We now come to the Opposition Day debate on the Iraq inquiry. I have to announce to the House that Mr. Speaker has selected the Amendment in the name of the Prime Minister. There is also a 15-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches.

I beg to move,

That this House
calls for an inquiry by an independent committee of privy councillors to review the way in which the responsibilities of Government were discharged in relation to Iraq, and all matters relevant thereto, in the period leading up to military action in that country in March 2003 and its aftermath and to make recommendations on lessons to be drawn for the future.

The passing of the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war brings us naturally to consider once again the need for a high-level and wide-ranging inquiry into its origin and conduct. When we last debated the issue on 11 June last year, I think it is fair to say that a consensus emerged across the House that such an inquiry would be necessary at some point. Those of us who voted for the invasion of 2003, just as much as those who voted against it, expressed the view that the length of the conflict, the difficult and controversial nature of the decisions leading up to it, the extreme difficulties encountered afterwards, and the sheer immensity of the decision and of its consequences were all so great that a major inquiry would be unavoidable. The Government accepted that argument in principle, but argued that the appropriate time had not been reached.

The case that I wish to put to the House is that the nation expects, our troops deserve, and the facts lead to a fresh conclusion that the time to commence such an inquiry has now been reached. The passage of time, the urgent need to learn for the future, the need to reinforce the credibility of future decision taking, and the diminished role in Iraq of British forces all point to that clear conclusion. In a letter to the Prime Minister of 11 February, the Fabian Society put the case very well. It said:

"Iraq has been...the most controversial and publicly contested episode in British foreign policy for half a century, since Suez".

It continued:

"An inquiry cannot change the course of events since 2003. But...A full inquiry would ensure that a rounded assessment of the pre-war diplomacy, the intelligence failures...the conduct of the war itself, and the difficulties of post-war political and economic reconstruction could inform future policy."

It argued that the fifth anniversary of the war would be

"the right time for the government to set out plans to ensure the lessons from Iraq are learnt and inform the future of British foreign policy".

In response, the Prime Minister maintained the Government line of the past 18 months, saying:

"This Government has already acknowledged there will come a time when it is appropriate to hold an inquiry. But...we believe that is not now."

That statement was treated by some as a new development in Government policy, but in fact it brought us no nearer to an inquiry than at any time in the past 18 months. In the debate on this issue of 31 October 2006, which the nationalist parties initiated, Ministers did indeed refuse to concede the case for any inquiry, but the Defence Secretary then announced to the television cameras waiting outside:

"When the time is right, of course there will be such an inquiry."

That has been the Government's position for 18 months.

Do the Government have to initiate an inquiry? What is stopping Parliament from setting up its own inquiry, and would the right hon. Gentleman endorse that?

If the motion were carried, it would amount to Parliament's insisting on such an inquiry. The hon. Gentleman is entirely at liberty to vote with us—as he seems to do on an increasingly regular basis—on this issue.

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I will give way to Simon Hughes.

Given that discussions on Privy Council terms with leaders of his party and other parties took place before many of the crucial decisions, would the right hon. Gentleman agree that it is right that the Conservative party's role and views throughout the proceedings should equally be the subject of the inquiry?

I am sure that no Opposition party would object if an inquiry wished to have access to any of its papers or records of its deliberations. The hon. Gentleman might not want to set that precedent in the case of his own party; if he is relaxed about it we may have inquiries in future on parties that promise things in elections and do not deliver them in opposition, but that is another matter.

Does the right hon. Gentleman go along with the idea that whenever an inquiry is held, it will be useless unless witnesses are obliged to swear an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? We have learned that from painful experience. The inquiry should afford support to witnesses who want to tell the truth but are being leaned on by superiors and people we do not see to be ambiguous or economical with the truth. For an inquiry to have any veracity, it is a prerequisite that people give evidence under oath.

There is no reason why that should not be built into an inquiry. If we were to carry the motion, the practical effect would be that the Government would have to come back with their own proposals for an inquiry. I am sure that they would want to build such a requirement into them.

As someone who voted against the Iraq war on every single occasion, I think that it ill becomes someone to come to the Dispatch Box and argue about an inquiry at this stage. It would be unreal for you to expect people like me to come into the Lobby with you. Could I pose a question back to you? If the right hon. Gentleman is looking at a position where you want an inquiry at this moment in time—

Order. I am trying to assist the hon. Gentleman in the use of the correct parliamentary language. He must not involve me by saying "you". I think that he meant the right hon. Gentleman.

The best answer that I could give to the hon. Gentleman would be to develop the case of what an inquiry would look at now, and the argument for holding it now. I shall proceed to do that—

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

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In fairness, I shall give way to the hon. Lady, who has been trying to intervene, and I shall then proceed a little way.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman. While I am in favour of an inquiry, and I do not accept the Government's arguments that the time is not right, I am concerned about its nature. If we vote for the right hon. Gentleman's motion, how can we be sure that it will provide a full inquiry that will take evidence in public, preferably on oath, in which we can have every confidence? We have not had confidence in previous inquiries, with good reason.

The case we have set out in the motion is for a Privy Council inquiry, modelled on the inquiry that took place after the Falklands war. As I said in response to Andrew Mackinlay, the practical result of the motion being carried would be that the Government would be required by Parliament to set up an inquiry, which would be a matter for further debate. My preferred model is that of a Privy Council inquiry. I want to set out the reasons for that in a moment.

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Let me proceed a little way. I will give way to hon. Members in due course, but we have to remember that others will wish to speak.

The case in principle for an inquiry should, therefore, be agreed across the political spectrum. It was agreed after the last debate. For those of us who supported the invasion of March 2003, recent signs of hope in Iraq are welcome indeed. The security situation has improved, the Iraqi economy is growing, stumbling but genuine steps towards political reconciliation have taken place and optimism among the people of the country has risen. But we all have to recognise that the path to this renewal of hope has lain through a painful trauma, including the deaths of 175 members of our armed forces. While the 23 days of the initial military campaign to overthrow Saddam were astonishingly successful, the constant theme of those who have written about their involvement in subsequent events is that things went seriously wrong in the preparation for, and execution of, the occupation of the country.

Sir Hilary Synnott, who was in charge of southern Iraq under the coalition provisional authority, puts very well in his book the need to draw practical lessons from the events. That is part of the case for an inquiry beginning now. He says that, of course, the highest-level political decisions in the run-up to the war need to be examined, but that many practical issues also need to be considered. I shall quote him at some length. He mentions:

"The deficiencies of process and planning need to be examined in detail: the inability quickly to mobilise adequate numbers of appropriate experts or sufficient financial resources...The bureaucratic accounting and contracting procedures; the failures of communication and understanding—between the hub in Baghdad and the regional and provincial spokes...the failure to motivate and organise the Coalition Central Government Departments so that they were...able to contribute their particular skills and resources to an effort which needed to be a truly comprehensive one."

He continues:

"Only by careful analysis of such failings will it be possible to decide to what extent changes need to be made and then...ensure they are brought about."

Several hon. Members:

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I shall give way to my right hon. and learned Friend Mr. Hogg and then I will read further from Sir Hilary Synnott's book.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that any inquiry needs to embark on the much more fundamental question of whether it is right for any nation to go to war in the absence of an express United Nations resolution, save when there is an urgent, genuine and immediate threat to its security or that of its immediate allies?

Of course, it would be open to an inquiry to examine the arguments about legality. I suspect that a difference of view would remain at the end, but it would be open to the inquiry to consider that.

Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that some of us felt that, whatever preparation had been made in advance of the invasion, the war would inevitably lead to the sort of mess that exists now—in other words, those who voted against the war at the outset felt that it was impossible to avoid the quagmire that we now face?

Of course, there are people who hold that view. There are disagreements in the House and in every party about that. The hon. Gentleman may recall that the person who said:

"I happen to be on the side of those who believed Saddam Hussein had to be removed by force, but no one could have predicted they would have made such a mess of the peace building afterwards" was his noble Friend Lord Ashdown. There is bound to be disagreement to some extent in any party about that.

Does my right hon. Friend share my opinion that it is clear that a Majority in the House of Commons currently believes that there should be an inquiry now, but that the practical problem is that we will not get one in the lifetime of this Parliament until sufficient Labour Back Benchers are persuaded to support the proposal? Could he perhaps invite members of the Labour party who have already expressed such an opinion to table a motion, stipulating what sort of inquiry they would like, and contemplate our party or the Liberal Democrats giving time for debate so that we could mobilise a parliamentary majority to do what Mr. Prentice suggested? Thus Parliament could reassert its right to call an inquiry when it wants.

That is, characteristically of my right hon. and learned Friend, a hugely constructive proposal. Indeed, hon. Members who differ with the terms that we propose but agree that there is a need for an inquiry may wish to do exactly as he suggests.

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I will give way to Rob Marris, who has been so persistent, and then I shall return to Sir Hilary Synnott's book.

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his graciousness. If the inquiry that he seeks through the motion took place and was completed before UK troops were withdrawn from Iraq, would he envisage a second inquiry?

That would depend on later events, but I do not think so. Given the stage that we have now reached of fulfilling an overwatch role and what is meant to become a training and mentoring role, pressure or a campaign for a second inquiry is highly unlikely.

Several hon. Members:

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Having spent the weekend reading Sir Hilary Synnott's book, I am determined to impart my knowledge of it to the House. He makes an important point when he states:

"Understanding the causes and consequences of what went wrong in Iraq should not therefore be regarded as just an academic or historical exercise."

In his opinion,

"Britain and America seem likely to be involved in more, not fewer, nation building efforts in the coming years...Even in Afghanistan, after more than six years of operations, the challenges show little sign of abating, and several of these are, yet again, being examined from first principles—police training...the role of Provincial reconstruction teams", and so on. He continues:

"Many of the shortcomings in that country have similarities with those in Iraq and still need to be properly assessed, with appropriate conclusions drawn."

That, as I see it, is why a full-scale inquiry is of practical relevance, and why it might be of assistance to the future operations of this or any other Government and to our armed forces in the field elsewhere. To close our minds to learning from or to delay learning from the issues that Sir Hilary Synnott—the man in charge of governing southern Iraq on our behalf—has been talking about would be a dereliction of our duty, as well as that of the Government.

Can we get back to the terms of the right hon. Gentleman's motion? It refers to

"the period leading up to military action in that country in March 2003", but when, in his opinion, did that period begin? Does it include what happened when the Thatcher Government were arming Saddam and implicitly supporting the repression of the Kurds, or does it simply start when the Labour Government were elected?

I do not think that that period starts with an election. Rather, it is for the members of the inquiry to decide; or, indeed, it is for the Government to bring forward terms of reference for an inquiry that set that out. That question is hardly an insurmountable obstacle to the setting up of a Privy Council or any other inquiry.

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I am trying to involve all parts of the House, so I give way to Mr. MacNeil.

I am grateful. To develop the argument that Mr. Clarke made, does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, this being the third attempt to have an inquiry into Iraq, if we do not have one this time, owing to the practical problem of Labour Back Benchers, the message sent out to the public will be that to have such an inquiry, they must not vote Labour, but for somebody who will ensure that one is held?

We have not quite reached that point yet, but we might, if we continue like this, nearer to a General Election.

Unlike the right hon. Gentleman, I voted against the war in Iraq. I accept that lessons can be learned from any inquiry that can help the House better to understand how things might be conducted in the future. However, does he not share my worries about holding an inquiry at this stage, in that if it indicted the Government on the reasons for their entry into the war and how it was conducted, it would leave our troops currently in Iraq in a very vulnerable position, both militarily and politically?

No, I do not agree with that. I want to set out the case for commencing an inquiry, now or very shortly, and deal with that very point.

As it enters its sixth year, the conflict in Iraq will soon have lasted as long as the second world war. The formative decisions—about the occupation of Iraq, the disbandment of the army, de-Ba'athification and the overall manner in which the military occupation was conducted—were made either in the immediate aftermath of the invasion five years ago, or in some cases well before it. Decisions and analyses relating to the origins of the war and its planning were therefore made up to six or seven years ago.

Any inquiry would presumably take many months to hear and assemble evidence; so even if the Foreign Secretary were to announce an inquiry at the Dispatch Box today, it would entail key participants of those early decisions trying to give a crystal clear recollection, by the time they gave evidence, of events of perhaps seven or eight years earlier. An inquiry announced next year or the year after would require those recollections to stretch back anything up to a decade, with accompanying documents, e-mails and files intact. With the best will in the world, that is going to be difficult for those involved. A continuing delay of months or years—for all we know, the Prime Minister may well mean years—is not merely the postponement of an inquiry, but the diminishing of its value. Its task at a later date would be more difficult, and the accurate and detailed picture of important moments and key meetings would necessarily be more difficult to assemble.

The passage of time is also bringing into public view a series of welcome but inevitably partial assessments of the initial stages of the conflict, in the form of memoirs, lectures, diaries and responses to freedom of information requests. The Government succeeded in blocking the publication of the account of the experiences of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's senior diplomat at the UN and in Iraq, which was reported to include the observation that the opportunities for the post-conflict period were

"dissipated in poor policy analysis and narrow-minded execution."

Other accounts are well known, including Clare Short attacking the highly personalised form of decision making by the Government, the diaries of Alastair Campbell and Lance Price from inside Downing street, the criticisms of the Government by Sir Christopher Meyer and General Sir Mike Jackson, and the memoirs of Sir Hilary Synnott, from which I have already read a considerable extract.

All of these accounts have come out, and in recent weeks it has been ordered that Cabinet minutes must be published, and an early draft of the so-called dossier on weapons of mass destruction has been forced out of the Government. With such a plethora of bits and pieces of information, and so many personal accounts, coming to light, would it not be better for the Government and for all who wish to learn from these events if what happened were considered properly, completely and in the round, with conclusions based on all the necessary information rather than on the parts that individuals have chosen or managed to publish?

The former Prime Minister's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, was able to say on BBC television nine days ago:

"We probably hadn't thought through the magnitude of what we were taking on...we were pushing our own side to be prepared, but I don't think any of us really thought through this much bigger question of what we were dealing with".

What harm could it do to this country for the points that he was making to be properly analysed and understood? Such views are a welcome contribution to our understanding of events, but they are no substitute for an inquiry with real power and purpose.

The right hon. Gentleman asks what harm it could do to this country. I can tell him quite plainly that it would not only debilitate our armed services— [ Interruption. ] I would appreciate it if the House would listen to what I have to say. It would not only debilitate our armed services but give great comfort and encouragement to al-Qaeda elements in the country, which would give them inducement to carry on their bloody trade even more vigorously than they have done to date. That is the harm that could be done.

I fundamentally disagree with the hon. Gentleman about that. I do not think that we should shy away from the proper functioning of democracy on the ground that it might encourage our opponents. An inquiry of this kind is part of the proper functioning of democracy.

An odd argument has been made by Frank Cook about an inquiry undermining our troops and our security efforts. If that were the case, why was there an inquiry into Bloody Sunday while British troops were still serving in Northern Ireland? That inquiry was supported by Labour and Conservative Members.

I agree with the general point that the hon. Gentleman is making. Of course, the same argument could have been made about the Dardanelles commission in the first world war, or, if we go back even further, about the inquiry that this House argued for, and voted for, on the Crimean war. The same argument can be made in all such circumstances as far back in history as we wish to go.

Does my right hon. Friend accept that, when James Baker and the other wise men carried out their inquiry on behalf of the American Government, no one suggested that it would harm American troops? Given that there was acceptance on that, surely it is logical that the inquiry that we are proposing would not harm our own troops.

My hon. Friend makes a valuable point. There have been far more searching investigations and discussions in the US Congress—and, indeed, in the Iraq study group, as far as we can see—about the nature of the United States' involvement in Iraq than anything that we have seen in this country. Indeed, there are far more regular reports to Congress—General Petraeus is about to testify to Congress again—than anything that we see here. This is a separate point that the Government should attend to. There should be regular quarterly reports about progress in any theatre of war.

I am listening very carefully, but it seems as if the right hon. Gentleman and his party were not in the House when we debated going to war in Iraq. I voted for that war and I still believe that it was the right decision at that time. Does the right hon. Gentleman think that in any ensuing inquiry, the Opposition's role in this country's democracy should be taken into consideration, particularly when, according to what we are hearing, the Conservative party somehow stumbled into voting for the war?

I think that that question has already been raised, Mr. Deputy Speaker, so I may have to cut down on interventions in the next few minutes. The hon. Gentleman is simply raising the same point as was put forward by the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey. If those carrying out the inquiry—in whatever form it takes—want to see the paperwork relating to the deliberations of the Opposition parties, those parties should be entirely amenable to that happening. We should approach it in that spirit. What is being proposed here is not a trial or an impeachment, but an effort to learn for the future. It is a vital national process and it is an important issue for this country, irrespective of whether we voted for or against the war in Iraq.

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Let me continue for a few moments.

A further aspect of the passage of time to which I referred is the fact that the need to learn from what has happened is serious and urgent. None of us can know at what stage in the future a British Government might feel compelled to say to Parliament and public that military action of some kind is necessary against a potential adversary. We just cannot know, but what we do know is that unless the country has been shown that all possible lessons have been learned, the credibility of any Government in that situation would be in severe doubt. And for good reason, since it would be entirely possible that lessons had not been learned because no searching examination of the past had taken place. We cannot proceed blithely into the future without understanding what has happened in the past.

When asked about an inquiry towards the end of last year, the Foreign Secretary said:

"I am obsessed with the next five years in Iraq, not the last five years in Iraq."

Of course the future success of Iraq in the political, economic and security fields is the most important issue of all in these matters, but whoever heard of making a success of the future without understanding the errors of the past? Do we not all avidly read the memoirs and diaries that I mentioned for clues as to the correct policy in the future? Are we not engaged in a conflict of major proportions in Afghanistan where, for all we know, important lessons about Government machinery, military planning and the occupation of an unfamiliar country might actually be useful sooner rather than later?

I happen to have opposed the war on the grounds that insufficient thought had been given at the time to what might happen if we won militarily. My right hon. Friend might be relieved to know, however, that I agree with him entirely on the purpose of having an inquiry now, not least because we are in danger of losing the peace in Afghanistan where our troops are in conflict. I declare that I have a son who has served in both Iraq and Afghanistan and that one of the biggest problems facing our armed forces today is the lack of transposition of the knowledge that we gained in Iraq to the circumstances of trying to secure the peace in Afghanistan— [Interruption.]

My hon. Friend makes a personal and a political point in support of my case, for which I am grateful. I heard a sedentary Intervention on the Government side a few moments ago to the effect that Afghanistan and Iraq are completely different cases; however, not only has my hon. Friend pointed out some parallels, but a similar argument was made by Sir Hilary Synnott, who was the man in charge of southern Iraq.

It is disturbing that, although there is a rhetorical consensus about the need for an inquiry at some point, the Government's body language still shows an unwillingness to inform the future by studying the past. When my hon. Friend Mr. Simpson asked the Foreign Office last November how many studies into the consequences of the Iraq war it had started or completed and what lessons had been learned by the Department, the reply came back:

"No study of this type has been carried out".—[ Hansard, 19 November 2007; Vol. 467, c. 562W.]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Not at the moment.

Similarly, in response to the same question, the Department for International Development responded:

"There has been no formal or specific study into the consequences for DFID of the conflict in Iraq."—[ Hansard, 21 November 2007; Vol. 467, c. 931W.]

Whatever lessons the Government thought they had learned—on the basis of not having conducted any studies so far—were presumably passed on in their evidence to the Iraq study group, which my hon. Friend Mr. Burns mentioned. That inquiry was commissioned by the United States Government and Congress, but the evidence, although given to the American commission, has never been disclosed to the British Parliament. Nevertheless, despite the passage of years, the publication of incomplete accounts and the threats of an uncertain future, Ministers maintain their position that an inquiry cannot yet be commenced.

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I will not give way for the moment.

I expect the Foreign Secretary will advance that argument again, but I see from the Government's Amendment that they have at least dropped the argument that they advanced last summer that an inquiry was not necessary at an early date because four separate inquiries had already been held. Given that one of them was the investigation into the death of Dr. David Kelly and another was the report by the Foreign Affairs Committee, which complained vociferously about the lack of Government co-operation with the Committee's proceedings, that was never a very convincing argument.

The Government's remaining argument is that, in the words of the Prime Minister's letter to the Fabian Society, it is

"vital that the Government does not divert attention from supporting Iraq's development as a secure and stable country."

That is the Government's crucial argument, as expressed by the Prime Minister himself, so it merits some examination. First, let us be clear that the idea that Iraqi politicians will be unable to proceed with measures of reconciliation, that the Iraqi economy will suffer, or that the stability of the country will be endangered because we are conducting an inquiry in Whitehall is ludicrous.

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman before the end of my speech.

Of course it is true that there are still senior officials in the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development who are closely concerned with Iraqi affairs, but being busy cannot possibly provide an argument for indefinitely postponing something that has become so essential. Presumably, when they are no longer dealing with Iraq there will be no shortage of other things for them to do. If we are to wait until those Departments have arrived at a benign and settled time when their senior officials can be troubled with the distraction of an inquiry, such a thing will never take place at all.

If it is true that, as the Prime Minister also said in his letter,

"the whole effort of the...armed forces is directed towards supporting the people and Government of Iraq", is it not of paramount importance for that effort to be based on a better understanding of past events? The commission that inquired into the Dardanelles campaign was set up in 1916 and reported in 1917, on the recommendation of Asquith, the Prime Minister of the time, who could no doubt have argued that the whole effort of the Government and the armed forces was devoted to winning the first world war. Of course their effort was devoted to winning the first world war, but our predecessors at that time reached the view that they might be better at winning the war, and any other war, if they understood as soon as possible where things had gone wrong.

"Ah," the Government have said in the past, "this may all be true, but we still have members of our armed forces in Iraq, and we would be letting them down or undermining their morale if an inquiry were commenced while they were there." The implications of that argument are, of course, disturbing, as for all we know some British force may be employed in Iraq for a considerable time to come, and it would follow from the Government's argument that no inquiry is remotely on the horizon.

