his line manager. For me, the bottom line is that I find it extraordinary that neither the Cabinet nor Parliament were told that all the experts in the Defence Intelligence Staff had reservations about the September dossier. 4 Feb 2004 : Column 827 There is one question that I have for the Butler inquiry to consider. I think that it falls within its remit, however narrow that may be. I have never doubted that Ministers believed all the information in the September dossier when that dossier was presented to Parliament, but I would be surprised if they believed all of it by the time the House was asked in March to vote for war. I say that because in between those two points we had two months of inspections by Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. We had given those inspectors, perfectly properly and correctly, our intelligence to guide them where to look, and they found nothing. Hans Blix has observed, "My God, if this was their best intelligence, what was the rest like?" Those blank results were fed back to our intelligence agencies by the weapons inspectors. I would like the Butler inquiry to consider whether that knowledge that our intelligence had proved faulty changed any of the evaluation by the intelligence agencies of the threat from Saddam. If so, why did Ministers not tell the House before we went to war? I shall pick up on the exchange between the hon. Member for Croydon, South (Richard Ottaway) and my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister earlier this afternoon. If I heard it correctly-I may have misheard it-the hon. Gentleman asked my right hon. Friend whether he was aware by March that we were considering battlefield weapons rather than wider long-range weapons of mass destruction. If I heard him correctly, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said no. I am bound to say that I was surprised by that answer. The House will recall that in my resignation speech I made the very point that we were considering battlefield weapons and that Saddam probably had no real weapons of mass destruction. I invite my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence, who will reply to the debate, to consider with his advisers whether it might not be wise to qualify the Prime Minister's answer when he replies. I find it difficult to reconcile with what I knew, and what I am sure my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister knew when we had the vote in March. Mr. Jonathan Sayeed (Mid-Bedfordshire) (Con): Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman could go further in his questioning. Just after the September dossier was published, the Evening Standard and The Sun took up the 45-minute claim, and interpreted it as referring to long-range weapons. That coming out in a newspaper article was clearly wrong. Should not the right hon. Gentleman's question also encompass whether the Government, having known that that was wrong, were not bounden to correct it? Mr. Cook: I am obviously more relaxed about whether the Government corrects the record in The Sun, but I am very anxious that they should correct the record in the House before it is invited to make a decision. The hon. Gentleman tempts me to quote from the interesting response that was published yesterday by the Government to the Intelligence and Security Committee, in the course of which the Government say: "In March 2003"- 4 Feb 2004 : Column 828 It is obvious from the context that this was before the vote in the House-
That is light years away from what the House was told in September. If the Government had had such an assessment in March, they should have shared it with the House before we voted. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister properly took credit for the fact that the Government allowed the House to vote before British troops were committed to action. I offer personal credit to my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary, who was always a robust advocate of the right of the House to vote on action before it took place. But if we are to take credit for the House having the right to decide, it becomes very important that the House had accurate information on which to make the decision. At the very least, the majority in the House would have been much reduced if we had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction. It may well be, as the right hon. Member for Bracknell (Mr. Mackay) said, that there are Members who would have chosen to continue with invasion even if they had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and they are entitled to that view. But the situation then becomes a choice, not a necessity. We now know that we did have the time to let Hans Blix finish the inspections, and had we done so we would have found out that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and there was no threat from Saddam. It has become fashionable to talk about the judgment of history. I do not know what history will say about our decision to choose to go to war, but we already know enough to conclude that history will judge that we did not need to go to war. Source: the UK Parliament, http://www.parliament.uk. © 2003 The Acronym Institute. |