It should also be pointed out that that has, in any case, always been a weak argument. The largest Army garrison in Britain—in Catterick—is in my Constituency, and I am glad to say that it is often visited by Frank Cook. I often speak to soldiers and senior officers who have returned from Iraq, and the notion that their morale would be in any way undermined by our commencing an inquiry into the origins and conduct of the Iraq war is one that most of them would consider truly laughable. The morale of those wonderful people is made of far sturdier stuff than that. It depends on their training, their colleagues, their leadership and their equipment. Far from their being undermined by an inquiry, there are few who would not welcome it, for they above all others want to know that all of us politicians have learned from mistakes for which some of their colleagues paid with their lives.

Furthermore, the Government cannot claim simultaneously that the role of our armed forces in Iraq has been much reduced and circumscribed, and that the military situation is so critical that no inquiry can be commenced. On 16 December, the Foreign Secretary said,

"our role from now is going to be a supporting role because it's Iraqis in the lead in security, Iraqis in the lead in politics."

In October, the Prime Minister told the House,

"in the spring of next year"

—that is now—

"...we plan to move to a second stage of overwatch where the coalition would maintain a more limited re-Intervention capacity and where the main focus will be on training and mentoring."—[ Hansard, 8 October 2008; Vol. 464, c. 23.]

Is a process of training and mentoring, or even of overwatch, in 2008 going to be disrupted or damaged by the holding of an inquiry that would surely concentrate on the events of 2002, 2003 and 2004?

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. I take on board his point that this issue is about the past as well as the future. Does he regret supporting the Government's decision to go to war in Iraq?

We have also discussed that many times. I do not regret my decision, but other Members who voted the same way as I did will regret their decision; some of them have spoken out about that. However, I believe that all of us, regardless of whether we voted for or against that decision, should be able to join together in being willing to learn from what has happened, because none of us thinks that everything went according to plan. That should be the united basis on which this House approaches an inquiry, as it was in the first world war example I have referred to, and which provides a lesson for us to draw on.

There is another strong reason in the national interest why there should be an inquiry now. Given that there will be a new President in the White House as of January and given that one of the perceptions of our decision to join with the Americans is that we were their poodle, it is important that our Government and the people of Britain understand the implications of that decision so that in future we get a foreign policy that is more balanced and that does not look so subservient.

In advancing that argument, the hon. Gentleman might start to fracture the possible coalition in all parts of the House in support of an inquiry. I shall not therefore go down that road with him, but let me at least say that that is clearly an argument that can be put in favour of an inquiry.

Since the current Prime Minister took office, the Government have announced at least 50 separate reviews of different areas of policy, all presumably designed better to inform future policy making. They cover a vast range of subjects, from casinos to 24-hour drinking to the promotion of tourism and to sunbeds. [Interruption.] The Foreign Secretary may not be aware of it, but the Government are having a review of sunbeds. Many of these reviews are in the military area, such as the review of support for the armed forces, the armed personnel review and the review of the role of the military. It defies credibility that there should be time and resources to review a vast range of subjects, including many in the field of defence, but that any review or inquiry into probably the most important events of the decade is too much of a distraction from the matters in hand.

Finally, among the Government's arguments against an inquiry last year was that it would give the impression of Division or weakness to the enemy; the hon. Member for Stockton, North has made that point. However, since when, in any mature democracy, have considered debate, searching inquiry and the establishment of truth been a sign of weakness—even in more dramatic moments in our history? Did our predecessors shy away from debating Norway in 1940 in case Hitler was emboldened?

The truth is that the case for commencing an inquiry of the type, or of a similar type, to the one we are calling for today has become overwhelming. That has been well illustrated by the work of the Fabian Society and the debates in the House of Lords where former Foreign Secretaries of all political persuasions have put the case for an inquiry to begin.

If Ministers continue to argue against that, they will be increasingly isolated voices, holding out against a preponderance of national opinion, which embraces every other party and many members of their own. They may be unwilling to embark on something which would, of course, add to the duties of some of them, but they should not shirk this task because it seems unpleasant, and they should remember that if this inquiry is not established by this Administration, it most surely will be by the next one. They may be unwilling to act at the behest of the Conservative party, or of the Liberal Democrats, or even of the Fabian Society, but if so, they should go away from this debate and come back in a short time with their own considered proposals. Not to do so would be an error of policy, as well as of politics; and not to do so would be to frustrate the wishes not of any one party in this House, but of the British people as a whole.

I beg to move, To leave out from 'House' to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:

'notes the Resolutions of this House of 31st October 2006 and 11th June 2007 on an Iraq inquiry;
recognises that this House has already twice voted against holding an inquiry at these times;
further recognises that a time will come when an inquiry is appropriate;
but declines to make a proposal for a further inquiry at this time, whilst important operations are underway in Iraq to support the people and government of Iraq.'.

The Amendment stands in the name of the Prime Minister, and that of myself and my colleagues. I must notify the House that a long-standing official engagement means that I shall not be present for the wind-ups.

I start on two points on which I believe there is agreement across the House. First, whether we voted for the Iraq war or against it, we all recognise that the continued bravery, dedication and professionalism of our armed forces and our civilian staff operating in Iraq is second to none. All of us have constituents whose sons and daughters, husbands and wives have served, or are serving, in Iraq. Some of us have constituents whose loved ones have died there. None of us—on any side of the debate—has anything but admiration for and pride in the selfless way in which those people have gone about their task, and nothing that I say today will impugn the motives or motivations of speakers or hon. Members, however they vote.

Secondly, there is agreement across the House that an inquiry into the Iraq war will be necessary. Mr. Hague set out the reasons for that well, and I do not need to rehearse them. He was also generous enough to say that the Government have been consistent on this issue since October 2006. The dispute between us concerns not substance, but timing. The Opposition have said that the time for such an inquiry is now—on the GMTV programme this morning he said, "Now is the right time". Given today's reports from Basra, most people would see that as a bizarre choice of priority. We say, as the Prime Minister has said, that

"the right time to look at these issues and review the lessons learned is when our troops have finished the work in Iraq".—[ Hansard, 19 March 2008; Vol. 473, c. 932.]

The British Government's view is that now is not the right time, but why have the Americans been prepared to carry out their own inquiries in previous years since the beginning of the war? Why has the time been right for the Americans when they have held inquiries but now is not the right time for the British?

That relates to the burden of my speech; it is contained in our Amendment, which refers to the "important operations" that our troops are doing in theatre. I want to go through each of the arguments carefully. They relate to precedent and the learning of lessons, both of which I shall address, and the condition of our troops on the ground.

Does the Foreign Secretary not accept that his argument is absurd? If we do not have an inquiry now, we will never have one while any conflict is going on because there will never be a good time to do so, as others have pointed out. Perhaps he could take a lesson from across the Atlantic. Not only has the United States held inquiries, but both of its Houses have debated and voted for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, and the troops remain there only through the presidential veto. Cannot we learn a lesson from that side of the Atlantic too?

Some 60 debates on the Iraq issue have taken place in this House. It is proper and right that any hon. Member, or group of hon. Members, can table a motion arguing for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq now and Parliament would have the right to vote on that issue.

A few moments ago, the Foreign Secretary argued that the conflict in Basra is a good argument against an inquiry. I am sure that he has read the recent interview given by Jonathan Powell, the former chief of staff to the Government, who makes it clear that the Government in no way planned for or understood the possibility of a sectarian conflict or internal civil war being likely to break out in Iraq if a war took place. Is that not precisely why we need to have an inquiry? Today's events in Basra demonstrate the inadequacy of the Government's preparation for one of the worst conflicts for which this or any British Government have been responsible in the past 100 years.

The events demonstrate a wide range of issues, not least the role of the Iraqi security forces and police in disbanding and attacking some of the Iraqi militia—the Shi'a militia—in the south of Iraq. I shall argue and explain in my speech why the situation in Basra precisely does not call for the sort of inquiry that has been mentioned. Our rationale was simple and it was set out clearly in the debate in the House on 31 October, to which the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks referred. This is what was said at the time:

"important operations are under way in Iraq. Major political decisions in Iraq and efforts to contain the insurgency appear to be in the balance. The Baker commission is expected to report in the next few months. Any inquiry should be able to examine what happens in the coming months"— that point was made earlier—

"as well as the events of recent years. To begin an inquiry now would therefore be premature".

Those powerful words encapsulate the heart of our case. What is peculiar is that they were not uttered by a Government Minister. Instead, they are the words of the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks in that debate, who provided a catalogue of reasons against an immediate inquiry.

Let us go through those reasons carefully. Eighteen months on, the Baker commission has reported but every other count set out not by me, but by the right hon. Gentleman in October 2006 applies now. The right hon. Gentleman argued against an inquiry in October 2006 because

"important operations are under way in Iraq."

That was his argument, not mine. [ Interruption. ] It is his argument and mine. The same is the case today. About 4,000 British troops are providing vital functions to monitor, mentor and train Iraqi security forces, to provide key support to those forces, to support border security on the Iran-Iraq border and to provide a quick reaction force at high readiness.

The right hon. Gentleman also argued against an inquiry because:

"Major political decisions...and efforts to contain the insurgency appear to be in the balance."—[ Hansard, 31 October 2006; Vol. 451, c. 183.]

So they are today; it is his argument and mine. One has only to switch on the TV to see it. I shall come back to this later and explain current developments but there are clearly clashes between the Iraqi security force and militia groups, never mind important developments on the political front. The Iraqi Government are deliberating on a new election law and a hydrocarbons law, as well as revenue-sharing Laws that will benefit all Iraqis. The myriad Iraqi political parties that have emerged since 2003 are working through the implications of their 4 December commitments to constitutional reform. [ Interruption. ] Some hon. Members say that that is not relevant, but it is relevant because it is the exact reason given against an immediate inquiry by the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks in 2006. In fact, he concluded by saying that an inquiry would be "premature" because of those grounds. If that argument was good enough for him then, it should be good enough for him now.

The events in Basra today, where the Iraqi army is trying to address the militias and, to a degree, the police force, which is wholly infested by the militias, are a direct consequence of the failure of British policy. That policy was made evident to the Select Committee on Defence in 2004 when we were shown the Iraqi police being trained by the British. That has a direct read-across to what our troops are doing in Afghanistan, where the lessons from Iraq are directly applicable to the failure to establish a police force that is not corrupt. What is happening in Basra today will happen in Afghanistan tomorrow if we do not learn the lessons.

As I shall show in the course of my remarks, the Ministry of Defence has published two studies of the lessons to be learned and has conducted numerous internal studies, too, which are informing the work that is going on.

For the record I want to say that my party, of course, called for an inquiry at a time considerably before the Conservatives did. Will the Foreign Secretary explain the position? Is he saying that there will be no inquiry while British forces remain in theatre? If that is the case, we still have troops in the Falklands, in Cyprus and in Bosnia. Is not the reality that the Baker commission in the US led to the appointment of General Petraeus and a change in policy by the US military that, to its credit, is starting to see some good effects? Could not that happen to our forces, too?

The hon. Gentleman referred to the Falklands—the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks called it a model inquiry—but we should remember that the Falklands inquiry was established at the end of the Falklands conflict. I do not think that the point made by Mr. Keetch in respect of the Falklands is—

Rather than taking the easy tack and looking at the inconsistency of the Conservative position, will the Foreign Secretary look at the substance of the case for an inquiry? Rather than talking about the operations, which we all know about, will he say why those operations would hinder an inquiry?

I shall address that directly. Essentially, we think that the priority of Government and our armed services should be the situation in Iraq, not the servicing of an inquiry.

What the House hopes to hear is why an argument that might have been premature 18 months ago has not matured now. We want to know, for example, whether the then Prime Minister put decisions in writing in the way in which Winston Churchill instructed his Secretary of State to do in 1941. Meetings were to be minuted and decisions confirmed in writing. Those are the kinds of things that will get lost as we get further away from the time when the war started, year by year. The House, the country and our troops deserve better than that.

There have been four arguments made for an inquiry and I want to go through them one by one, but the very case that the hon. Member makes—that he wants to know whether decisions were given in writing or orally—shows that this has nothing to do with the learning of lessons that are appropriate for the lives and welfare of our troops on the ground today.

The one group of people whose views on this issue have not been mentioned in the first hour of this debate is the Iraqi people. The motion talks about "all matters relevant thereto", which would presumably include the internal workings of the present democratic Government in Iraq. Can my right hon. Friend tell the House whether the Iraqi Government have been pressing him for an early inquiry?

That is a good point and one that we had not thought of circulating in the briefing. We have not been pressed by the Iraqi Government, who have more important things on their mind.

The judgment about the right time hinges on four points, and I shall address each in turn. The first is precedent. The right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks mentioned the situation in July 1916, when Prime Minister Asquith set up an inquiry not into the origins and conduct of the ongoing first world war, but into the time-limited, finished and ill-fated Dardanelle expedition of 1915 and, for the sake of accuracy, into the Anglo-Indian campaign in Mesopotamia in spring 1916. That point was brought out in the debate on 31 October 2006 by my hon. Friend Mr. Davies, who at the time was not my hon. Friend. He showed that the Dardanelle example did not actually speak to the case that the right hon. Gentleman seeks to prosecute. In fact, the campaign was over before the inquiry was set up—

A case could just be made by the Foreign Secretary about the Dardanelles, but he glided carefully over the example of the campaign in Mesopotamia—which we otherwise know as Iraq. That inquiry was set up specifically to learn military operational lessons in an ongoing campaign, which had brought disaster to the British at Qut al Amara. It was going on at the time, and lessons were learned. That example proves our case.

It is a good thing that the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks did not mention the Mesopotamia campaign in the prosecution of his case. In fact, it was the Dardanelles campaign that he mentioned.

The right hon. Gentleman did mention the famous Norway debate in 1940, but it is known as the Norway debate, not the Norway inquiry, for a very simple reason—it was a debate about Norway, not an inquiry into the Norway campaign. There was no inquiry into the Korean war, Suez, the first Gulf war or the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. The Franks inquiry was set up after the end of the Falklands conflict. The right hon. Gentleman said in his speech that we should model—not my word, his—any inquiry on the Franks inquiry. In fact, the Franks inquiry was set up only after all the troops had come home from the Falklands. I do not therefore believe that the case has been made.

The whole of the Foreign Secretary's argument seems to rest on what will be perceived outside this Chamber as the absurd premise that a group of 4,000 people with an overwatch role will somehow have their morale undermined if we commence an investigation to clear up the huge number of concerns that remain about the war. Is that really what his argument rests on? If not, will he finally get round to telling us what his argument is?

I have never mentioned the word "morale". I do not think that the morale argument is a very strong one and the hon. Gentleman will not hear it from me.

The second argument is that following Basra's transition to provincial Iraqi control in December, our military role in Iraq is now so limited—the right hon. Gentleman used the rather dismissive word "diminished"— that an inquiry could safely be held without prejudice to the position of our servicemen and women in Iraq. That argument does not accord with the reality of our ongoing commitments in southern Iraq.

rose—

Will the Foreign Secretary give way?

No; I am just going to make this point, then I shall let hon. Members come in.

British forces still have an important role to play in monitoring, mentoring and training the Iraqi security force in southern Iraq. Our forces support the Iraqi security force in active operations such as countering smuggling on the Shatt al-Arab waterway and at the Iranian border, including by supporting, training and developing the Iraqi department of border enforcement.

When necessary, and at the request of Iraqi authorities, we provide Iraqi-led operations with advanced capabilities that the Iraqi security forces do not possess. That was what we did in January when the ISF were faced with a series of pre-planned attacks in both Basra and An Nasiriyah by a fundamentalist sect during the Ashura festival.

Will the Foreign Secretary give way?

I shall give way at the end of this section of my speech.

UK forces were in close contact with the Iraqi security forces, and provided fast air support and aerial surveillance capabilities in support of ISF operations. Those capabilities were crucial in enabling the Iraqi security forces to deal with the situation as effectively as they did.

We also retain the capacity to deploy ground forces in support of the Iraqi security forces, at Iraqi request and in line with the terms of the memorandum that was signed in December. The dangers and difficulties of that role are shown by the continued efforts of small numbers of extremists to target our forces. It is not tenable to make the second argument: that our armed forces are no longer devoting significant attention to the future of Iraq, and so have time on their hands for all the demands of an inquiry.

rose—

The hon. Gentleman has been trying to get in; I am happy to let him.

The Foreign Secretary says that Iraq is an ongoing situation. Is he saying, therefore, that the President of the United States was wrong when he said, "Mission accomplished"?

I think it is evident that the mission has not been accomplished. I associate myself entirely with something that the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks, said earlier—I do not know whether he was quoting what I said last week. It seems clear that the war itself went better than most people expected, but that the building of the peace afterwards has gone much worse than people expected. That is the basic truth, and we might as well all accept it. The mission has not yet been accomplished.

On the previous point, I think that my hon. Friend Mr. Simpson completely demolished the Foreign Secretary's argument.

Will the Foreign Secretary explain to the House why the Prime Minister promised a reduction in the number of troops in Iraq to 2,500 by next summer? It is now becoming evident that that is not going to be delivered, and 4,000 looks like the minimum. Is that not a further argument for an inquiry? Some of the mistakes that the Government made soon after the invasion seem to be being repeated.

The Prime Minister's promises were made on the basis of military advice. He promised a downward trend in troop numbers, which remains the case. All further decisions will also be based on military advice, and I think I would discount the numbers that the hon. Gentleman is chucking around.

The Foreign Secretary's argument is predicated, in truth, almost entirely on the fact that it would be militarily deleterious for an inquiry to be held now. Will he tell us which senior commanders of the British armed forces, present or past, have told him or said that such an inquiry would be harmful?

The same question was asked in a previous debate, and the answer was, "None." That is not the basis of the case. I am asking people to make a judgment of the four reasons that have been given. The first is the precedent, and the second is the so-called diminished role that we are playing.

I do not understand the Foreign Secretary's response to my hon. Friend Mr. Tyrie. He has described clearly the role being carried out by the 4,000 people still in Basra. He said that it is not their morale that he is worried about. What is the argument that an inquiry into the origins of and planning for the war will disrupt the continuing role in Basra? It sounds as though the Foreign Secretary is just saying, "They wouldn't have the time." The people involved in Basra at the moment, however, are highly unlikely to be required for the sort of inquiry that my right hon. Friend Mr. Hague has been arguing for.

The argument is straightforward: that the focus, attention and priority of armed services and diplomats should be on the job at hand, not on the service of an inquiry.

The third argument for an inquiry has to do with the lessons learned for the benefits of future policy. It is that an early inquiry can help us learn lessons that will contribute to the future success of efforts in Iraq. However, our military, diplomatic and development strategies have consistently been adjusted and updated in the light of events on the ground in Iraq and the lessons that have been learned.

As I said earlier, in 2003 the Ministry of Defence published two studies about the operations in Iraq. Since then, it has conducted a series of internal reviews and studies concerning various stages of the operation. They apply across the complex range of issues raised by the Iraq conflict—from military kit to counter-insurgency strategy, from the relationship of security to economic and political change. More broadly, we have long recognised the importance of learning systemic lessons about the conduct of post-stabilisation operations— a point that was made earlier in relation to Afghanistan.

The final argument is that, if an inquiry is not held soon, memories will fade, records will be lost and the passage of time will render it impossible to conduct an effective and detailed examination. The right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks said last week:

"As we reach the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq it is becoming imperative to begin an inquiry before memories have faded, e-mails have been deleted and documents have disappeared."

The Foreign Secretary spoke about lessons learned, but 15 years or more ago a very expensive course—the higher command and staff course—was set up at the Joint Forces Staff college. It studied campaign planning, and many of the senior officers and civil servants who tried to make decisions about the invasion of Iraq had been on it. I know that they looked carefully at a module covering the Marshall plan, and at what would happen after the fighting finished. Why was their advice ignored, and should we not inquire into the matter?

I shall be happy to look into that, and to ask my hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces to address the point about the module. However, the hon. Gentleman and I agree that there are significant lessons to be learned, both in-theatre and about decision making. What divides us is when there should be an official inquiry—and the motion calls for a Privy Council inquiry—into the Iraq war. Should we hold one now, or when our troops have finished their work? I put it to the hon. Gentleman that it is more sensible to hold it when our troops have finished their work.

The Foreign Secretary has gone into some detail about the internal inquiries conducted by the Ministry of Defence. There is no dispute about them, but will he explain why the Foreign Office has not undertaken any inquiry? I refer the right hon. Gentleman to the written answer that I received from the Minister for the Middle East on 19 November 2007.

The wisdom of all Foreign Office officials is of course used to inform the development of policy. Those officials include existing ambassadors who have moved out of Iraq, as well as those who have retired. The policy of the Foreign Office is not the same as it was in 2002 or 2003, but the failure to establish an official inquiry is not a consequence of that.

I want to say more about the fourth and final argument for an inquiry, which is that memories will fade and that e-mails will be deleted. Frankly, that is the weakest part of the case for an inquiry. Since 2003, there have been four separate inquiries into different aspects of the decision to invade Iraq and associated events, and they are not going to go away. In the same period, there have been 60 parliamentary debates on the matter. As the depth of interest in the fifth anniversary of military action shows, events and decisions related to Iraq are still being analysed and debated in minute detail. I do not see any risk that interest will fade before the time is right for an inquiry.

I am afraid that the Foreign Secretary has just holed himself below the waterline. He has told the House there have been four inquiries, and that used to be the Government's argument for not holding an official inquiry. Will he tell the House how the Government were able to hold the four inquiries about which they now boast without harming operations in Iraq?

The argument against the Government was that those inquiries were narrow and limited. I shall go through them: they include the inquiry into the death of Dr. David Kelly—the so-called Hutton inquiry—and the Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry for which the hon. Members who compiled it claimed to have received insufficient help. Both were specific and narrow, but the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks made it clear that the inquiry proposed in the motion would have no limit on what it would be able to look at. A Privy Council inquiry of the sort that is being proposed is of a different order from those that have been conducted so far. The inquiries that have been conducted so far, including the Butler inquiry on the use of intelligence, were discrete and narrow in their terms of reference and in what they were investigating.

Before my right hon. Friend moves on from the point about memories fading, many in this House remember well the events leading up to actions five years ago, and we remember well the Conservative party's view on the issues. Is he not being patient in his speech, given that we know why we are debating the subject today? The debate is a cynical move by the Conservative party to reposition itself on Iraq for narrow, party political advantage.

I am glad to have my hon. Friend's support, and I think that there is rather a lot of agreement, certainly among those on the Liberal Benches, with what he says about the official Opposition's motivation on the issue.

The Opposition's position on the four inquiries may indeed have been that the terms of reference were so limited that a wider inquiry was needed, but does the Foreign Secretary not recall that the Government's position, repeated time and again by Members on the Government Benches, was that it was precisely because the inquiries' terms of reference were so wide-ranging and comprehensive that no further inquiry was needed?

There is absolutely no comparison between the Privy Council inquiry advocated by the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks, which would cover every aspect of not just Government policy but, as we learned today, Opposition policy, and the Butler inquiry on the use of intelligence or the Hutton inquiry on the death of Dr. David Kelly. Those were of a different order from the Privy Council inquiry, with no limits, that is being proposed today.

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

In a moment; let me make some progress. The right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks, majored on this point, but it is not credible to argue on the basis of the risk of interest fading, of records being lost, or of e-mails going missing. That cannot conceivably be the basis for arguing for an inquiry now, rather than when our troops have come home. That seems to me to be the fourth and final weakness of the case that he makes.

My right hon. Friend mentions the Butler committee's inquiry, but how can the House have confidence in that inquiry, or indeed that of the Intelligence and Security Committee, when one member of both committees—a former Member of the House, Ann Taylor—was involved in the preparation of the dossier? We know that from an e-mail to Jonathan Powell, among others, that begins:

"Ann Taylor read the draft dossier this morning and passed on some detailed comments to John Scarlett. She has just rung me to underline the following points."

There then follow various points. A Member of the House was involved in drawing up the dossier, was then appointed a member of the Butler committee, and was Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee; how can we have confidence in those procedures?

I have never heard the credibility or the good sense of the Butler inquiry called into question. I think that all of us who have read that study believe that it did a very serious job, without fear or favour. It interrogated all the relevant people, it looked into all the issues, and it had full access to papers. It came up with a clear set of recommendations that no one would say were comfortable for the Prime Minister and the Government of the time.

What the Butler saw was as little as possible.

My hon. Friend says, from a sedentary position, something about what the Butler saw; I think that the Butler saw pretty much everything in this case. I am surprised to hear my hon. Friend Lynne Jones cast doubt on the credibility of the Butler inquiry.

rose—

Is it about the Butler inquiry?

The Foreign Secretary said earlier that it was not the morale of troops in Basra that was of concern to him, but the fact that senior Ministers and diplomats would be distracted from the priorities of dealing with the ongoing situation in Iraq. He knows perfectly well that not a single senior Minister, ambassador or senior civil servant who was responsible for Iraq five years ago currently has responsibilities for Iraq, so how can that possibly be an argument in favour of his position?

First of all, for the record, I would never say that the morale of troops was not of concern. My argument was that I would not advance the case against an inquiry on the basis of the morale of the troops. Secondly, in respect of the work that would be required across the armed forces, which I mentioned, and the diplomatic service, it is not only the senior Ministers to whom the right hon. and learned Gentleman referred but the whole machine that will have to service the inquiry and ensure, in a diligent way, that the issues are addressed. That is the issue at hand. That is the argument for holding an inquiry when we could hold one, when all our troops have come home.

rose—

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, because he has not yet had a chance to speak, but then I want to conclude.

The Foreign Secretary has spoken about the wide-ranging nature of the Butler inquiry and the inquiry by the Intelligence and Security Committee. He knows that the previous Prime Minister admitted at the Dispatch Box that he did not know that weapons of mass destruction, which he was going to destroy, were in fact defensive weapons. We went to war without the Prime Minister knowing exactly what the threat was. How could that possibly happen? The Prime Minister did not know—he was not briefed—yet those questions were not posed by either the Butler inquiry or the ISC inquiry.

We have had 60 debates, many of which have focused on that and other relevant issues. However, that does not seem to be relevant to the issue that we are debating.

rose—

rose—

On due grounds, I shall give way to Sir Menzies Campbell. I hope that the hon. Member for Hereford understands.

I have listened carefully to the Foreign Secretary's speech. Does he understand that the impression that he is giving is less a concern about the effectiveness of British operations in Basra and much more a determination to try to protect the Government from embarrassment in relation to the decision to go to war?

With all due respect, I believe that the right hon. and learned Gentleman thought of that line before the debate began.

Given the events in Basra, it is important that I update the House on our understanding of the clashes that have taken place. In the hour between oral questions and the debate, I have spoken to our acting consul general in Basra and to our ambassador in Baghdad, and I should update the House on that, because it is relevant to this issue. Over the past two days, the Iraqi Government have launched a new phase in their efforts to assert full authority over Basra. On Monday, Prime Minister Maliki broadcast a message to the people of Basra, emphasising that the Iraqi state was responsible for security.

rose—

Order. I may have anticipated the point of order the hon. Gentleman was about to raise. The Foreign Secretary should be careful on this matter. If he seeks to insert in his speech a statement about a situation that would ordinarily be subject to questioning, that ought to be done in a specific way. It is not normally accepted procedure to combine a statement of information to the House with a speech in an Opposition day debate.

I am certainly not going to argue with the Deputy Speaker, or trespass on the conventions of the House. I think it is relevant, however, to our debate that the centrepiece of the Government's—

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. May I suggest to the Foreign Secretary that he make that statement on the completion of our debate tonight, when he will have more information to present to the House?

I think that the hon. Gentleman knows that that is not a matter on which the Chair can pronounce. I have suggested that the Foreign Secretary follow the normal way of proceeding in cases of this kind. It is up to the Government to decide how they deal with that.

Let me conclude, Mr. Deputy Speaker, by addressing the finely balanced position that continues to exist in Iraq, and which the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks himself argued in 2006 militated against an inquiry.

In the past year, there have been significant improvements in the security situation in Baghdad, as the right hon. Gentleman said. That is a reflection of various factors, not least the growing capability of the Iraqi security forces and the rejection by many Iraqis, particularly Sunnis of western Iraq, of al-Qaeda. However, it is also clear that to sustain that progress, Iraqis themselves need to use the opportunities provided by improved security to take forward the political reconciliation process. It is important, too, to use the breathing space provided by improved security to progress broader reconciliation at the local level, which is directly relevant to the position of our troops and the training of the Iraqi security forces in southern Iraq.

In Basra, real progress had been made by General Mohan, head of Basra operations command, and by General Jalil, Basra police director, in developing ISF capability since their appointment last summer. On the economic front, the Prime Minister's announcement on 8 October of a Basra development commission has been taken forward, and meanwhile, hundreds of corrupt or militia-affiliated police officers have been dismissed by General Jalil. The sovereign decisions of the Government of Iraq in respect of the Iraqi security forces and their work with our troops in southern Iraq reflect the progress that has been achieved since provincial Iraqi control in Basra.

We have commitments to the Iraqi people, rooted in UN resolutions. We are continuing to devote substantial diplomatic, development and military resources to honouring those commitments, against a background of promising but still fragile progress. In that context, all the efforts—

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

No. All the efforts of our most senior people, from soldiers to diplomats, need to be focused on creating the best possible future for Iraq, not on concentrating on the past. That is what the Government will be doing. I believe that is what the House should be doing as well. Let us have an inquiry, but when our troops are safe. I urge support for the Government Amendment.

I begin by associating my right hon. and hon. Friends with the initial comments of the Foreign Secretary about the bravery and dedication of British servicemen and women. Whatever our differences on the war or the inquiry, at least we can all agree on our joint pride in our armed forces.

Apart from those comments, however, I am afraid that the Foreign Secretary's speech was totally unconvincing. Although I enjoyed his exploitation of the inconsistencies of the Conservative position, his argument on the substance was pitifully weak. The case for an inquiry into the Iraq war is overwhelming, and the case for it to be held now is at least as strong. One would have thought that an inquiry ought to be automatic when a decision of the magnitude of going to war goes so catastrophically wrong. To put such an inquiry off, even five years afterwards, is nothing short of a scandal. So just as the Liberal Democrats have proposed an inquiry and supported all past calls in the House for an inquiry, we will do so again tonight.

Yet in supporting the Conservative motion, we feel that it is only right to remind the public that the Conservative party still refuses to admit that it made a gross error of judgment on Iraq. If the Conservative party were to admit that tonight, my hunch is that their motion would be more likely to succeed. In past such debates, more than 40 Labour MPs who had voted against the war voted against an inquiry, partly because the Tory position looked so opportunistic. A long overdue expression of regret from those on the Conservative Benches could serve a useful parliamentary purpose and defeat the Government tonight. Judging from the speech of Mr. Hague, it seems that they are still believers in the war.

I can therefore appeal only to Labour MPs—those who were brave enough five years ago to vote with us against the Iraq war. Yes, the Conservatives may be playing politics with the issue. Yes, I can understand that those Labour Members do not want to be seen to play games with the Tories. But surely the logic of their Opposition to the war means that the only rational place for them to be tonight is in the Lobby with the other 15 Labour MPs who previously voted for an inquiry.

We need an inquiry because those who took that decision, including the Conservatives, need to be held to account. We also need it because, as the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks said, we need to be sure that the lessons are learned for Afghanistan and all future conflicts, and for the work of the intelligence services.

Has not the hon. Gentleman given his game away by asking for hon. Members to be made to give account of themselves? Surely this is wider than a party political debate. Of course, I should be interested to know what happened with the Government, with my own party and with his party in the discussions, but this is a matter for the country. It is not for the Liberal Democrats to try to use it as their little toy.

That is rather rich, coming from the Conservative Benches. I agree with the hon. Gentleman on one thing—the debate goes wider than party politics. That is what we have argued for many years.

The Government position used to be to oppose an inquiry completely, claiming that four inquiries had already been held. When I intervened on the Foreign Secretary tonight, we heard a volte face from the previous Government position. His argument tonight destroyed the argument that they made in the past, which we always thought was threadbare. At least tonight the right hon. Gentleman had the decency to admit the fiction.

Early this week, it seemed refreshing when we appeared to get a promise from the Prime Minister, repeated in the Government's Amendment tonight, that the Government were no longer against an inquiry in principle. Indeed, the Foreign Secretary said that again today. It seems that the only issue in this debate is the timing of that inquiry. Are the Government correct in saying that an early inquiry would be wrong and that we must wait while, as the Government amendment puts it,

"operations are underway in Iraq to support the people and government of Iraq"?

Absolutely not. The Government have got themselves into a ludicrous and untenable position. In this debate, the Foreign Secretary has never explained why the ongoing operations in Iraq are an obstacle to the inquiry. He mentioned that a few diplomats, soldiers and commanders might be needed for the inquiry. However, as I shall endeavour to show, most of the people who will need to go before the inquiry will have moved on and will not be involved in Iraq today.

If my hon. Friend speaks to senior members of Congress who were involved in the Baker review, they will tell him that Congress was able to carry out a thoughtful and full-ranging review of the US commitment in Iraq with no negative effect whatever on troops on the ground or the diplomatic service. If the Foreign Secretary is suggesting that they were put at risk by the review, he is, frankly, wrong.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He will know that there have been many American investigations into a whole range of issues in Iraq—not least, many of the audit reports. There have been more than 60 audit reports on different aspects of the reconstruction. How have they got in the way of the major work going on in Iraq?

The Foreign Secretary tried to make the point that many potential participants in the inquiry may be too busy to take part in it. Is it not the case that the key witness—the most important person from whom we wish to hear—has plenty of time on his hands at the moment? In a few months' time, however, he may be too busy as president of the European Council.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, but he anticipates my speech; I shall deal with his point in a second.

The main remaining public justification for UK troops staying in Iraq is that they are there to train the Iraqi security forces—an important task that our armed forces have been doing for some time with distinction. However, does the task of training prevent an inquiry? I think not. [Interruption.] From a sedentary position, the Minister for the Armed Forces is saying that the troops are doing far more. However, the Iraq Commission, co-chaired by my noble Friend Lord Ashdown, made it absolutely clear that the training function was the key and critical issue during the overwatch stage. If the Minister wants to deny that, let him get to the Dispatch Box.

Furthermore, even when questioned about the action in Basra today, the British military are clear that it does not involve our forces. Action is being taken by the Iraqi armed forces and the Iraqi police, who have been trained in the past by the British security forces but who have no help from British forces today. That is the point; we are now handing over.

How do you know?

I know because that is what the military are telling the journalists in Iraq. The Minister ought to know that himself.

British forces are there to train the Iraqi forces, but also, if necessary, to back them up. We do not yet know what is happening in Basra.

One can only go on what the military spokesmen are saying.

Even if the limited military operations mentioned by the Foreign Secretary are ongoing, I still do not see how they would be an obstacle to an inquiry. He went on to talk about the attention and focus of our armed forces and diplomats. However, if that is the argument, our engagement in any military operation anywhere in the world—Afghanistan or elsewhere—would hinder an inquiry. The argument is palpably absurd.

I was grateful for the history lesson given by Mr. Simpson; it really holed the Foreign Secretary beneath the waterline, and he failed to answer the hon. Gentleman's point. He was also wrong in his refutation of the precedent of the Dardanelles commission of 1916-17, cited by Mr. Hague. That was sitting during the first world war. The actions in Gallipoli may have finished, but let us face it, our armed forces were hugely involved in northern France. The idea that because the action had happened in Gallipoli, those involved were freed up so that the inquiry could take place is absurd.

rose—

I give way to the hon. Gentleman. I hope that he can come up with a better argument than that of his Front Benchers.

To compare a war that was taking place in 1917 with one that has taken place this century—in the age of the internet and of people flying around on easyJet, when propaganda can fly around the world in a split second—is to look at the whole issue totally out of context.

If I had understood the logic behind the hon. Gentleman's argument, I would answer his Intervention. However, I am afraid that the House has already shown that that point is not worth addressing.

If the House is to vote against the Government's Amendment and for the motion, it will have to try to understand more the nature of the inquiry. Who would be called? What would be the inquiry's focus? The right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks rightly said that it would focus on the run-up to the war, the invasion itself and the immediate aftermath far more than on actions going on in Basra and the southern provinces on the Iran-Iraq border in 2008.

Let us think about who would come to the inquiry—one Tony Blair comes to mind. I suggest that he is not that busy at the moment; I do not believe that he is involved with our troops in the Iraqi operations in Basra. He may be attending a few board meetings. One or two days a week, I believe, he helps to create peace in Israel-Palestine, although he has a bit of work to do on that. Nevertheless, he ought to come to the inquiry. He ought to be called now, not in a few years' time. He is the central witness and he is available. Many of the main actors in the civil service, the armed forces or the Government have moved on from the responsibilities that they held in 2003. Even if they are still in place, they are not working in the theatre of operations, but are here in London or somewhere else in the UK. On the issue of those very few witnesses in Iraq whom the inquiry would wish to call, I cannot believe that a temporary leave of absence would bring training work or any other operations to a dramatic standstill that would somehow undermine our efforts. The argument is ludicrous.

The case for delaying the inquiry is weak, but the case for an early inquiry could not be stronger. It has been five years.

Longer than the first world war.

The hon. Gentleman anticipates me; it is longer than the first world war, and almost as long as the second world war, since the invasion. The Foreign Secretary dismissed the notion that memories could fade and recall could be hazy. He may be right; Tony Blair's memory of what he has said to the House or his colleagues is often hazy, but it will not improve with the passage of time. Unless they have been recorded accurately, which I doubt, recollections of who said what to whom will be far less precise.

The Foreign Secretary dismissed the point about e-mails. The Government do not have a good record on archiving and management of electronic records, so I hope that he understands why the Opposition are unconvinced by that argument. I ask him, and whoever will sum up in his absence tonight, what is happening in respect of preserving the electronic and written evidence. In anticipation of the inquiry that they now support, have the Government set up people to make sure that all the evidence is available to it? I hope that there will be an answer to that. Continuing this farcical delay does the Government no credit at all.

The hon. Gentleman is, of course, right that if we are to restore public confidence in the democratic process, it is essential that we initiate an inquiry as a Parliament this side of a General Election. If we are unsuccessful on this third occasion—three tries for a Welshman; the Shadow Foreign Secretary is an honorary Welshman, at least—will the Liberal Democrats consider supporting the proposal made by Mr. Clarke that they use some of their parliamentary time for this purpose? Alternatively, they could use the Amendment that they are allowed to put to the Queen's Speech motion. If an inquiry is not proposed by the Government, would the Liberal Democrats support a Back-Bench initiative from the Labour side so that we as a Parliament, on a cross-party basis, can get the inquiry that the public demand?

I certainly think that all the Opposition parties in this House should work together on that and work with those Labour Back Benchers who are prepared to be open-minded about the issue, as many of them were. Five years ago, more than 100 of them bravely went against very hard whipping from their Front Benchers to support our arguments against the war, so I am sure that that could be brought about by people of good faith.

Given the scale of the disaster in Iraq, it is perhaps understandable that the Government are reluctant to open their files. There was a chance during the change of Prime Minister to seize the moment, draw a line and have the inquiry, but I am afraid that once again the new Prime Minister ducked that opportunity—as in so many things, he is blowing his chances.

We owe an inquiry to the people who have died—the 175 British servicemen and women and the 4,000 American troops, and the countless Iraqi civilians. Whether that figure is the latest UN estimate of 0.25 million or the higher figures of The Lancet and other surveys, those deaths demand an inquiry, as do the injured, the tortured, the refugees, the internally displaced, the kidnapped, the people whose lives have been ruined—the millions of people affected by the decision to go to war. When we begin to count the cost of the war in the lives lost and in the damage to security, stability and the rule of international law, it is, frankly, frightening. That is before we get to the cost to the taxpayer, the cost to our friends and allies in the region—countries such as Turkey, Israel and Jordan—and the cost of making less friendly countries in the region much stronger, such as Iran and Syria, which have been strengthened by the failures in Iraq. Then we should think of the cost to the United Nations and its credibility. How can anyone say that there is no need for an urgent inquiry?

Is not the fact that the UK is spending £4.5 million a day enough reason alone for an inquiry?

It is low down on the list, given all the deaths that have occurred, but it is one of the many reasons for the inquiry.

Liberal Democrat Members will vote for the motion, but I cannot let the debate go by without a slight comment on the Conservatives' position. They are right to push again for an inquiry, as the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks did well, but even he must understand that his position is much weakened by his refusal to admit that the Conservatives were wrong to back the war in the first place. Of course, the Conservatives are desperate that people should not be reminded of their complicity. Their call for an inquiry has long been part of their tactics in seeking to distance themselves from responsibility for this catastrophe. Yet they cannot escape their past, for they are guilty on three counts for aiding and abetting the war.

First, the Conservative party leadership argued the case for military action, at times with far more enthusiasm than Tony Blair. On 1 September 2002, the then Conservative party leader said that

"we can choose to act pre-emptively or we can prevaricate".

If that was not a call to war, I do not know what was. Then he added:

"Those who genuinely seek evidence in support of potential military action in Iraq will find there is plenty of it; those who oppose Intervention at all costs will never find enough."

In other words: "Suspend your rational faculties and go with your prejudices."

The second count on which the Conservatives are guilty is that of failing to ask the pertinent questions. So convinced were they that the war was legal that they left it to the Liberal Democrats to push for the true legal opinion.

Not just the Liberal Democrats.

And indeed to others in this House, on the nationalist Benches and on the Labour Back Benches.

rose—

I give way to the hon. Gentleman.

Hon. Members:

No!

Were not the deliberations of Mr. Hague all about distancing himself from the Government's decision to go to war, and are not the hon. Gentleman's remarks all about distancing his party from the Conservatives?

I am afraid that I made a mistake in allowing the hon. Gentleman to intervene. I will listen to my hon. Friends more in future.

So convinced were the Conservatives that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that they attacked our view that the UN weapons inspectors should be given more time. So convinced were they that the war was right that they failed to join the Liberal Democrats in demanding to know what the exit strategy was and for how long UK troops would be committed. Failing to ask those searching questions before a decision to go to war is a failure to perform the constitutional duty of an Opposition party.

The third charge against the Conservatives is that Mr. Cameron, the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks and 144 of their Conservative colleagues voted for the war. It is just possible that some of them regret their decision and believe that it was a mistake, although the official Conservative Front-Bench position is still that the war was right. I find it astonishing that even five years after the war, with all the evidence that it was so wrong, the Conservatives will not give their regrets. Of course, some of them may try running the line that they were misled by Tony Blair, and that with the truth now available and the benefit of hindsight, and now that we know that there were no weapons of mass destruction, they can somehow escape the blame for voting for the war. However, that was not the argument of the Conservative leader and his Front Benchers at the time. In October 2002, he said at his party's conference:

"We cannot wait until we have irrefutable proof that Saddam has nuclear, biological and chemical weapons targeted on the British people."

The truth is that the Conservatives at no stage relied on the Government's dossier of September 2002 to make their case for war. That is why we believe that when the inquiry comes it must be a comprehensive one that will be free to question all Members of this House from whatever party.

I hope that the House will vote for an inquiry tonight, but if the Government really do try to put it off, they must know that their day of reckoning will come.

I think that I have been quite consistent during the time that I have spoken about Iraq in this Chamber. I argued for one thing—for the removal of a regime that persecuted its own people and was responsible for 5,000 deaths in Halabja, for the deaths of tens of thousands of Kurds throughout Kurdistan, and for the deaths of tens of thousands of Shi'a in the south. It was for humanitarian reasons that I always argued for the removal of the regime, and I did so in 2003 when I spoke in favour of the war. I did that because I had failed—and I would suggest that we had all failed—in looking at the alternatives to war in the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime. There were alternatives. There was an alternative that I spoke about here for at least seven years; in fact, I continually bored myself by talking about it so often. I was very pleased that 201 people in this Chamber—my colleagues in all parts of the House—voted at that time to indict the regime and to remove it by international law. That would have been possible.

I support the inquiry, but I would like it to include the question of why nobody took the indictment of the regime seriously at that time. I chaired an organisation called Indict, which had collected evidence of Iraqi war crimes over a period of seven years. We had three researchers who went to 15 countries all over the world and collected that evidence in case anybody forgot about it. Some of the evidence went back further back than seven years; it went back for more than 30 years, because it was for 30 years that that regime persecuted its own people. We employed researchers and lawyers to take testimony from Iraqis all over the world. We gathered evidence, carried out interviews and prepared legal briefs detailing the monstrosity of the Saddam regime as told to us by individual Iraqis. We took many more testimonies than we were able to use; some of them, unfortunately, would not have stood up in a court of law. The crimes committed by the regime were truly appalling.

The right hon. Lady argued for military action on humanitarian grounds, but would she agree that one of the disasters of the Iraq war is that—without an inquiry—it makes military action for humanitarian purposes in future even less likely?

I am sorry, but the hon. Gentleman is completely missing my point, which is that there was an alternative to war, but nobody took it seriously enough. At that time, it was possible under international law to indict leading members of the regime, particularly Tariq Aziz, on the taking of hostages. We presented evidence to the then Attorney-General, who passed it to Scotland Yard. I remember saying to him, "You're kicking it into the long grass," and in the long grass it remained, because, as far as I know, Scotland Yard took no action at all. In fact, we were ridiculed in the press for wasting police time. There were very few people in this House who supported alternative action; I have mentioned the 201 who did.

On the board of Indict—much to people's surprise, I am sure—were leading members of the Iraqi Opposition. They also believed that indictment was the way to remove leading members of the regime, and they believed that the regime would fall as the result of that action. Those members included Latif Rashid, who is now the Iraqi Water Resources Minister, Ahmad Chalabi, who now chairs a committee on reconstruction in Baghdad, and Hamid Al-Bayati, who is now Iraqi permanent representative to the UN in New York. By 2003 we had enough evidence to indict Tariq Aziz. I personally attempted to get the indictment in Belgium, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. We were funded by the Americans because, at that time, their statute of limitations did not enable prosecutions or indictments to take place in the United States, but they were possible in Europe.

My right hon. Friend makes an important point, but does she regret—as those who shared her concern but still voted against war do—that when the trial of Saddam Hussein finally took place, it was framed in such narrow terms that none of the charges about which she had collected evidence were allowed to be addressed? The British and American Governments felt that evidence of our own complicit involvement in supporting and perpetrating those atrocities would be unearthed .

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I would have liked a full-scale indictment where all the charges against Saddam Hussein could have been heard. I hope that they will be heard in other cases; do not forget that the trials are still going on. My point does not concern those trials, however, but the opportunity that we missed in this place for an alternative to war. I was not somebody who supported war; I did so only on rare occasions. I was active in the peace movement. I supported war as a last resort because we failed to get those indictments. I hoped that in the United Kingdom most of all, we would have seen how to use international law to avert a war, but we failed to do so. I would like to see that dealt with in an inquiry.

Some of those on the other side of the House are asking for an apology from those of us who voted for military action in 2003. I do not apologise, because I still think that it was the right thing to do to remove that regime. However, it is quite right to ask what went wrong. Unlike many Foreign Office officials, I have not yet put my memoirs on paper. However, I have been closely involved with Iraq for more than 30 years. I have my own criticisms of how things progressed after the war— [ Interruption. ] I know that my hon. Friend Jeremy Corbyn wants to intervene. I do not need him pointing out, thank you; I am not deaf. We should have examined certain possibilities to the full, and we did not do so.

Does my right hon. Friend consider that any inquiry held should also look at the role of the Foreign Office and Ministers in relation to the refusal to allow weapons inspectors to return to Iraq just after Christmas 2002? The inspectors had clearly made enormous progress in disarming the regime. As she knows, I supported the idea of indicting the regime before that. The inspectors were not allowed to return, and instead we rushed into war, with all the consequences that followed.

My hon. Friend was one of those few people who, in 1988, came with me to the Foreign Office to complain about the actions of the Conservative party in its dealings with Iraq. In particular, when the events at Halabja occurred, the then Foreign Office Minister said that there was no evidence. We said at that time, "We insist that you get the evidence, because it is there." My hon. Friend has played an honourable role in pursuing these matters for a long period.

I go to Iraq frequently—I was there in December—and at the moment there are green shoots of optimism. There is no doubt about that; even the sternest critic of the war would have to admit that there is progress and optimism. There are positive developments, but what is happening in Basra at the moment is very unfortunate. It is a pity that we could not hear from my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary about the events that are taking place there as we speak. I understand that British jets are involved in some sort of surveillance and in giving information to Iraqi forces fighting on the ground. We are not quite as detached from what is going on there as some people may suggest, which is why it would not be helpful to have an inquiry now, next week or the month afterwards, although I do think it essential to have one at some stage. In particular, I would like the inquiry to ask why we did not make more of an effort to get an indictment when we had the evidence to do so.

The right hon. Lady says that she voted for the invasion reluctantly, because we could not get the indictment. However, would she accept that invading a country for regime change is illegal under international law, and that that was not the reason given for the vote in this House? On 25 February 2003, the Prime Minister told us:

"I detest his regime...but even now, he could save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully."—[ Hansard, 25 February 2003; Vol. 400, c. 124.]

In other words, if Saddam Hussein had given up the non-existent weapons of mass destruction that Hans Blix could not find, he would have been allowed to stay in power, and it was not about regime change.

That may be the case, but it is not my case. My point is that for more than 25 years, senior Iraqi officials committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The list is long, and people need reminding of it; I sometimes think that people have conveniently wiped it from their memory. It was important to get regime change; I have not changed my mind one little bit.

My right hon. Friend knows, because she has been involved in the campaign longer than I have, that we have just marked the 20th anniversary of the terrible Anfal atrocities that Saddam carried out, but where has that appeared on the BBC? Where has the "Today" programme been? When did John Humphrys talk about that yesterday? There has not been a word.

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. He is absolutely right. I tried to talk about it last week on a BBC programme and I was continuously told, "It's Basra we're talking about. Basra." We need to assemble all the facts; we cannot take something in isolation and talk about only one specific case. The genocidal Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurds in 1987-88, the invasion of Kuwait, the killing of more than 1,000 Kuwaiti civilians and the violent suppression of the 1991 Kurdish uprising led to 30,000 or more civilian deaths. I am interested to know what the Conservative party's solution would have been. Would it have allowed Saddam to continue to persecute his own people?

The right hon. Lady makes the case for regime change and says that the war in Iraq was all about that as far as she was concerned. Why was the case for regime change different in Iraq from the case that could be made against dictators and despots the world over? What is the difference between the position in Iraq that she has outlined and the position in Zimbabwe, where there is the most awful dictator, Robert Mugabe? Why is it right to invade one country to change the regime and not another?

Because Iraq had ignored 17 UN Security Resolutions— [Interruption.] I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman has ever sat in the UN and listened, as I did for several years running, to the report of the UN rapporteur on human rights in Iraq, who detailed all the things that I have mentioned today. The UN Security Council sat there and did nothing. If the UN is to mean something, surely ignoring 17 UN Security Council resolutions is important.

The right hon. Lady has been a tireless campaigner and I respect the fact that she has been consistent in her arguments. However, does she accept that the humanitarian reasons were not those given to the House or the country to justify going to war with Iraq? That is why we urgently need an inquiry into the Iraq war now.

I agree that humanitarian arguments were not presented. I think that they should have been, and that we should ask why they were not. I know the slick answer to that question, but some of us, including many of my hon. Friends who opposed the war, presented the arguments for regime change for many years. We consistently said that something should be done about the Iraqi regime. I believed that the regime should have been indicted under international law. It was possible in the case of Milosevic, so why not in the case of Saddam Hussein, Tariq Aziz and many others on our list who are in jail awaiting trial?

To take up the point that the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee made, it is important to remind people why the regime was so bad. The people of Iraq deserve to hear that themselves, and the people who lost family during those years need to hear the people who perpetrated those crimes answering for them.

Several hon. Members:

rose —

Order. I remind hon. Members that Mr. Speaker has imposed a 15-minute time limit on Back-Bench contributions.

It is a pleasure to follow Ann Clwyd, who speaks with such experience and knowledge of Iraq. I am sure that the points that she made could be accommodated in the terms of reference of the sort of inquiry that the motion envisages, and I hope that she will perhaps reconsider her intention to vote against the motion, because the logic of her speech is that such an inquiry should be held and that the best time for it is now.

I agree with many speakers, including the Foreign Secretary, that we should pay tribute to the way in which our forces have performed in Iraq. That unites us all. Many of them were trained at Lydd and Hythe in my Constituency, and several were trained in Shorncliffe, also in my constituency, before they went to Iraq. They have performed superbly and we owe them a deep debt of gratitude.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Shadow Foreign Secretary on a powerful, compelling and, in my view, unanswerable speech. I sympathise, in his absence, with the Foreign Secretary for the task with which he was saddled. I was a practising barrister for 21 years and during that time I had to argue some pretty thin cases. I had the privilege of being a Minister for 12 years and I readily confess that there were one or two occasions—very few—when I found myself defending from the Dispatch Box one or two positions that were perhaps a little thinner than I would have liked. However, I am happy to say that I have never had the experience of attempting to advance such threadbare arguments as the Foreign Secretary was obliged to present today.

May I take the right hon. and learned Gentleman back to the late 1980s when he was a Minister? Since he supports an inquiry, as I do, does he accept that it should include a thorough investigation of those Ministers, civil servants and others who authorised selling arms to Iraq, even after the events at Halabja, and of British participation, which Ministers approved, in the Baghdad arms fair the following year?

That is exactly what the Scott inquiry examined at length. It was right to hold an inquiry into those matters. The previous Government set it up and it duly reported.

Our debates about the need for an inquiry into events surrounding the invasion of Iraq before and after it took place were clothed in a language that had an arcane theology of its own. That was when the former Prime Minister was still in office and before the Defence Secretary's announcement in 2006, to which my right hon. Friend Mr. Hague referred. The Government position then was that no full inquiry was needed because of those that had already taken place.

Those debates were punctuated with obscure arguments about the precise terms of reference of the previous inquiries and the extent to which they had been implemented. The Government's position at that time and in the context of those arguments was not only inconsistent with that which the Foreign Secretary advanced today but directly contradicted it. Their argument then was, "We've had all these wide-ranging and comprehensive inquiries—there's nothing left to inquire into." Fortunately they realised—I suppose that they deserve some credit for it—that that position was untenable. They therefore changed it and accepted that the case for an inquiry was unanswerable. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, as we have heard today, the Government's position is, "Yes, we'll have an inquiry, but not yet. We won't tell you when or precisely what circumstances must be satisfied. It'll happen sometime, but not yet." That exposed a vulnerability in the Government's line, which, as we have witnessed this evening, was obvious, clear and wholly indefensible. There is no good reason for not holding an inquiry now, and everyone, including the Government, knows it.

It is interesting that when the Prime Minister responded to the case for holding an inquiry that the Fabian Society put forward, he limited himself to just one reason. He said that it is

"vital that the government does not divert attention from supporting Iraq's development as a secure and stable country."

That prompts the question, which has already arisen in this debate: whose attention would be diverted from that task? It would not be our troops on the ground in Iraq whose attention would be diverted. Indeed, it is difficult if not impossible to see how they would be involved in such an inquiry, so there is no cause for concern there. The Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary, who we hope are spearheading the United Kingdom's support for Iraq's development as a stable and secure country—they have the political responsibility for that task—were not involved in the events surrounding the invasion, so they are not likely to have their attention diverted from that important task, either.

The House is entitled to know whom the Prime Minister had in mind when he uttered those words. We are entitled to an answer. Who are the people whose attention would be diverted from that task? I hope that the Minister, who has the unenviable task of replying to this debate, will respond to that question. If the Prime Minister says that the reason for not holding an inquiry now is that we must not divert people's attention from that task, we want to know whose attention would be diverted.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman has been around long enough to know that several serving members of the Government, some of whom were in other Departments before, were intimately involved in the events of 2003.

That is not what the Prime Minister said. He did not say, "We can't have an inquiry because there are lots of Ministers who have important business to attend to and we mustn't distract them." He said, "We can't have an inquiry, because we mustn't divert people from the responsibility of what they need to do in Iraq." That prompts the question that must be answered if we are to give any credence at all to the position advanced by the Government.

The truth, of course, is that there are lessons that could be learned from such an inquiry and from which we could benefit. Those lessons could benefit what we are doing in Iraq and in Afghanistan now. It is a disgrace that we should be deprived of those benefits for no good reason at all.

Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that many military personnel would welcome an inquiry now? Many in the military feel that they were left with a huge burden, in moving into Iraq and creating a level of peace without back-up from other Departments—namely the Department for International Development, which did not undertake the reconstruction and redevelopment that was so needed. However, it is the military who receive the brunt of the complaints about what has gone wrong.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: that is one of the many reasons why we need an inquiry.

I did not intend to intervene on the right hon. and learned Gentleman, but following the point raised with him by Mr. Ellwood does he not accept—I raised this point earlier with the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman—that were an inquiry to take place now or in the months ahead that indicted the Government and was critical of the conditions in which the troops had found themselves, and that was published while the troops were still there, the leadership of those troops would become almost impossible for the officers, because they would lack the political credibility enabling them to be there in the first place? Is that not the real reason why it is important not to hold an inquiry now?

No, I do not accept that reasoning at all. My right hon. and hon. Friends have cited the precedents. It is inconceivable that the results of any such inquiry could have that effect on the limited role that our troops are currently carrying out in Basra. The argument does not begin to make sense. We know what the troops are doing and what they are there for. It is inconceivable that the results of any such inquiry could in any way damage their position. Also, that argument was not the reason put forward by the Prime Minister—it may be the hon. Gentleman's reason, but it is not the Prime Minister's.

So what is the reason? Why are the Government proving to be so obstinate? What is the real reason for their procrastination? I suppose that some people may be tempted to put it down to the Prime Minister's natural tendency towards procrastination—we know that he finds it difficult to make decisions about all sorts of things. However, I believe that a more specific reason is at play in this case. I believe that there is only one conclusion that we can draw from the Government's behaviour: that they do not want an inquiry that will report before the next General Election. The Government do not want any inquiry's findings to be available to the electorate when they come to give their verdict on the Government. The Government do not want those findings to be taken into account when that verdict is delivered. In short, they are running away from the principle that should be central to our parliamentary democracy: the principle of accountability.

Earlier this afternoon, the Justice Secretary introduced a white paper from the Dispatch Box. Practically the first sentence that he spoke was, "Accountability is fundamental to the health of our democracy." The Government's attitude to the motion before the House in this debate gives the lie to what the Justice Secretary said just that short time ago.

Let me finish by giving the Foreign Secretary a word or two of advice in his absence—I hope that it will be transmitted to him. This issue will not go away. This will not be the last time that it is debated in the House, and if the Government stick to their line, this will not be the last time that the Justice Secretary is so painfully embarrassed in the studios of the "Today" programme as he was this morning, or the last time that the Foreign Secretary is so humiliated at the Dispatch Box as he was this afternoon. I urge the Foreign Secretary to use all his persuasive powers to get the Prime Minister to see how ludicrous the Government's current position is. The Government have changed their position once; they can change it again. The sooner they do so, the better.

Since 2003 there have been four inquiries into the events leading up to the war in Iraq, as has been stated. There has been the Butler inquiry, the Hutton inquiry, the Intelligence and Security Committee inquiry and the Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry, which was agreed in June 2003.

However, there is a need for ongoing investigation and inquiry, and for lessons to be learned. I gave evidence to Channel 4's Iraq Commission inquiry a few months ago. That was a valuable exercise and the report of the commission, which is chaired by Lord Ashdown, was a valuable piece of work. However, that is not what today's debate is about. In today's motion, hon. Members are pressing for

"an independent committee of privy councillors" to conduct an inquiry. We might ask whether one can find such a thing as a genuinely independent Privy Councillor, but that is a debate for another time.

Reference has been made to the US Baker-Hamilton inquiry. That inquiry was composed not only of current members of the US House of Representatives and the Senate. It was a body that brought in academic experts and former diplomats, as well as Lee Hamilton and James Baker as its bipartisan chairs.

My first criticism of the motion before us relates to my belief that we need to widen the focus of any such inquiry, when the time comes. We also need to take account of what my right hon. Friend Ann Clwyd referred to as the long history of events in Iraq that led to the decisions made in this House in March 2003. Mr. Hague, who is not in his place at the moment, said that an inquiry should concentrate on 2002, 2003 and 2004. I would ask why, and I would do so for two reasons. Reference was made earlier to the Scott inquiry. That inquiry did not deal with the terrible crimes of Saddam against the Kurdish people in Halabja. Instead, it took a narrow focus on the supergun, Matrix Churchill and the way in which public immunity certificates were used in a legal process to stop the truth coming out under the previous Conservative Government. The late Robin Cook did a fantastic job of demolishing the Conservative party and its role in that debate, after the Scott report was published. Any inquiry that takes account of the recent past would also have to take account of the previous history.

Reference was also made to the arms sales policies of the 1980s, when some of the Conservative Members who are here today were members of the Government who were selling arms to Saddam. We can look back to 1980, when Margaret Thatcher and the right hon. and learned Members for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) and for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) were all part of that British Conservative Government. They made the decision to support the Ba'athist fascist regime in Iraq, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, as well as supporting Osama bin Laden and other disreputable people whom we now regard as beyond the pale. At that time, however, for reasons of state, certain decisions were made. We need to look at the whole context.

If there is to be an inquiry, let it not be partisan. Let us have an inquiry into the UK's relations with Iraq over the past 30 years. Let us really dig up the stones and look at the way in which those on the Conservative Benches who are now taking a holier-than-thou position on these matters were conspiring to support that Ba'athist regime while my right hon. Friend Jeremy Corbyn and I were campaigning against the arming of Saddam. Let us not forget that as we discuss what kind of inquiry we should have.

I am listening intently to the hon. Gentleman's concerns, which stretch over many decades. I take it that, like me, he is very impatient for an inquiry into the war in Iraq, and that he will vote for such an inquiry tonight.

If the motion before us today proposed an inquiry into all aspects of UK relations with Iraq over the past 30 years, I would indeed support it, speak to it and vote for it. However, that is not the focus of the narrow motion that we are debating today. I will therefore not support it.

My friend is becoming very animated. Did he know that the Public Administration Committee will be taking evidence next week on the possibility of initiating a parliamentary inquiry into the circumstances leading to the war in Iraq? Given that such an inquiry would not be partisan—the Opposition motion is, by nature, partisan—would he support an inquiry couched in those terms?

I am always in favour of Select Committees of this House initiating inquiries. I was a member of the Defence Committee, which carried out an inquiry into the lessons of Iraq. It was published in 2004 and, incidentally, was very critical of the then Secretary of State for International Development for failing to get her officials to prepare for the aftermath of the conflict. If I remember correctly, she criticised us rather robustly in a debate on that report in the House. I believe that all Select Committees should take the initiative in holding the Executive to account, both for what they are doing now and for what they have done in the past. That is the appropriate route to take if we are to strengthen the power of the Committees of this House against the Executive. That is what we should be doing.

rose—

I will give way to my friend over there, my colleague on the Foreign Affairs Committee, even though he is also from the Liberal Democrats.

I am grateful to my Chairman for giving way. Thanks to the procedures that we have in this House, we can now be texted by our constituents. One of mine is watching this debate in Basra, on the BBC Parliament channel, and he simply wants to know why he is there. I accept what the hon. Gentleman and Ann Clwyd have said, but surely the real question for today's debate is: why did we deploy troops in 2003? Will the Chairman of the Select Committee support this motion calling for an inquiry? The recent past that he is describing has nothing to do with the argument that the rest of us in this Chamber are engaged in.

I am afraid that I will not support the Conservative motion tonight. Nor, unfortunately, will I be able to vote against the Liberal Democrat motion, as far as I am aware. I believe that simply to call for an apology from the Conservatives or from the Labour party needs to be balanced—

Order. Perhaps I can advise the hon. Gentleman that the only Amendment under discussion tonight is the one tabled by the Government.

I shall take your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I would simply say that there needs to be a recognition that some of us, whichever side we took in this debate, are glad that Saddam is no longer in power. That would not have been possible without the Intervention that took place in 2003. My right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley made the point very strongly that some people tried to find other ways to get rid of the Ba'athist regime in Iraq. They tried to do so in 1991, when the Shi'as in the south rose up and were massacred. They rose up with the encouragement of the first President Bush, and ended up being slaughtered, and the Kurds were driven into the mountains. I pay tribute to the role that John Major played at the time, when the previous Conservative Government brought in the no-fly zone to protect the Kurds.

Some people, having taken the position of saying that those crimes were terrible, did not follow the logic of saying that we had to get rid of the regime that had made them possible. I always took the view, as I do today, that regime change in Iraq was the right way to go. That was what I argued in the debate at the time, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley. However, that was not the position taken by the Government or by those on the Opposition front bench. It was also not a position taken by many others at that time, who took a narrower focus.

However, many of us had fought and campaigned against the Ba'athist regime for many years. I had friends who were students in this country, and who had come here as refugees from Saddam in the 1970s and 1980s. They told me about the terrible crimes that his regime had carried out. Some of those people went back to Iraq, and some are now in the Iraqi Parliament or in the Iraqi Government. They would not be alive today if this country had not welcomed them as refugees and supported them later on.

I am grateful to the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee for giving way. I think that the record will show that, a moment ago, he said that he was in favour of regime change in Iraq. Will he therefore explain how it is possible to be the Chairman of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs and to be in favour of something that is actually illegal in international law?

The problem with the crude, simplistic view of the world is that it does not take account of facts. The fact is that over 12 years Saddam's regime was, as already stated, in breach of 17 successive Security Council resolutions. There was and there remains a very strong argument—unfortunately, it was not tested—for Intervention to remove that regime— [Interruption.]

rose—

rose—

I will give way in a moment. Presumably, Angus Robertson will tell me that he was against what happened in Kosovo in 1999.

Yes.

Was that a yes?

It was a yes.

It seems so. That is interesting.

Order. Will Members note that the usual rules of debate apply in the Chamber?

The Scottish National party is at least being consistent —[Interruption.] Consistently wrong, but consistent. There needs to be a serious debate about humanitarian Intervention and when it is right to exercise a responsibility to protect as called for under the UN system by the Canadian commission and as debated at the millennium summit. We need to look at the issues surrounding Iraq in that context.

rose—

rose—

rose—

I give way to Mr. Blunt.

I am grateful. The hon. Gentleman has just paid a generous and proper tribute to Iraqi politicians who literally take their lives in their hands by participating in the politics of that country. He is a senior Member of this House, the Chairman of a Select Committee, and he also served on the Defence Committee when I did. That Defence Committee reported:

"We regret that MOD has failed to provide us with certain documents which we have requested and has demonstrated on occasion less co-operation and openness than we have the right to expect as a select Committee of the House of Commons".

Is it not sad that, in advancing his arguments this evening, the hon. Gentleman is not prepared to stand up for the rights of Parliament against the Executive? Is that not a very sad example to show to the Iraqi politicians he mentioned?

I will not take that from the hon. Gentleman. I am afraid that I will take no lectures from him. We could discuss what happened in the Defence Committee in 2003 and 2004, but that would be outside the terms of our debate. What I would say to the hon. Gentleman and others is that when we have an inquiry, it is crucial that it is conducted on the right basis. It must be constituted on the basis of wide support—not just in the House or among "independent privy councillors", but also among academics, journalists, former diplomats, perhaps even people in the BBC if that is possible—having heard the "Today" programme yesterday and today, I sometimes wonder whether another agenda is at work, as certain issues about Iraq are not mentioned. There is a constant litany of one view, which unfortunately does not inform the wider debate.

On the way forward, we need an inquiry to look into other aspects before, during and after 2003. One such aspect is the scandalous abuse of the oil-for-food programme, in which at least one Member of this House—Mr. Galloway—has been implicated. There are also scandals relating to the role of consultants and contractors and the money—mostly US money, not UK money—that has not got through to the Iraqi people in the reconstruction period. I do not know what the real costs of the conflict have been.

That is important now!

That is important now and it is particularly important in the US, because mainly US money is involved. British money spent in Basra in 2003-04 through the quick-fix quick-impact projects was a small amount well spent, whereas the US spent huge amounts very badly and inefficiently. I think that issue could be looked into further in connection with the question of how to prepare the ground for reconstruction after a conflict.

give way!

No, I am in my final minute. I have been generous in giving way several times.

The issues emerging from an inquiry will not be only for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. We need to look at the role of the Department for International Development, as well as that of the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice; we need to look into the training of policemen and the other people we need to help build up judicial systems; we need to look into ways of giving advice on humanitarian law. All that is very hard to accomplish when we are trying to recreate a country almost from scratch. An inquiry will be needed at the appropriate time, but it will need to be established on a much wider basis than is provided for in the motion.

I voted against the invasion of Iraq. As we have all heard, we have already had four inquiries and one might ask why we need a fifth. There are just two arguments in favour of that—one is on account of the scale of the disaster that has flowed from the invasion; the other is the need to know how it came about that we invaded Iraq in the first place.

I thought that Sir Menzies Campbell, who was such a distinguished foreign affairs spokesman for the Liberal party, put his finger absolutely on the real reason why the Government do not want an inquiry. Actually, we all know what has gone wrong. Anyone who has followed what happened knows perfectly well what went wrong in the Iraq war. We do not need another inquiry on that score, although the people in charge are, of course, reproducing the same mistakes in Afghanistan. The fact that they are doing so shows that no inquiry is going to educate them on these matters. No, the real reason is that Labour Members are frightened that the activities of the then Prime Minister in the run-up to the war will be exposed in detail.

Three inquiries—into the Crimea, Mesopotamia and Gallipoli—have already been mentioned, but one much more relevant inquiry has not been mentioned: the Jameson raid inquiry—[Hon. Members: "Ah."] The key issue there was whether Joseph Chamberlain, without the knowledge of his Cabinet colleagues or of civil servants in his Colonial Office or the Foreign Office, conspired with Cecil Rhodes to launch that raid. It led, of course, to the disastrous Boer war, in which British casualties were incomparably higher than in Iraq so far—tragic though those have been.

The voting on the inquiry was entirely on party lines, as it always is in the end, so no one knows to this day whether or not Joe Chamberlain was a scoundrel. However, Enoch Powell, who wrote a biography of Joe Chamberlain, told me that when he started studying and writing about Chamberlain's career, he thought he was a great hero, but by the time he had finished, he was convinced that he was a scoundrel. That is also my view, in that I am pretty certain that he had foreknowledge of the Jameson raid. I am also convinced that Mr. Tony Blair entered into a conspiracy—in September 2002, if not earlier—with President George W. Bush to attack Iraq in the early months of 2003.

Would we learn nothing from the cross-examination of Tony Blair? During the Hutton inquiry, the Prime Minister was famously not cross-examined.

I am all in favour of the inquiry, because I should like to see Mr. Blair cross-examined on these matters. I have no doubt that after the American presidential election, when the new President takes over next January, the Democrats—if they win—will investigate all these matters, so we might as well do it ourselves.

I shall return to the question of Mr. Blair in a moment, but I think we must not lose sight of the magnitude of the disaster, and of the reason given to us for going to war. One would hardly believe that some of the speakers whom I have heard tonight were present when they heard Mr. Blair's brilliant eve-of-war speech to the House of Commons, in which he made perfectly clear that regime change was not the reason why we had to go to war. The reason, we were told, was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be mobilised within 45 minutes and which might not only put our troops in Cyprus at risk, but pose a threat to Britain itself. That was the basis on which we were told that we must vote for going to war, and the basis on which the country was led into the war.

A great deal of evidence about the intelligence on which Mr. Blair based that speech has been made public, and appeared in the various reports. It is perfectly clear that the evidence did not justify the terms in which he explained the position to the House. Even Lord Butler's report, in mandarin English, makes that clear.

This sort of thing is not unusual in history. We need only think back to the meeting between Napoleon III and Cavour at Plombières, or Bismarck's handling of the Ems telegram—to take two of the most famous schoolboy examples, about which we were all taught at the age of 11 or 12 in the days when history was still taught in this country—to know that political leaders do periodically decide to involve themselves in skulduggery in order to achieve what they think are foreign policy aims which it is desirable to pursue.

I am not just being wise after the event, as it is so easy to be, because I never believed in any of this at the time. I had known Iraq, although not as well as Ann Clwyd. I had been there first when I was 19, and a number of times since then. For many years I had been an adviser to the Central Bank of Iraq on the management of its bond portfolios, and I had met every leader of Iraq from General Nuri to Saddam Hussein. I therefore had some knowledge of these matters. I know many members of the foreign service who have served in the middle east, and none of them believed the story. Moreover, they were not consulted. That was the extraordinary thing: in the run-up to all this, none of the key people in the Foreign Office with great expertise on the Arab world were consulted.

Four months before the war, during a debate on resolution 1441, I said—if I may egotistically quote from Hansard—

"It seems to me that we shall get into difficulties if the inspectors are given a free and unfettered right to search for weapons of mass destruction, if that continues without interference, and if they are unable to find any such weapons. Surely we could not, at that point, say that, because we believe that those weapons were there last September, a nil return would justify an attack on Iraq. That would be difficult to explain to the British people."—[ Hansard, 25 November 2002; Vol. 395, c. 70.]

I said that in a speech on 25 November 2002—or, rather, not a speech: just an Intervention.

It was perfectly clear to me then that they were not going to allow Hans Blix and his inspectors to do their job properly. Indeed, they started a whispering campaign to discredit Hans Blix and the inspectors because they were frightened of his integrity. They started saying "The man is unreliable, and all these people are absolutely inefficient."

A month after the attack, at Prime Minister's Question Time, I put the following question to Mr. Blair:

"If it eventually transpires that at the time of our invasion Iraq no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction capable of threatening this country, and that the Prime Minister led this country into war on the basis of a false assumption, will he resign?"

Mr. Blair gave a long reply, from which I shall select two key sentences. Members can look it up if they wish. In his reply, the Prime Minister of the day said:

"I am absolutely convinced and confident about the case on weapons of mass destruction...we will produce the analysis and the results of that investigation in due course. I think that when we do so, the hon. Gentleman and others will be eating some of their words."—[ Hansard, 30 April 2003; Vol. 404, c. 296.]

Well, I never had to eat my words—and nor, I may say, has Mr. Blair, because he has never apologised for the whole thing.

The situation that existed then has led to a complete collapse of the balance of power in the middle east, which depended on the triangular animosities of the secular dictatorship of Iraq, the Sunni monarchical Government of Saudi Arabia and the theocratic Shi'a Government of Iran. Those three mutually conflicting animosities between the three leading countries in the middle east kept the peace. British foreign policy at its best has always supported the balance of power for that reason. By smashing the Government of the wicked Saddam Hussein they turned Iran into the major power in the area, and that has destabilised Islam all the way from Turkey to Indonesia.

Is not the point that it was not the British who decided to do that? Was it not simply Tony Blair's appeasement of George Bush that led the United Kingdom into that situation?

I think that that is so. I was in New York on the morning of 9/11. I was not there when the attack on the twin towers took place, because my plane took off for Denver 20 minutes before the attack. I never got to Denver, where I was supposed to be making a well-paid speech to business men, because the plane was diverted to Chicago. We flew, at about 5,000 ft, all the way to Chicago. The pilot said "I cannot say what has gone wrong, but we are flying to Chicago. I am flying by sight—I have done it before—because we are not allowed to use the flight guidance instruments." As we came in to land, we could see 40 or 50 planes on the ground. When the plane landed, we were surrounded at once by the national guard with rifles and things. I had some difficulty in getting out of the airport. I knew Chicago very well, because—

Order. I realise that the hon. Gentleman has a very interesting incident to relate, but perhaps it is for another time and place.

I can show that it is relevant. When I reached the not insubstantial comforts of the Drake hotel, where I was stuck for the next six days, I found Chicago in a state of the most amazing hysteria and panic, because—

Order. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will now relate his remarks to the motion that the Opposition have tabled.

The American people were so shocked by the attack that President Bush felt that he had to find an enemy to attack. All his speeches thereafter mixed together that wicked attack on the twin towers with Iraq, which had nothing whatever to do with it.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

No, I must conclude.

The extraordinary thing about Iraq was that it was the one country in the middle east where al-Qaeda could not go. Their respective leaders were bitter enemies. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein detested each other; they represented opposite ends of the theological spectrum in the Muslim world.

The American Administration led by President Bush wanted an opportunity to show the American people that they were hitting back in what they called the war on terror. They enlisted Mr. Blair's support for that, and he dressed it up in the bogus phrase, liberal interventionism, which is in fact just an excuse for overthrowing sovereign Governments wherever we do not like them. If we were to attack every despotic ruler on that basis, the world would be in total chaos. I have no doubt that if Zimbabwe had had oil, we would have long ago thought it morally necessary to overthrow its leader.

The fact is that we did not have to attack Iraq at that time, because under the no-flight zone arrangements Kurdistan was doing better than ever before, and there was no possibility of danger from Iraq. Israel is much less secure now than it was before the attack, as the war in Lebanon against Hezbollah has proved. We are responsible, jointly with America, for the death and mutilation of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children. We have driven the whole of the middle class out of Iraq. Some 4 million Iraqis have lost their homes. The water supply has gone and the drainage has gone, and the health service, which was the best in the entire middle east, has been destroyed.

There will be instability in the middle east for years to come. In my judgment, the attack on Iraq was the greatest strategic mistake that the west has made since our failure to crush the German militarisation of the Rhineland in 1936. The consequences of that went on for many years, and the consequences of our attack on Iraq will be felt for decades to come.

It is a privilege to follow Sir Peter Tapsell, and I must say that I agree entirely with his analysis. I was opposed to the war, but not because I thought Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction. I thought that he probably did possess some residual capability of the weapons that we knew he had possessed in the Gulf war. There was evidence of that past possession, and in my view it was likely that he still maintained some capability. In the 1990s, however, weapons inspectors were crawling all over Iraq, and Hans Blix and his team and Mohamed el-Baradei were not able to gather sufficient or indeed any evidence to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein was a threat.

I was also very suspicious of President Bush constantly referring back to 9/11 and suggesting that Iraq was involved with al-Qaeda. He specifically said that Iraq

"has aided, trained and harboured terrorists, including operatives of al-Qaeda."

We know that that was not the case. Saddam was a secularist, and if anything he had a lot to fear from the likes of al-Qaeda. President Bush blatantly exploited his people's fear and anger about 9/11. When I put that to the former Prime Minister, he did not explicitly come out in support of President Bush, but neither did he condemn that link. Indeed, on 20 March 2003, the then Defence Secretary, now the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, told me:

"There are clear links between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda."

He went on to say:

"We are not sure of the precise nature of those links".—[ Hansard, 20 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 1096.]

How can we take a Secretary of State seriously when he makes such comments to this House? In fact, I could not take at all seriously the entire evidence presented to the House, and I was very surprised that Opposition Members went along with the campaign.

It is time that we had a thorough inquiry into what happened in the run-up to the war and after it. I have reservations about the type of inquiry proposed, but Mr. Hague implied that Her Majesty's Opposition would give the House the opportunity to specify the kind of inquiry it wants.

It might be helpful if the hon. Lady and other Labour Members who are considering voting for the inquiry are made aware that the motion that stands today in the name of the Conservative party is exactly the same as the motion previously tabled by the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru, having been drawn together by Members in all parts of the House to try to get maximum support. The motion under consideration has, therefore, been born out of views from all parts of the House.

I am aware of that. I was unable to support the previous motion at the time, because I felt it was playing politics and was personalising the matter. I take on board the hon. Gentleman's point, however.

Earlier, I mentioned the Butler report and the Intelligence and Security Committee, and I cited evidence that came to light in the Hutton inquiry of an e-mail from somebody called Matthew Rycroft to Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Clare Sumner, Robert Hill, David Manning, Alastair Campbell and John Scarlett. I shall read out the relevant parts of it:

"Ann Taylor read the draft dossier this morning and passed on some detailed comments to John Scarlett. She has just rung me to underline the following points."

A number of points are then made, and the message ends:

"the hardest questions in the debate, not fully answered by the dossier, remain why now and why Saddam. The PM should take these on in his statement to undercut critics".

Those questions are still relevant and have not been addressed—and certainly not by the ISC or the Butler report. Ann Taylor was a member of the Butler committee, and she was also the chairperson of the ISC.

The Foreign Secretary was surprised that I cast doubt on the Butler report. I should like to illustrate why I cast doubt on it—and not only on its membership. I and a former Member of this House, Llew Smith, submitted a detailed dossier to the Butler committee. We focused on the Government's claim that Iraq had sought to procure uranium from Niger. We asked many detailed questions, and we made 15 recommendations. I will not go into all of them, but the report is posted on my website. It asks some pertinent questions, and refers to the fact that I and colleagues had often received contradictory evidence in response to the many parliamentary questions we had asked, and that when we queried those contradictions we were referred back to the Butler inquiry. We were anxious that Butler examined this issue in detail, because it was one of the core arguments about the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to us.

We made 15 recommendations, and I wish to read out a couple of them. We stated:

"From the information made publicly available by the UK Government, the IAEA and the FAC, it is our view that the ISC investigation into this matter was insufficiently inquisitive—the ISC do not make it clear whether they even saw the relevant primary documentation. We recommend that the Butler Committee ask the Government for all relevant primary documentation on the claim, including the forged documents mentioned by the IAEA and assess what impact the forged evidence had on the UK sources of June 2002 (which is officially still 'under consideration' over a year after the forged evidence was revealed) and of September 2002 (the single source upon which the UK relied)."

We further recommended

"that the Butler Committee investigate whether the information the Government have made publicly available provides an accurate reflection of the primary evidence."

The Butler committee did answer that question, concluding that it was reasonable for the Government to make their claims. The logic by which it reached that conclusion must be highly questionable. It cited information obtained from the International Atomic Energy Agency that makes it clear that not only before the war, when it presented its evidence to the UN in March 2003, but more recently, it had received no further evidence that would lead it to believe that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger.

The Butler report makes no comment on the fact that the international agency charged with looking into these matters did not believe that Iraq had sought to procure uranium from Niger, but simply talks about reasonableness. It states:

"Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible."

That is a risible argument. How can we take such an argument seriously? Yet, that was the Butler report's conclusion.

Furthermore, that report did not take on board the argument that we had presented, which was that under article 10 of UN Security Council resolution 1441, member states were required to provide any information on Iraq's prohibited weapons programmes, so either the British Government did not make that information available or they did make it available and the IAEA concluded that it was not credible.

I am listening carefully to the hon. Lady. Can she complete this study on the uranium, or yellow cake, by sharing with the House how it ended up being mentioned in the State of the Union address by President Bush?

It was mentioned in the State of the Union address, but shortly afterwards a withdrawal was made. The UK Government cited CIA intelligence in support of their argument that uranium was sought, yet the CIA did not support that; it simply reported that another state had reported this fact. There is no evidence of any support from America or the CIA. Again, Butler neglects that fact, which was again argued closely in our dossier.

All the evidence suggests that the United Kingdom Government were going out of their way to present evidence in a way that justified going to war. I could not put it better than the former member of the Defence Intelligence Staff, Brian Jones, who said:

"A small coterie in and around No 10 knew that the Prime Minister needed an intelligence assessment that allowed him to paint a picture of an Iraq bristling with WMDs. That alone won him the public and parliamentary support he needed to go to war. A few top intelligence officials were the facilitators, providing the political spinners with enough of what they needed and the silence of an acquiescent Joint Intelligence Committee did the rest".

We need to get to the bottom of how this House was misled in voting to go to war.

Will my hon. Friend also consider the possibility of examining the cost of war—the sustained amount of money that seems to appear during a war? As Sir Peter Tapsell, the historian across the way, will recall, during the 1920s Churchill, Bonar Law and Lloyd George had long debates on the issue of money being spent on the equivalent of the Iraq war then. Why has there not been a proper discussion in this Chamber of the escalating costs of this war? Why does that escalation happen?

With respect, that is not a matter relating to the inquiry. I merely make the point that had the resources that have been deployed in this war been devoted to fighting terrorism by winning hearts and minds, we would not face the kind of international threat from terrorists that we face today.

I am also moved to support the motion as a result of recent contact with one of my constituents. She is a British subject and citizen, and her husband, who is currently in prison in Iraq, has joint citizenship. In February 2003, Oxfam stated:

"Those who propose war have not yet shown that any threat from Iraq is so imminent that it justifies the risk of so much suffering".

We know that so much suffering has been felt, and I shall tell the House about the suffering experienced by my constituent and her husband.

Although it was not the main reason for going to war, in Prime Minister's questions Tony Blair told me:

"If we remove Saddam...the people who will rejoice most will be the Iraqi people who will be free of a murderous tyrant".—[ Hansard, 19 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 936.]

The Iraqi people are free of one murderous tyrant, but many hundreds of murderous tyrants have sprung up in his place. The Iraqi Government are weak and the country is run by fiefdoms and militia.

The constituent to whom I referred, Mohammed Hussein, was in Iraq in January 2007. He went there with his wife and two-year-old son to try to persuade his mother to come to the UK for medical treatment—she was very ill. She had been unwilling to leave Iraq because she was living in the same household as her daughter-in-law, whose husband, her son, had been killed in Baghdad by terrorists. Her son was a member of the Iraqi police force. She was forced to flee Baghdad to Najaf, which I am told was more peaceful at the time. She was not allowed by the governor of Najaf to join two of her daughters who were in the city, but she did join another daughter who was living in its outskirts. In the run-up to the holy festival of Ashura, she, her family and my constituents were outside Najaf at a place called Zarga. On the night before Ashura, Mohammed Hussein telephoned a number—I think it is 130—that Iraqi citizens are invited to use to report any suspicious activity. He reported that a number of armed men had been seen in the vicinity. Subsequently, there was an event that became known as the battle of Najaf. During that conflict, the mother, sister and, we believe, the brother-in-law of my constituent were killed, and my constituents were rounded up along with many other people.

Since then, along with hundreds of people who were rounded up simply for being in the vicinity of that conflict area, my constituent was sentenced—in an en bloc trial where no individual evidence was allowed—to 15 years' imprisonment. I have a letter from his wife telling me about the torture that he suffered from the Iraqi authorities. She said:

"During this time he has been tortured brutally. He was hung from the ceiling for two hours causing permanent damage to his arms and attempts were made to pull out his nails."

She gave some further information, and I have since spoken to her. She told me that she witnessed the torture of another woman with whom she was imprisoned for a short time. She said that that woman was hung from the ceiling, her clothes were forced above her waist and she was beaten on the legs and feet by the authorities. My constituent was threatened with the prospect that that would happen to her. For a while, she was imprisoned near her husband. She said that he was chained to a toilet and guards came in intermittently, beat him and threatened to rape his wife and his sister. That is what is going on in Iraq today. Is that what we fought this war for?

I went to Iraq in 2005 and met many people, and the Majority were in favour of the war. Almost all of them, however, condemned the nature of the occupation. They said that it had been totally mishandled. They were very concerned that the Iraqi people were seeing no benefits from the millions of dollars that were being poured into their country. One said to me, "No other tyrant has done what the Americans have done to my country."

We also spoke to an opinion pollster who had set up the first opinion poll in Iraq. He had 350 very brave people going out throughout the country—

Order. I am afraid that the hon. Lady's time is up.

I commend Lynne Jones on her moving comments and clear illustration of what happens when one goes to war, even if it is for the best of purposes, but then loses control of subsequent events. I shall return to those considerations in a few moments' time.

The Liberal Democrat spokesman, Mr. Davey, said that the Prime Minister had missed an opportunity, when he came to office, to try to distance himself from the Iraq war by initiating an inquiry. Although one would have liked to see the Prime Minister do that, it was never really on the cards. The Prime Minister is as involved as Tony Blair was. During that period, he was the second most powerful member of the Government, and if he had made it clear that he could not support the war, it would not have happened with British involvement. The Prime Minister of the day could not have accepted such a consideration. The Prime Minister has a serious problem, which explains the rather curious way in which he has tried to handle these legitimate demands for an inquiry.

Reference has been made to the letter that the Prime Minister was sent by the Fabian Society. What he said in his reply, which has already been mentioned by my right hon. and learned Friend Mr. Howard, is rather curious. The Prime Minister said that it was

"vital that the Government does not divert attention from supporting Iraq's development as a secure and stable country."

Is it seriously being suggested that we have to wait until Iraq is a secure and stable country before the Government will feel able to initiate the inquiry that they promised? We all know that even in the best scenario it will be years, if not decades, before Iraq is a secure and stable country. That cannot be the basis for denying the inquiry that is so clearly necessary.

The case for an inquiry is unanswerable, both for reasons that are internal to Iraq and for reasons regarding the implications for the region as a whole. I refer again to the Prime Minister's comments, because they show the confusion and double standards at the heart of Government. The Government are confused. They know that their policy on Iraq is a shambles and that they cannot deal with the criticisms properly. When the leader of the Liberal Democrats asked the Prime Minister last week whether he had any regrets over what had happened in Iraq, almost the only point that the Prime Minister made in his reply was:

"Millions of children are getting the benefit of education, vaccination and health care services as a result"—[ Hansard, 19 March 2008; Vol. 473, c. 916.]— as if we went to war to ensure vaccination for the children of Iraq, and as if that somehow justified all the other terrible things that have happened in Iraq!

The Prime Minister knows perfectly well that that was a ridiculous justification for war, but no Ministers can now use the arguments that were made at the time. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Ministers know perfectly well that whatever the Chairman of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs might have said, to argue for regime change in its own right is against international law, and could never possibly have the support of the UN. Ministers are scrabbling away trying to find convincing justifications, all to do with what a terrible man Saddam Hussein was, when they know perfectly well, as we do—we are not telling them anything that they do not already know—that that could not possibly have justified the war.

I want, too, to refer to the external consequences of the war. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend Sir Peter Tapsell who, in a marvellous and colourful speech, made some powerful and appropriate points. The single greatest beneficiary of this disastrous Iraq war has been Iran. Two of Iran's most powerful enemies were Saddam Hussein's regime on one side, and the Taliban on the other. Never in their wildest moments did the Iranians believe that both regimes would be removed by the United States—the great Satan—without Iran having to lift a finger to achieve its geopolitical and strategic objectives.

One then has to add to the implications of Iran's emergence as a regional power the terrible Shi'a-Sunni sectarian conflict, which does not now exist merely in Iraq, but is part of a regional problem that is distorting the politics of the middle east. Although those tensions would have existed without the war in Iraq, that war provided the opportunity for a massive loss of life and ethnic cleansing on an enormous scale in Iraq that certainly would not have happened otherwise.

Then let us look at the whole question of al-Qaeda. Even today, people such as Dick Cheney try to claim that there was some link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. We know perfectly well that al-Qaeda had no opportunity to develop its terrible deeds in Iraq until the power vacuum was created by the war initiated by the US and the UK. Perhaps most serious in terms of the next year or so is the fact that for the west and the international community, putting real effective pressure on Iran to desist from going down the nuclear weapons path is infinitely more difficult than it would otherwise have been. That is because of the massive loss of authority, credibility and power on the part of the US in particular, but also on the part of anyone who argues for tough measures with regard to these matters.

I want to draw attention to a crucial question. Iraq is not only terrible in itself, but it is the single biggest example so far of the consequences of what is known as the Bush doctrine—that pre-emptive wars can be justified—combined with Tony Blair's Chicago speech, which tried to justify, under the name of liberal interventionism, the use of our armed forces to change regimes and, hopefully, in his view, to promote democracy around the world.

That comes to the heart of the question of what is and what is not a just war. The concept of a just war goes back many centuries, as people have struggled to try to find some set of criteria for when war can be justified, particularly against those who have not attacked first.

Traditionally, there have been five justifications for a just war. First, it must be started by a lawful authority: in the case of Iraq, that is a question of enormous controversy. Secondly, it has to be for a just cause, and we know that the reason why we went to war was not justified. Thirdly, it has to be a matter of good against evil—and I would be happy to concede that point, if it were the only relevant consideration. Fourthly, it has to be the last resort. Partly for the reasons given by my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle, it clearly was not that in this case. Finally, there is the issue of proportionality.

In the modern world, we have to extend those propositions in two important ways. First and most crucially, if we are going to try to begin to justify a war against a country that has not attacked us—if we are not acting in self-defence, and especially if we do not have the mandate of the Security Council of the United Nations—it is crucial that as part of the justification for war we consider all the likely, possible or credible consequences of that war. I do not mean only the combat, but what may happen after the combat is over. Unlike in the mediaeval world, in the modern world a war is not an end in itself. In times gone by, there were wars, somebody won, somebody lost, the war ended and things went back to normal. The whole problem with Iraq has been the power vacuum created by the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime, and all the consequences that flowed from that.

I was very disturbed by the interview that Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff, gave to Andrew Marr a week or so ago. He was asked whether he had known what was going to happen in Iraq. He said:

"I think that the trouble with Iraq was, we were kind of preparing for the wrong sort of aftermath. We made lots of preparations for humanitarian disaster, for the lack of water, you know for all that kind of thing."

He spoke as if a lack of water was the only predictable consequence of sending an army into Iraq, removing the regime and creating a power vacuum.

When asked why there were not sufficient troops in Iraq, Jonathan Powell said:

"But no one was urging us to do that at the time. No one actually had that, that insight at the time. It would have been rather more useful if they'd told us then."

Who is "they" supposed to be? This is the Prime Minister's chief of staff speaking—the man closest to him, who we know worked with him in the preparation of British policy. He says that they made no attempt to consider the possible consequences of removing a Sunni-dominated regime in a country with a Shi'a Majority. They did not consider what would be the consequence of removing the existing power structure and, as was entirely predictable, the Shi'a majority then demanding power. They made no attempt to consider the implications for Iran if its traditional enemy were removed by force. They made no attempt to consider the implications for Shi'a-Sunni sectarian conflict. It was not that they got it wrong. They had not studied the situation and come to an unjustified conclusion. If Mr. Powell is to be believed—and we have no reason to doubt him—they were so busy wondering about the water supplies that they gave no thought to such issues.

That suggests that we must learn from this experience that if one wishes to contemplate going to war in the modern world, and credibly to justify it as a just war, such consequences—which, in the case of Iraq, were not only predictable but predicted—must be taken into account and one must be prepared to live with the consequences. That is the first major change necessary to the just war theory to take account of modern circumstances.

The second consideration goes to the heart of the argument made constantly by the Prime Minister and other apologists for the war. They ask whether we would have liked Saddam Hussein to have remained in power. Would it, they ask, be better if Saddam Hussein were still there, as if somehow that was an argument in itself. Well, it is not, because in the modern world armed forces can be used in a more restricted way. Using the military does not only mean going to war. They can be used for peacekeeping, for peace enforcement, for containment in various ways or to impose a no-fly zone. As my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle rightly pointed out, that was successfully being done in the 10 years before this terrible war began. Of course sanctions were not working perfectly, but Iraq's military power had been emasculated, by the first Gulf war, by the economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations, by the arms embargo that had been imposed, and by the no-fly zone that the United States and the United Kingdom were enforcing.

Those sanctions had been so successful that those Arab and middle eastern countries that had supported the first Gulf war, including Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt—which were happy to be allies of the United States and the United Kingdom, and who sent their armies to help to liberate Kuwait, because they recognised that Saddam Hussein was a threat to regional security—were not happy to send their armies or provide diplomatic or political support for the Iraq war of five years ago. They knew, as we all know, that Saddam Hussein's regime had been emasculated. He was not a better man; he was still an evil man who would have like to do more evil, but he no longer had the capability to do so.

The lessons must be learned for the future, if this is not to be an entirely terrible experience. First, in trying to decide whether war is justified, we must look not only at the combat aspect, but at the political, economic and social consequences of any war that we may initiate. In Iraq we have seen terrible loss of life of hundreds of thousands of people, millions of refugees, and internal anarchy. Ministers know how terrible the situation is in Iraq, and they wish that it had never happened. They wish that different decisions had been made five years ago. They know that, although I do not expect them to say so.

The second lesson must be that the alternative to going to war is not, and never has been, doing nothing. Nor has it meant restricting oneself merely to economic, social or diplomatic pressure. There are other military means that can be used, including no-fly zones, embargoes, and various methods of peace enforcement. As we showed in Iraq until 2003, that can ensure regional peace and security. It was a messy solution and it might not have lasted for ever, but it did not even begin to be as terrible as what the people of Iraq have had to live through over the past five years.

May I say straight away what an irrepressible joy and pleasure it is to follow not just the person but the blazing erudition of Sir Malcolm Rifkind, which was surpassed only just, perhaps, by the blazing erudition of Sir Peter Tapsell. I can tell both of them that at the conclusion of this debate I shall hand them my papers for marking, and I hope to do rather better than I have done in the past. I shall also have the pleasure of joining them both in the Lobby.

I believe not only that there must be an inquiry but that it is urgent and necessary, because this is a war without an apparent or defined end. There is no apparent or defined context of victory. What is victory in this war? We had a victory four years ago, and it is a gloomy symbiosis that the fourth anniversary of that victory marked the death of the 4,000th US serviceman in Iraq. He will not be the last; and nor will our next casualty be our last.

What is the victory that we seek? Is it the stable, secure state that is spoken of by the Prime Minister? What is a stable and secure state? Who decides when Iraq has become a stable and secure state, capable of its own government? I do not wish to be facile and flippant, but I remember when debating devolution that there were those who said that Wales was not a sufficiently stable and secure state to govern itself. So who decides, who sets out the parameter of when we can safely leave? If the Americans cannot leave, nor can we.

We hear what is said about the success, security and achievements of Basra, but it is necessary only to notice whence the trumpets of triumph and achievement come. They come from within the security of the British army base, miles from Basra. If a quarter of what we are told about Basra were true or reliable, British politicians would be making their speeches from within a liberated city and to a liberated people. They would not be arriving secretly at night at a base in order, as the world sees it, to posture in the safety of a British square. This is not a war that is anywhere near its termination, and that is why we cannot possibly wait until such time as that end occurs and by whose wish it occurs.

If it is to be said that we cannot have an inquiry because it imperils the military effectiveness and strategy of what we are doing in Iraq, that is a military judgment, not a political judgment. If our senior commanders, past or present, had said publicly that it would be ill-advised and dangerous for us to hold an inquiry, or if Ministers had said that the commanders had advised them in that way, I would respect what they said. If Generals Rose or Jackson said, "We must not have an inquiry now because of the danger that it will pose to our strategy and to our troops", I would respect that and not vote for an inquiry. I shall not respect those who have interests in an inquiry, and those who are potential defendants in an inquiry, using the troops and strategy as an alibi in order to avoid one. That is precisely what we have seen.

The second reason why an inquiry is urgent is that we cannot rely on the British media and press properly to interrogate the responsibility for and causes of this war. One had looked forward on the fifth anniversary of the war to seeing a resurgence of activity and interest in the media. Many of us were horrified by what we saw in the past few weeks: a media obsessed not with what was happening in Iraq but with itself. People in the media were asking themselves, "Why did I support the war?" or "Why did I oppose it?" or looking at other members of the media and asking, "Why did he oppose it? Why did she support the war? What was wrong with us?" That exercise had scant relevance and showed no interest in the truth in Iraq.

Then came the worst part, the climax of that. I endorse what the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea said about interviews with Jonathan Powell. An even worse example was his interview with Jeremy Paxman on "Newsnight". I am perfectly happy to make the resources of my chambers available to Mr. Jeremy Paxman if he wishes to brush up his skills in cross-examination, but I can inform him that the youngest pupil in my chambers knows very well that prosecuting counsel do not ask questions that approximate to "Are you really sure you're not guilty?" When that is the question asked, one is a very long way away from the great pantheons of British advocacy, I can tell you that for nothing—particularly when it is followed by something like, "Do you have any regrets?" That, metaphorically, is very slow bowling outside the leg stump, particularly to somebody of the capacity of Mr. Jonathan Powell.

To make it even worse, one third of that interview was given up not to Iraq but to plugging Mr. Jonathan Powell's book on Ireland. Baghdad is 2,805 miles from Belfast geographically, and a great deal further in culture and history and in terms of those who have died as a result of the military Intervention. It is not in the same league.

I am motivated by what the hon. and learned Gentleman is saying. If I say the words Tim Razzall, cricket and that "Newsnight" programme, to which I happened to be a contributor last week, he will understand why.

What I found most revealing—this is also probably barrister speak—was that Jonathan Powell, when questioned repeatedly by Paxman, simply said that he was glad that Saddam Hussein was down and gone. We all are—but that was not the issue, was it?

I respectfully agree. The right hon. Gentleman has conveniently taken my next words from my mouth, because I was about to report to the House that that was indeed what Jonathan Powell said. The apologia that he gave for the war was that Saddam Hussein had gone. It is an apologia that we hear time and time again, and as a litany it begins to bear an uncomfortable relationship to the words of Napoleon the pig in Orwell's "Animal Farm", who at the end of the book informs the animals that their suffering and distress is in fact a paradise, because the farmer has been removed. Let us have no more of this, particularly those of us who spent many years campaigning against Saddam Hussein. We do not want to hear any more the idea that the distress to the Iraqi people and the 600,000 of them who have died is blood that was worth paying for an illegal occupation in 2003.

It was possibly the diversion into Ireland that prevented any serious investigation in that interview, or at all, of the main issues upon which an inquiry must centre. I wish to bring to the House's attention just two, which are, for me, the most important two. I mention them also because they may be investigated without the slightest inconvenience to any diplomat in Iraq—which is now apparently the reason why we cannot have an inquiry—without the Intervention of a single member of the armed forces; and without inconveniencing a single member of the security services, if that is something that exercises the House. They can be investigated only through the cross-examination and interrogation of those who were involved.

The first is what was revealed in the Downing street memo of July 2002, reported by The Sunday Times in an unusual contribution to the debate. It was recorded that at that meeting in Downing street in July 2002 Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of secret intelligence, or "C", as he was known, had reported from America to the War Cabinet, which included Jonathan Powell, that:

"There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

In the same minute, it is recorded that the then Foreign Secretary, now the Lord Chancellor, said that it was clear that

"Bush had made up his mind to take military action...But the case was thin."

The then Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, to whom I shall return in just a moment, is recorded as warning that justifying the invasion on legal grounds would be difficult.

That secret memorandum, of limited circulation and ordered to be destroyed thereafter, will become, I predict, one of the seminal documents when the history of warfare comes to be discussed. Not one single word of that document reached this House; not one single word reached the British people. Indeed, this House was told precisely the opposite: until the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003, the case was made that there was still time to avert war and catastrophe. That was a lie, and a black deception to this House and to the British people.

I do not entirely agree with the palliative statements in the excellent speech made by Mr. Hague in opening the debate. The real point of the debate, and of any inquiry that may be held, is not to learn lessons so that we do not make mistakes again. That is one reason, but I want an inquiry to be held into the Iraq war because I want those responsible to be brought to book and to justice. If necessary, they should be brought to international justice, but I want us to be the ones who bring them to it.

I support the hon. and learned Gentleman's argument with all the strength that I can muster, but may I remind him gently that some Opposition Members at the time took the view that he is expressing? I was one of those who resigned as a Shadow Minister because of the illegal war. Does he agree that, when we look back at our parliamentary lives, we may well regard the decision to go to war with Iraq as the worst and most horrible decision that this Parliament has made?

That is undoubtedly right. Indeed, beside that decision, all our other achievements and deficiencies—and there have been many of both—pale into insignificance. The circumstances and repercussions of what we did then have swept well past Iraq. As Tacitus noted, one victory can create a thousand enemies, and that is precisely what happened.

I shall dwell briefly on the second matter, which is the written advice given by the Attorney-General to the Prime Minister on 7 March 2003. We are able to look at that advice now, even though it was obtained only in the teeth of those at the time who wished to keep it secret. Those people produced every form of spurious argument, based on dubious or non-existent precedent, that such advice should never be shown.

When we saw it, we found out why they wanted to keep it hidden. The advice was hedged around with doubt: it said that it was possible to argue that the invasion of Iraq was illegal but, two paragraphs later, that it was equally possible to argue that it was not. The advice then pointed out the number of challenges that could be brought, and the people who would bring them, if it turned out to be wrong.

One week later, on 14 March, the Attorney-General went to the Cabinet and to the House of Lords. Not one word of those doubts was set out to either. The House of Lords and the Cabinet received a completely different opinion. Furthermore, and even worse, the Attorney-General's written opinion was buried. It was never shown or volunteered to the Cabinet—of course, its members should have asked for it, but they did not—or to the House of Lords. The advice was not given to this Chamber or made available to the British people. That must be made the subject of an inquiry, although I suspect that no such inquiry will be held during my time in the House. However, if the inquiry that is eventually held concludes that deception and deceit led us into an illegal war, then I hope that Parliament will deliver up to justice those who are responsible. That is inescapable.

I am a humanist. I do not believe in a final judgment, when our sins and misdemeanours will be read out of a great book. I suggest that this is the place for such things. However, if I did believe in judgment day—and particularly if I was a Catholic—and if I had been responsible for the deceit and duplicity that led to the slaughter in Iraq, I would be saying my Ave Marias as fast as diction would allow. It may be a pity that I do not believe in the final judgment, as I should like to be there to see it. However, I believe that we here must arrive at a quicker judgment, and that we, the British people and those who have suffered as a result of our actions, are entitled to that judgment sooner—much sooner—than later.

It is a pleasure to follow Mr. Marshall-Andrews, who made a fine speech. There have been many fine speeches from those arguing in favour of the motions, although not so many from those who oppose them.

I shall begin as others have, by paying tribute to 175 British troops who have been killed in the Iraq war. I pay tribute, too, to the 4,000 US troops and the countless thousands of Iraqi civilians who have also died. The decisions that we made on 18 March 2003 are the most momentous that I have witnessed in my relatively short parliamentary career, but I am glad to say that I believe that, when history looks back, I and others will be found to have been on the right side.

I have always been interested in what Lady Macmillan said at the time of Suez. It was to the effect that, for several weeks, she felt as though the Suez canal went through her drawing room.

That was Lady Eden.

The hon. Gentleman reminds me that it was Lady Eden who said that, and I am grateful to him for once again correcting an historical inaccuracy.

There was a time in the run-up to the war when I felt that Iraq was dominating my life. In the months leading up to the conflict, I made three visits to the Gulf, two to the US and one to NATO. Since the war, I have been privileged enough to visit Iraq on four occasions. I want to share with the House what happened on my visit to US Central Command in Tampa on 21 August 2002.

I was told by the then Defence Secretary that I was the only member of the Opposition who had asked—and been allowed—to go to Tampa to meet Tommy Franks and his team as they prepared the invasion. General "Rifle" P. DeLong gave me a medal that I still carry, and he told me in great detail what was about to unfold in the middle east.

I had made a deal with the then Defence Secretary that I have always honoured. It was that I would never discuss what I was told that day at CENTCOM, before the action started. I reported my experiences to my right hon. Friend Mr. Kennedy, and I shall share with the House this evening my two overriding memories from my meeting with General DeLong. Also present was a British general who I know, because I have discussed this matter with him since, is known to Mr. Simpson.

The meeting took place in August 2002, and two overriding points were made to me. The first was that there would be a war. It was made clear that the US would invade Iraq in March or April of 2003—of that there was no doubt. The US wanted British troops to be involved, and American planning assumed that they would be. I was shown in candid and considerable detail what the role of the British troops would be, and one element of it was that Royal Marines would lead assaults that included US marines—something almost unheard of then.

From that point, I had no doubts at all that war was coming, but I was also told something else that was equally interesting—that all the US planning was predicated on the assumption that it would be a US-UK war. No thought was given to the possibility that Saudi, French or Syrian troops, in the sort of alliance that was built up to liberate Kuwait, would be used. The view of the US military, supported by their political masters, was that they did not want other troops involved—and that the UN was therefore totally pointless.

What I find incredible is that all the talk of attempting to get another resolution from the UN was irrelevant to the US military in Tampa, Florida, planning that assault; the war was going to happen in March or April 2003, and it would include only British and American troops. That gives the lie to some of the things that we were told in the run-up to the war—that we could possibly somehow avoid the catastrophe, and that somehow we wanted the international community to be involved. That simply was not going to be the case. When I visited troops massing in Kuwait and Bahrain, and warships in the Gulf, there was a strong belief among our armed forces that war would happen in March or April 2003. Of course, as we all now know, that was indeed the case.

The first result of the war was to make another war, Afghanistan, much more difficult. It has not so far been mentioned tonight that in the run-up to the Iraq war, urgent operational requirement orders—the emergency purchasing of kit—all related to Iraq. I firmly believe that the attempt to bolster, for understandable reasons, our forces preparing to go to Iraq damaged our actions and performance in Afghanistan, and it has continued to damage our performance there ever since. The reality is that we could not take on two such engagements, as the strategic defence review suggested we ought. That is perhaps the reason why we have failed, or have not yet achieved success, in both those engagements.

The lasting legacy of the war was the fact that the great coalition of the international community, built up to fight international terrorism since 2001—when even the front page of Paris newspapers said, "We are all Americans now, after the tragic events of 2001"—was thrown asunder. Suddenly it was not the world versus terrorism; it was large parts of the world against America, and large parts of the world against Britain. Those two consequences of the war—first our continued failure in Afghanistan and secondly the rift in the international community that has still not yet been settled—are legacies of the vote that took place on 18 March.

What was very apparent at the time, and what motivated many of us who voted against the war, was that it would inflame Muslim opinion. That was so obvious, and every single diplomatic source told us that. The tragedy of the event is that that advice was ignored.

The hon. Gentleman is indeed right, and I was going to mention the fact that in the weeks after the attack on Iraq, in the ceremony in which children are named in Islam—forgive me for not knowing the term; in Christianity we call it the christening—the name Osama was given to more boys born in the Islamic world than any other name; I think that proves the hon. Gentleman's point.

What should the inquiry cover? Well, there are a number of things that it must cover, if it happens, and I sincerely hope that it does. I hope that many Labour Members will again join us in the Division Lobby this evening to see that it does happen. The first thing that it should cover is the aftermath of the war. Anybody who believes that large parts of Iraq are better now than they were under Saddam Hussein certainly is not talking to some of the service people to whom I talk, and has not experienced some of the things that I have experienced in my four visits in the past five years.

The first time I went to Basra, we drove in soft-skinned vehicles with Royal Marines with berets on their heads, and we felt safe. We got out and talked to people on the streets. The last time I went to Iraq, we were holed up in armoured vehicles, flying by helicopter and living in reinforced bunkers on air bases because the Ministry of Defence was too scared to let us on to the streets. Unfortunately, as was excellently described by Sir Peter Tapsell, the lives of many ordinary people in Iraq are probably worse than they were under Saddam Hussein.

The Red Cross says so.

As the hon. Gentleman mentions, that is exactly what the Red Cross says. I think that the aftermath of the war needs to be considered. We could have predicted it. People on the Liberal Democrat Benches, notable exceptions on the Conservative Benches, and very many notable exceptions on the Labour Benches— [Interruption.]—and the nationalists warned the Government that the consequences of the action would be appalling, yet, I am afraid, one Conservative Front-Bencher who is sitting in the Chamber described me as an appeaser, and described my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber as Charlie Chamberlain. That was the kind of abuse that was being thrown at us when we warned of the consequences.

A second aspect that must be considered, mentioned by the hon. and learned Member for Medway, is the legality of the war. I have never wanted to say that the war was illegal, because if I did, I would be suggesting that the British forces who went to Iraq were complicit in some kind of war crime, but certainly the legality of the war, and the justification by Lord Goldsmith, conveniently changed considerably in a 10-day period in the run-up to the war. There are many reasons to believe that under international law, the action, if not illegal, certainly pushed the bounds of legality in ways never experienced before. As Sir Malcolm Rifkind said when expressing his view of what a just war is, Iraq could not be considered a just war. It is absolutely right that we examine whether the war was legal or not. After all, what other reason is there why Lord Boyce—then Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the defence staff—sought the Prime Minister's personal guarantee that the war was legal? He surely would only have done so if he had some doubts.

The next thing that we must surely ask—it is a question that I asked consistently at the time—is whether we were equipped to fight the war, and whether we had the right equipment. Certainly the troops that I saw preparing to fight the war did not have the body armour, the boots or the equipment to make sure that they could fight the war. Sadly, that is a view shared in many coroners' inquests held since the war. We are not talking about a war that suddenly occurred; it was not like the Falklands, where we suddenly woke up one morning and said, "Oh my God, we've got to perform an amphibious action on the other side of the world." We are talking about a war for which we were preparing, month after month, yet we sent our troops away inadequately kitted out. Certainly some inquests have suggested that some of our servicemen died as a result of not being properly equipped. What more serious criterion could there be by which to judge the value of a conflict? We are talking about a Government who sent their troops off, knowing that they were going to fight, without giving them the equipment with which to fight that war.

We have tonight heard references to weapons of mass destruction. There might have been such weapons years before, but certainly there were not weapons of mass destruction available to Saddam Hussein, ready to fire within 45 minutes, that could hit our bases in Cyprus; let us remember that the dossier suggested the contrary, as did the front page of the Evening Standard. They suggested that there was somehow an immediate threat to British troops based in Cyprus, and a threat to the troops who were about to fight—the troops whom, let me remind hon. Members, we had not properly equipped.

Reference has been made to Lord Franks and his inquiry after the Falklands. That was an inquiry on the workings of Government. I would certainly be happy if the inquiry that will eventually take place covered the workings of Opposition parties. I would certainly be prepared to stand by what we, as an Opposition party, did to oppose the war. Frankly, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition failed to oppose it in the way that they should have done. It is a matter of record that before Christmas in 2002, the then leader of the Conservative party was calling for military action to overthrow Saddam. That was before the dossier and before any talk of weapons of mass destruction. The Tories, and unfortunately their leader at the time, were as much cheerleaders for the war as any Member on the Treasury Bench.

Not all of us; not all of us.

Not every Conservative, and I certainly pay tribute to those who were not.

I want to make two more points. Ann Clwyd said that we went off to fight the war because of the appalling things that Saddam Hussein had done, and Mike Gapes, the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, suggested the same thing. On one of my visits to Iraq, I was stopped by a sergeant from the Parachute regiment, who said, "Sir, why am I 'ere? I didn't join the British Army to do this. I joined it to protect my family, to make sure that they were safe, to ensure that our country is protected, not to go off and fight war at the behest of the President of the United States, endorsed by the Prime Minister." I have to tell the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley that there may have been a very good reason for attacking Saddam Hussein on humanitarian grounds, but it is easy to stand here and call for that action; it is less easy for someone who has joined the armed forces with the aim of protecting their country not to go off and fight someone else's war.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that bizarre arguments were made in the Chamber by the two Back-Bench Members who opposed an inquiry, especially as they could not say where we should draw the line, and which obnoxious regimes we would tolerate and which we would decide to send the armed forces in to topple?

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea set out the reasons why a humanitarian war might be justified. Kosovo springs to mind: it was a conflict that my party and I supported, because there were clear reasons for doing so. We simply could not say that, however, about Iraq. If we did, we would say it about Zimbabwe and a host of other countries, in which we simply should not get involved.

Finally, the one thing we know is that sooner or later, there will be another conflict. Another Secretary of State and another Prime Minister will come to the House to ask us to support military action. The first thing that some hon. Members will say—and the first thing that our constituents will say—is, "Is this another Iraq? Are we going to be fooled, like we were fooled then?" At some point in future, there will be a war that we will have to fight, and from which we will shy away, simply because of what happened in Iraq. 9/11 started the process. I was in the Commons with my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber on 9/11. We saw the skies being cleared, and we watched the aftermath on television. Once 9/11 had happened, George Bush had the authority in the US to do what he wanted to do, and settle his debts with Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately, the previous Prime Minister went along with that. Unfortunately, the main Opposition party—or most of it—went along with it, and the result is the biggest disaster for British foreign policy that has occurred not only in my lifetime but in the lifetime of much more senior Members of Parliament. We should be ashamed, collectively, of what we did by sending our troops into Iraq. I hope that tonight we will start the process of atonement, and the only way in which we can begin to do so is to have a full, proper inquiry into the events leading up to war.

I intended my remarks to be short, and I shall still try to keep them brief.

I should like to take the Chamber back to the original debate. Members who were there will recall that it was a lengthy day. There was a main Question, and there was an Amendment. The text of the amendment was originally proposed by Lord Smith, who was then the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury. A number of Labour Members got together to consider the text, and it was thought by some—principally me—that it was slightly inappropriate, and needed to be changed. Collectively, those Members decided to accept my suggestion, and that has a bearing on what I will come on to say. The text of the amendment was, in a way, the result of consideration by myself.

I sat all day through that debate, and I left the Chamber only twice—once to visit the rest room and get a cup of tea, and the other time, to respond to a summons from the then Prime Minister to his chambers behind the Chair. He called me singly. I had to wait to go in alone, whereas other Members went in in groups. A group went ahead of me, and a group followed me after I had finished. I was with the Prime Minister for about 25 minutes, and he was clearly in some distress. He begged me to support him on the amendment, but I pointed out that I was voting for the amendment. He said, "No, no, no—I need you to vote against it." I said, "You don't really need my vote. The Conservatives are going to support you on the amendment anyway, so you're going to romp it." He said, "I want to win it with Labour votes." I said, "I'm sorry, Tony, you can't have mine." "Why not?" he said. I said, "For a start, I have sat in the Chamber for over four hours today, and I was informed by the Chair as I came out to see you that I didn't have a chance of being called to speak, because I spoke for four minutes on the debate that was called during the recall of Parliament last year, for which I had to travel across the Atlantic, before going back again." Four minutes in one year denied me any opportunity to register my views at that time.

I said, "Apart from that, I am partly responsible for the words on the Order Paper. I can hardly vote against my own text." The Prime Minister pleaded, pleaded and pleaded, but I said, "I just can't do it. I can't even apologise for it, because that's it." The amendment, as the House will recall, said that Hans Blix and team be given time to finish the job with which they had been tasked. Blair said, "I really need your support." He was distressed—he was chalk white, and was visibly shaking—so I said, "Tony, the best thing I can do for you is, once the amendment is defeated, although I would like to think that it won't be, on the basis of Clause stand part, I will vote for the main Question." That is what I did, and I have to tell the House what I have told one or two people privately: from that day to this, I have regretted it to the bottom of my heart, and I am deeply ashamed that I allowed myself to do it.

As I went through the Lobby in the Division on the main Question, I got a slap on the back. Some Members will remember that I had trouble with my shoulders. Left wing, right wing—they were both troublesome at different times. I got a slap on my bad wing—my left wing; Blair was always keen to hurt the left wing. When I turned round, ready to use my right wing to reply to this pain, Blair was standing against the bookcase, still white, still quivering. All he said was, "Thanks, Frank."

In a way, I am relieved that I have had the opportunity to confess openly to that this evening, but let me come to the question of an inquiry. I do not think that anyone is arguing about the need for one, and I do not think that anyone will argue about its breadth or the depth to which we should pursue it. There is great agreement on that, because it needs to start as early as my hon. Friend Mike Gapes said, and it needs to cover all the things that my hon. and learned Friend Mr. Marshall-Andrews covered, and lots more besides.

But the question is when, and I am still not convinced that now is the time. Let me explain why. I was brought up as a child when there were big posters on the wall which read, "Careless talk costs lives". We have been talking about previous inquiries, such as the Dardanelles in 1917—that was when nations were fighting nations—and Norway, when it was no more than a debate. We are not fighting nations now and we are not seeking a debate.

We are dealing with al-Qaeda, and with al-Qaeda we must deal with al-Jazeera. We have all experienced their great technique in handling modern communications. We have seen how skilfully they can misrepresent, and even now I can guarantee that they will be misrepresenting the kind of debate that this has become and the kind of self-justifying statements that have been bellowed across the Chamber.

I sympathise with the sergeant in the paras. Of course I do—my boy is in the army. We care about every one of them, but we must make sure that we do not give hostages to fortune, and that we do not give encouragement to the terrorists that we are trying to combat. Let us not forget that not only is it not nation against nation, but we have the enemy in our midst. There was not only 9/11; there was 7/7 in a London bus and in a tube station, and we are creating enemies within our own communities by talking in this way.

Whatever inquiry takes place must be conducted on the right basis and must not be conducted in haste. I understand that we have the problems that Mr. Hague has suddenly discovered in the past 15 months, in going ahead with an inquiry, and I commend him for recognising those problems. "It is not a trial," he said, "or an impeachment." On that basis, if he were running the inquiry, I could go along with it, but do you think that the Daily Mail would allow it to remain not a trial and not an impeachment? My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Medway has already said that we cannot rely on the media. Well, we can, you know. They will make the worst of it that they possibly can, for their own political ends.

I have been listening to my hon. Friend with considerable respect. I respect what he says, but if we are to allow fear or trepidation of al-Qaeda to dictate when we have our inquiries, when in truth will we have one?

Like any sensible inquiry, it would commence once there had been a cessation of hostilities. Cessation of hostilities occurred when we signed peace agreements or when we declared an armistice. That is not possible with al-Qaeda, because we are creating more of them every day. As long as the terms used are those that have been used in the Chamber tonight, we have no more chance of getting a fair and free inquiry than I can fly, and I cannot and never will fly—alone, that is.

Yes, I support an inquiry, but not now.

I appreciate many of the points that the hon. Gentleman is making, but given the tenacity of terrorism in our society—I look at the situation in Northern Ireland where, for 35 years, terrorists were able to hold the country to ransom—does the hon. Gentleman accept that if, as he argued, we cannot have an inquiry until there is a cessation of hostilities, it could be 30 years before we ever examine some of the events that we are discussing?

I take the hon. Gentleman's point. With Bloody Sunday, it was 30 years. We did not have an inquiry into Bloody Sunday until we had a Labour Government. By holding an inquiry while hostilities continue, we would be creating more ammunition for further hostilities. I well recall that we always thought that the Irish question would never be resolved. Perhaps it has not been resolved yet, but we are a sight nearer to that than we ever were before.

Like everybody else, I am in favour of an inquiry, and like most of us in the Chamber, I want it to be as wide as possible, but to have it now would be the height of lunacy. I want to vote for the inquiry. Why? Because I want to achieve the final catharsis of the confession that I have made tonight. I look forward to doing so when I can, but that is not now.

It is always a pleasure to follow Frank Cook. He has long taken an interest in these matters and I found his account of how he voted in 2003 moving because it exposed many of the dilemmas that many hon. Members faced. I confess that I did not. I was reasonably clear about what I was going to do. I supported the Government's motion and I shall come to an explanation of that later in my remarks.

I seriously disagree with the hon. Gentleman, however. The idea that we would give comfort to al-Qaeda by avoiding accountability through an inquiry or through the processes of the House is wrong. Let us consider what is happening in al-Qaeda in Iraq. I have a godson who is commanding an American infantry platoon in Iraq. He is about halfway through a 15-month tour and has very nearly been killed twice in the time that he has been there. I can tell the hon. Gentleman that al-Qaeda in Iraq is on the way to defeat. Further down the road there may be many more serious problems arising from the Sunni-Shi'a divisions in Iraq and the movement of Iraqis for power, but we are witnessing success.

One of the reasons why we need an inquiry into Iraq is surely that al-Qaeda was not in Iraq when we first invaded. That must be one of the basic reasons why we need a study of what went wrong.

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend.

There have been many brilliant speeches in the debate and I do not want to repeat arguments that have already been made by others much more ably than I could. I shall pick up one or two of the points that have been made and try to add to the arguments, and then come to my own perspective.

Mr. Henderson said that an inquiry now might end as an indictment of the Government's decision in 2003 and that would have consequences for our troops in Iraq. Our troops are now in Iraq on a wholly different legal basis from that in 2003 when they entered the war. They are there now on the basis of a United Nations Security Council resolution, at the invitation of the Iraqi Government. That argument does not hold water.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I shall make a little progress, if the hon. Gentleman will allow me.

From a sedentary position, Mr. Jones said, in reference to Iraq and Afghanistan, that the situation was different altogether. I could not disagree more strongly. I shall come to the direct parallels that exist—particularly in respect of the overlap between our policies towards the police and the army in Iraq. We have totally failed to provide proper training for the police in Iraq; I shall come to that, and to what is happening in Afghanistan now, later in my remarks.

The saddest speech that we have witnessed in this debate was the Foreign Secretary's. To say that the events today in Basra are an example of why we should not be having an inquiry now is to say the opposite of the truth. In Basra at the moment, what the Iraqi army is having to mete out to the militias—and, to a degree, to the Basra police, who are completely infiltrated by the militias—is a precise example of what I am talking about, because it all flows from British policy and action, in Basra in particular, in the past five years.

The most amusing part of the Foreign Secretary's response came when my hon. Friend Mr. Simpson made it clear that the Mesopotamia inquiry entirely destroyed his arguments about the Dardanelles inquiry; the Foreign Secretary's defence was that the Shadow Foreign Secretary had not mentioned the Dardanelles in his argument in chief. The Foreign Secretary went on to say that the wisdom of the Foreign Office would always be taken into account. In the light of what happened in 2003, that statement is pretty amazing: the legal adviser to the Foreign Office resigned; a previous Foreign Secretary resigned from the Government; my right hon. and learned Friend Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the Foreign Secretary previous to Robin Cook, was against the war; and scores of retired ambassadors with experience in the region made public their Opposition to the war.

The hon. Gentleman said that we are now in Iraq on a different basis, and he is absolutely correct. The motion asks for an inquiry into the Iraq war. We are not at war with Iraq today; we are in a different situation—a mess created in the aftermath of the war. The war is over, so there is no reason for not having an inquiry now.

I agree. The Government's arguments are manifestly absurd; in respect of time scale, they are like rejecting an inquiry into Dunkirk just after VE-day because we are going to engage in fighting the Japanese, which might be a distraction. It is five years since this unhappy adventure was embarked on. In 1945, one could have said that an inquiry into Dunkirk would be entirely irrelevant and a matter for the historians. However, I am afraid that an inquiry into the events leading up to the Iraq war, and into our policy on the occupation since, is extremely relevant to what we continue to do—not only in Iraq, but in Afghanistan and in other conflicts in future. We cannot wait any longer; Government Ministers have only to read Hansard, listen to this debate and see where the strength of argument is coming from to know that in their heart of hearts.

Mike Gapes has the honour of chairing the Foreign Affairs Committee. He talked about R2P, the right to protect. That all links in with the Chicago doctrine and the whole idea of liberal interventionism. It is absolutely essential that we inquire into how we got into the situation and into the arguments put forward to justify our actions.

In a customarily brilliant speech—on this occasion without any specialist advice, I am impressed to say—my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea referred to Jonathan Powell's statement that he and others did not know that more troops would be needed. I am afraid that that argument does not wash. The previous chief of the US army staff told Donald Rumsfeld that more troops would be required and that the forces provided were wholly inadequate for the occupation; his reward was to be sidelined and shuffled out. We should honour him for the fact that he did give advice. The Americans cannot say—nor can the British at the most senior levels—that they did not receive serious advice that the strategy on which we were embarked was wrong.

I agree with nearly all that my right hon. and learned Friend said. He was certainly right that containment was working and that sanctions were not. When I worked for my right hon. and learned Friend at the Foreign Office, it was my view that at some point we would have to face up to the failure of the oil-for-food programme. That is why I have significant sympathy for people such as Ann Clwyd. When they voted for the Government motion in 2003, that was about business unfinished since the ceasefire in 1991.

From what I know of it, the legal case presented by the then Attorney-General hung round the failure of Iraq to observe the terms of the 1991 ceasefire. The argument made to the people of the United States was that the issue was about al-Qaeda—it was painfully apparent that that was false. The problem was that that argument could not be made in the United Kingdom, as we had not been attacked by al-Qaeda. Of course, here the arguments made were that it was about weapons of mass destruction.

We need an inquiry to identify what happened in the decision-making process. I want to know how it is that I, as a Member of Parliament, ended up voting for the Government's resolution. I watched the performances of the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, probably from right where I am standing now, in September 2002 and in March 2003. I thought that I knew when he was not being entirely direct with the House and that I could spot when things were different. Those performances were of a totally different quality from anything that he had produced on any other occasion in the House of Commons, and he was always a fantastic performer in this Chamber. He really believed it, and that was what I was being told by friends of mine who remained in the army and were briefing him to say that he was entirely up for this and convinced of its necessity. I am afraid that that faith in its necessity, combined, it would appear, with the faith of the President of the United States in its necessity, and the opportunity presented by 9/11 to move on to unfinished business in Iraq, blinded senior policy makers at all levels to the consequences of what they were doing.

I want to know the detail of what happened in October 2001 in the discussions between Rumsfeld and Cheney and at senior levels of the Bush Administration about 9/11 providing the opportunity to "do" Iraq. I want the then Prime Minister questioned about what happened in Crawford, Texas in April 2002, when the United Kingdom became irredeemably committed to that course of action. All the policies that flowed from that decision, with British officers getting involved in CENTCOM and the planning that took place during the summer, meant that by July 2002 the thing was rolling down a military track and was not going to stop. I do not know when Mr. Keetch received his briefing from CENTCOM, but my understanding would be that this was happening six months before he went there. Everything was running to a military timetable in order to get the invasion of Iraq under way in spring because people would not have wanted to delay it until the summer, for entirely understandable military reasons. At that point, the military timetable overtook all the other considerations. The doubts that were being thrown in about the intelligence and other issues became irrelevant to the key policy makers as they drove the process forward.

An important lesson that an inquiry should be able to get to the bottom of is how we can put the brakes on at a policy-making level inside Government and in Parliament. Today, the Justice Secretary came to the House to explain about this Chamber's involvement in war-making votes in future. That is of direct relevance to an inquiry. For ex-soldiers like me, it was not realistic to ask me to vote about 12 hours—or 36 hours; I cannot remember now—before H-hour and troops going over the front line, and to pull the plug on a huge operation that had been months in the planning by suddenly saying, "Sorry, the British aren't coming." We were providing more than a third of the forces to invade southern Iraq; the military and strategic decisions had been taken. We were placed in an impossible position. Immediately before the soldiers were committed to action, with their battle procedure almost complete for going across the starting line, we were being invited to pull the rug out from underneath them. That would have been another consideration of mine in deciding to support the Government.

My view was that that the Saddam Hussein issue had to be resolved and that 9/11 had given the President of the United States the freedom of manoeuvre to act on Iraq and resolve it; that is why I supported the action. I should have followed the advice from slightly wiser quarters like those whom I previously worked for and with in the Foreign Office. I was profoundly wrong in not identifying the consequences that we have unleashed on the middle east and the world.

We need an inquiry to understand the damage done to the United Kingdom's position in the middle east. I take a significant interest in the region and travel there frequently. Wherever one goes there, one finds that friends of the UK are appalled at our failure to exercise more influence on the United States throughout the course of the disastrous strategy leading up to the invasion and during the conduct of the occupation as well. They expected much more of the United Kingdom, given our history and our association with the region. Tragically, we utterly failed to deliver and our standing in the middle east has taken a hammering as a result. It is vital to the British interest that we somehow address that damage to our standing and start to put it right.

As my right hon. Friend the Shadow Foreign Secretary made clear, books on the subject are now being published by figures such as Sir Hilary Synnott. Rory Stewart wrote an excellent book on the conduct of the occupation in Iraq, Paul Bremer has burst into print, and so has the former chief of the general staff—everyone is writing their account. We need an inquiry so that senior Members of both Houses can bring together all that testimony in a sensible, disciplined way, as proposed by the motion, to try to draw the sensible lessons we must learn from the appalling tragedy that has overtaken Iraq as a consequence of our policy.

Finally, I want to turn to today's events in Basra, which was one of the arguments advanced by the Foreign Secretary as to why now is not the time for an inquiry. In April 2004, I and other members of the Defence Committee were taken to Basra, and we were proudly shown British police officers, and Northern Ireland police officers, training Iraqi policemen. We were taken to three different police stations—it took up about half of the time we had in Basra—where we were shown different groups of policemen going through riot training and so on. But even with the level of investment we had put into training police in Basra, we completely failed to avoid their being highly penetrated by militias competing for power there.

If we had given our international development aid to one thing alone, it should have been to payment of the police to get control of their human resources policy. We could then have sacked people who did not match our standards. If we had paid the police at the same rates paid to police in the UK, we would have achieved an enormous amount more than we did in the past five years. The importance of how the police are treated in the establishment of the rule of law in a country was a lesson learned in Bosnia. We have identified that problem all too plainly in Iraq, and we are making the same mistake in Afghanistan now.

The police in Afghanistan are highly corrupt and in the hands of drugs barons and local warlords. The entire shop in Afghanistan is bet on the Afghan national army at some point being able to face down the police forces around the country in order to retake control for the central Government.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

If the Minister will forgive me, I have about 20 seconds left, and I will not get any extra time as I usually would.

I know that the Government understand this point; it is a lesson to which they will need to direct significant resources. A proper inquiry into what has gone wrong in Iraq will strengthen the Government's hand in making their case for what we need to do in Afghanistan.

It is a pleasure to follow Mr. Blunt, who spoke lucidly and forcefully. At one time, he was my deputy in Northern Ireland and in those days we used to agree with each other rather more frequently than we do now, but I shall endeavour to explain why I find myself rather a long way from him on this issue.

I shall focus narrowly on two issues. I shall not focus on whether we should have taken military action in Iraq or on the issues that ought to be the subject of an eventual inquiry, or even on whether we ought to have an inquiry at some stage. That is common ground in the House, which has emerged clearly from the debate. The issues I shall focus on are why we are having the debate on this motion, and on the arguments for having an inquiry now rather than later—and even more importantly, the arguments for not having one now.

The reason for tabling the motion has not been addressed. Anyone who listened to Mr. Hague when he introduced the debate, and attempted to take his words seriously and at face value, would suppose that the Conservative party had invented the idea of an inquiry on the military operation in Iraq and had consistently been in favour of it. Nothing of the kind is the case. The Welsh and the Scottish nationalists devised the idea. At the time, I was a member of the Conservative party and I assumed, based on the party's reaction to such things in past years, or at least in past generations, that, as soon as it saw such opportunistic and irresponsible nonsense emerging on the horizon, it would reject it without further ado. To my horror, I found that that is not the way in which the modern Tory party works.

The modern Tory party sees a bandwagon, thinks it might pick up some short-term party political benefit, and, without caring about the issue, jumps straight on it. I expressed my public disagreement in 2006 with the Tory party's conduct on the important matter that we are discussing. I think that the Tories were a bit miffed and felt that they had missed a trick—"trick" is the right word for such a ploy—because the Scottish and the Welsh nationalists had thought of the idea first. They were determined to appropriate it if they could and, on another Opposition day last June, they tabled a motion calling for an inquiry, taking credit for the idea themselves.

Why does an inquiry have such appeal for the Conservative party? The answer is plain. The Conservative party voted overwhelmingly for military action in Iraq and I was part of that—I had better say that now so that there is no doubt about it. I was a member of the Shadow Cabinet when we decided to support the Government on the matter, for reasons that I do not regret. However, leaving that aside, the Conservative party has that record and cannot do anything about it. On the other hand, it has noticed that the Iraq war is not popular and would like to gain some party political advantage from that and attack the Government.

How do the Conservatives attack the Government without saying that they were wrong about the Iraq war and facing some humiliation for doing that? The answer is that they call for an inquiry—which is irresponsible for reasons that I shall outline shortly, and could not realistically be accepted by any remotely responsible Government—and thus gain some short-term party political advantage. Such conduct from a major party and pretended alternative Government is beneath contempt. It is one of the major reasons that I do not sit on the Conservative side of the House any more.

Let me consider why I believe that it would be irresponsible to hold an inquiry now. There are three reasons. First, there is a general principle that, when one's military forces are engaged in combat, one can responsibly do only two things: support them to the hilt or pull them out. It is impossible to be half pregnant; there is no easy halfway house. A public inquiry is not a Select Committee inquiry—in democratic countries, Select Committees always have the right to conduct an inquiry into anything, of course. It is not an inquiry into a matter, albeit important in itself, that is marginal to the main issue, such as the death of Dr. Kelly. An official public inquiry into whether we should be in a particular place, when we are asking our serving men and women to risk their lives there, is inconceivable and wrong. We should not even think about doing such a thing.

We owe it to our troops—we all agree about how extraordinarily gallant they have been—not to sow the seeds of doubt about the rationale for their being in that situation and putting their lives at risk, which they do every day. There are strong reasons for not pulling out of Iraq now. We cannot let down the nascent Iraqi democracy, which has a chance of success. I do not know how great the chance is—perhaps not overwhelming, but certainly not minuscule. We owe Iraqi democracy a chance. We also owe it to our allies not to let them down, particularly when the Americans have bravely launched their surge campaign, which has yielded encouraging results.

Those are good reasons why we can legitimately ask our serving men and women to continue to risk their lives in Iraq, but we should not raise any doubt. As my hon. Friend Frank Cook so eloquently said, the signal that we would send out by starting such an inquiry at this time would be amplified and distorted by the press in this country and, no doubt, by malevolent forces in the middle east. That is a major reason of constant principle why we should never do such a thing.

I am glad to say that we are a democracy that, traditionally, has been extraordinarily responsible in its conduct of anything to do with our armed forces, and we have never dreamt of holding such an inquiry at such a time before. We have already heard the examples of the Dardanelles campaign, when the inquiry did not take place until the year after, the Franks report on the Falklands conflict, which did not take place until the Argentines had surrendered, and the Norway debate, which was just a debate, of course. There was some doubt about that in the minds of those on the Opposition front bench, so let me remind them that the debate took place several weeks after the last British soldier and sailor had been withdrawn from Narvik. There is no doubt that that consideration has been a constant principle, and it should remain one.

Secondly, there is the practical issue of interrupting operations on the ground by having to question soldiers, sailors and airmen who are currently involved in the campaign. That is not an overwhelming consideration, but it is a real one. It is not true that if we had such an inquiry, we would not need to question those engaged in operations in Iraq. Very much to the contrary: General Rollo, who is currently the deputy commander of coalition forces in Iraq, served in Iraq—in a two-star role, if I recall—a few years ago. He is exactly the sort of person who most certainly would need to be summoned back to such an inquiry. What an extraordinarily irresponsible thing it would be to summon the deputy commanding officer in the middle of a campaign to be interrogated by the Privy Council, presumably in public.

The third reason has not been raised this evening, but it is possibly the most overwhelming one of all. If we were to have an honest public inquiry, and if we were to say that the electorate and the public had a right to know all the detail and that the truth would all come out—that is the only honest basis on which to have an inquiry, and I hope to God that we would never have a public inquiry in this country that was anything other than honest—we would have to go into all the issues that determine the success, the limited success, the failure or otherwise of the operation in Iraq. That includes matters such as logistics, capabilities and tactics, as well as intelligence, which is vital in any counter-insurgency or counter-terrorist campaign.

Are we going to have a public inquiry telling al-Qaeda and all the militia in Iraq how good or how bad our intelligence is, has been or may continue to be? Do we want to tell them the breakdown of our intelligence among signals intelligence, visual surveillance and human intelligence? Do we want to tell them how good our infiltration of terrorist or insurgent operations might be or how good we estimate their infiltration of the Iraq defence forces or police has been? Are we really going to go into those matters?

Are even those on the Front Bench of the modern Conservative party, in its appalling state of mind—in its complete rejection of any sense of responsible government and its willingness to try to make political capital irrespective of the importance or the sanctity of the issues involved—seriously going to tell the House tonight that we should go into all those issues in public now, thereby giving comfort and support to our enemies who desire the death of our servicemen and women who are deployed in theatre? I trust that the whole House will give a resounding negative answer to that question.

Several hon. Members:

rose—

Order. Before I call the next Speaker, may I tell hon. Members that we are planning to start the wind-ups at half-past 9? Three speakers are seeking to catch my eye, and I would be extremely grateful if they would tailor their contributions to that time scale.

My goodness, we know how threadbare the Government's case is on Iraq when the only Back-Bench Speaker who has resolutely and staunchly supported the Government Front-Bench position is a Conservative party switcher who has changed sides in the House—that famous socialist, Mr. Davies.

I would like to highlight two other speakers, however. Most of us who have taken the time to be in the Chamber throughout the day cannot but have been moved in no small order by the contributions of the hon. Members for Stockton, North (Frank Cook) and for Reigate (Mr. Blunt). We heard from the hon. Member for Stockton, North of the personal challenge of being spoken to by his Prime Minister and of being appealed to over his own conscience to back his own Government. That is the most difficult situation for any politician in any political party, and it took some guts for him to come to the House and say that he had been wrong. I respect him immensely for that. The hon. Member for Reigate described similar experiences in wrestling with his conscience.

I want to start by praising all those in the service community who serve in our name. I represent more servicemen and women than any other Member of Parliament from Scotland, and I do so with great pride, regardless of where those personnel come from. Members of the House will recognise that I would wish to organise Scotland's defence in line with that of all normal, independent countries. All those people have served and put their lives on the line, whether they are from Scotland, England, Wales or Northern Ireland, and I do not forget those from other nations, including Fiji, South Africa and the Irish Republic, who have died in our name.

It is worth putting it on the record that the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru were opposed to the war from the start, and it is worth remembering that we have been calling for an inquiry from the start. We have used the limited time that we have at our disposal in the House of Commons to hold a debate on 9 March 2004 on publication of the Attorney-General's advice. My colleague, Mr. Llwyd, led persuasively in that debate. We were then the first political party to offer our own time in the cause of pursuing an inquiry, which we did on 31 October 2006. Interestingly, the wording of the motion on that occasion was drawn together by Members on both sides of the House in order to ensure maximum support.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I want to make some progress in order to give other Members time to speak. I will therefore decline the hon. Gentleman's Intervention. I hope that he will understand.

Now, on this, the third opportunity, I hope that many Labour Members will, for the first time, vote for an inquiry.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I will give way, as the hon. Gentleman might not get the chance to speak.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I am a bit of a recidivist on this, so I will once again be voting for an inquiry. Should we not be successful tonight, however, will he confirm that this issue will be returned to, in the spirit of Members of all parties who are in favour of an inquiry being signatories to the motion?

I am happy to confirm that the Scottish National party will continue to co-operate with members of all parties and none on this issue. We will look at using our parliamentary time if we need to bring this matter back.

I want briefly to go through the case for an inquiry. I believe that we need one because we need to learn the lessons of why we went to war in the first place. That is an obvious point, both domestically and internationally, for all of us who support the international community and the institution of the United Nations. We also need to learn the lessons regarding rebuilding. This is work in progress; it is ongoing. There are lessons to be learned. Surely that is important for the people of Iraq, so if we are going to learn lessons that are important for the people of Iraq, please let us get on with it. Many of them live in the most extreme circumstances, and we need to learn those lessons as soon as possible in order to assist those people. We also need to learn the military lessons, because our service personnel and those from other countries are there, whether or not we supported their presence in the first place. Surely learning lessons would help our troops in the field.

The case against an inquiry has possibly been the most unconvincing case that I have heard in my time in the House of Commons. I usually find the Foreign Secretary, who is no longer in his place, extremely persuasive. He is a good and engaging Speaker, but today he was sent out to bat with a broken bat— [Interruption.] And on a sticky wicket. He was unconvincing; he did not convince even Government Members on the issue.

Some people have suggested that having an inquiry would undermine the efforts of our service community while on operations. Goodness me, that has not prevented the US from having a host of inquiries. If that was true for the US, surely it is true for us. Neither has such a problem stopped the UK in the past, as we have heard a number of examples showing precedent whereby inquiries have been allowed to take place. If it is to be argued that we should not have inquiries in times of conflict, let me remind those who have not been to the Imperial War museum that one of the first items one sees there underlines the fact that there has been only one year since 1945 when the UK has not had service personnel in combat situations. The argument put forward by a few Government Members as to why we should not have an inquiry now or in the immediate future is, frankly, given that troops serving in our name are in permanent conflict situations, an argument for never having an inquiry.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I would be delighted to do so.

In expressing his concern for British troops, will the hon. Gentleman take the opportunity to remind the House that senior members of his party refer to the Union Jack as the butcher's apron and that only today active members of his party were looking forward to the day when they could burn the Union Jack in Scotland?

The hon. Gentleman has been in the Chamber for only the smallest part of our proceedings today, but if that is the only contribution he can make, it speaks for itself. It is sad and misguided.

Let me return to the points made by the Foreign Secretary. We heard two very important concessions from the Government front bench. The first was that the President of the United States was wrong and that mission has not been accomplished. It is important that the record shows that. The Foreign Secretary also confirmed that the four previous inquiries were limited; in the past, the Government have argued the exact opposite—that they have covered all the bases—so we have had an interesting change in the Government's position. They have stood their own warped logic on this question on its head this evening. The case for war and the continuing disaster that has engulfed Iraq has been exposed for the sham that it is.

I would like to explain why, five years on from the start of the Iraq war, there is one new reason for holding an inquiry. It concerns our casualties and how we can avoid them. Many of us in different parts of the UK have had bad experiences, suffering heavy casualties in previous conflicts. Going back to world war one, Professor Niall Ferguson pointed out in "The Pity of War" that, relative to population, Scotland suffered the third highest casualties of any country; it came after Serbia and Turkey. As to the number killed as a proportion of the total number of troops mobilised, Scotland provided 26.4 per cent., while the UK average was 11.8 per cent. We know that in the second world war, 50,000 names of Scottish service personnel out of a UK total of 388,000 were added to the rolls of honour for having died in conflict. On the basis of the writings of Trevor Royle, probably Scotland's best known military authority, we also know that a quarter of all UK service personnel killed in action in the Korean war never came home to Scotland.

Some of those conflicts, and certainly the second world war, were just wars, and perhaps the fact that we lost more people than did other nations was the price that had to be paid. Five years into the Iraq war, however, the statistics on deaths from various nations greatly concerns me. We find that of the 23 coalition nations, the United States leads, which is unsurprising, given the number of its troops there. The next nation on loss of troops relative to population is Wales, and the next after that is Scotland. Some 38 per cent. behind is England. The list goes on. On these islands, we have lost more lives than have many other countries—some larger than our own, but almost all larger than Scotland or Wales.

On one level, those statistics do not matter to mothers and fathers—wherever they are, on these islands or elsewhere—who have lost their loved ones. Every loss is a tragic loss. But the fact remains that the number of Scottish military casualties is higher than the number of casualties in almost every other coalition country, and I want to know why that is. I do not know why it is, and I think that we deserve an answer.

I apologise for missing the first minute of the hon. Gentleman's speech. I hope he is not taking the path that I think he is taking. Many people who join the armed forces join not as Scots, Englishmen, Welshmen or Ulstermen, but to fight for a regiment. Entry to many regiments, including one closely associated with my Constituency, means becoming a member of the armed forces. Whether the entrant is English, Scots, Northern Irish or even Commonwealth is irrelevant. I hope the hon. Gentleman recognises that.

Although he was sitting in front of me, the hon. Gentleman obviously did not listen to what I said just a moment ago. I said that, in a sense, it did not matter where any casualties came from, and I paid tribute to all personnel. Nevertheless, just as it was right for someone to ask at the beginning of the last century why the establishment of "pals" regiments was not appropriate, it is right now to ask why the rate of casualties suffered in Iraq, as in previous conflicts, is heavily skewed.

I do not know the answer to that question, but I think it worthy of answer, and worthy of answer in an inquiry. Perhaps the Minister can give us the answer this evening. Why have we suffered so many casualties? I am certain that it has nothing to do with the bravery of the troops in question or their leadership on the ground, and I do not think that they were any more or less brave than coalition soldiers from any other country; but the fact remains that our casualty rates are substantially higher, and I think we deserve to know why.

As for the wider question of an inquiry, I have no doubt that, as others have said, the real reason why the Government are not acceding to the request for one this evening is purely to do with the electoral cycle. The Government do not want to go into the next General Election after being exposed over the worst foreign policy disaster in which the United Kingdom has involved itself in the last 100 years. It has been a disaster for our service personnel, who have served bravely in our name, and for hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, and it has destabilised the world.

The current Prime Minister was intimately involved. He sat at the Cabinet table at the right hand of Tony Blair. Not only did he agree to this military conflict; he has signed the cheques for it from the start, and any inquiry would show that to be the case. But for all that, and all that, it is not the reason for having an inquiry. The reason is that after five years—longer than the duration of the first world war and than the United States' involvement in the second—we deserve answers to many, many questions, and an inquiry of the kind proposed has long been needed. I hope that Members in all parts of the House agree that it is right for it to take place now.

A number of right hon. and hon. Members were not in the House on 18 March 2003, when we were able to debate an Amendment that would have meant resolving that the case for a war on Iraq had not yet been established. In retrospect, I suspect that even more Members wish that they had not been in the House at that time, because many of them were taken in by the arguments with which they were being bombarded by the Government—and the Prime Minister in particular—about the inevitability of a case for war.

Debates among Labour Members in the Tea Room and in the Corridors of the House legitimately addressed many of the claims that were being made about the necessity for a war: the threat to Britain of a 45-minute strike from Iraq, the weapons of mass destruction, the threat that Iraq posed to the United Kingdom, the importation of uranium cake, and the prospect of a restarted nuclear programme and a concealed chemical weapons programme. All those issues were of legitimate concern to Labour Members, yet they were consistently shrouded in claims that have proved to be utterly groundless, and which at the time must have been known to be untrue.

The question is: to whom do we owe an inquiry? There is a long list of people. We owe it to the families of the 175 British soldiers who have died in Iraq. We owe it to the 4,000 troops who have been injured, and their families. We owe it to the military generals who came to the House before the war and expressed to Members of Parliament their concerns about the legality of going into Iraq and the logistics of getting out. We also owe it to the families of the anything between 250,000 and 500,000 Iraqis who have died as a result of the war, and to the 2 million Iraqis who are now refugees, primarily in countries surrounding Iraq. But most of all we owe it to ourselves, because although several million people in Britain were opposed to the war on any terms, tens of millions made the same judgment, which was that, with reluctance, they believed what the Government were saying because the Prime Minister had consistently said, "If you only knew what I know from the intelligence briefings, you would understand why there is a compelling case for a war." Those tens of millions of people have a right to say to us, "So now that we know there was not a shred of truth in that, where do you stand on insisting that you hold yourselves accountable so that we learn the lessons from the last war folly in order that you do not mislead us into the next war folly?"

I want to remind Labour Members that, in the days before that debate, those of us who formed Labour Against the War took the liberty of circulating to every Labour Member our counter-dossier to the dodgy dossier that was to come out a day later. We did so with great trepidation, because all of us were hugely fearful that we might have somehow missed something that the weapons inspectors or the International Atomic Energy Agency had said that was not part of the international evidence base of the case against a war, and that at the last minute the Government would pull out a smoking gun and there would be something in their report. It was therefore with a sense of perverse relief that we read the dodgy dossier on the morning of its release and realised that there was nothing there. We circulated all that evidence and those arguments to our colleagues at the time, and we have to take responsibility for the decisions we made in which we knowingly chose not to believe evidence that was internationally available to us; we owe it to ourselves to ask how we were misled.

There are different issues in terms of the Conservatives' position. I have heard it argued that the objections to having this inquiry now are threefold. The first of them is that it would be a gift to the friends of al-Qaeda. The answer to that is that the greatest gift to al-Qaeda was the war itself. The second objection is that an inquiry would endanger our troops. The reality is that 4,000 British troops are now stationed in a base 8 miles outside Basra at the airport: it is a bunker. They do not do any training outside the base; people have to go in. The idea that more missiles will be fired at the base because there is an inquiry seems ludicrous.

If there is an issue to do with opportunism, we must address it. That is my principal reason for voting for the motion tonight—I want to put the Conservatives on the spot. In the months leading up to the war, I toured the television stations arguing the case against it, but invariably I was preceded or followed by Conservative Front-Bench spokesmen who said, "We would declare our allegiance to the US war initiative a week before Labour. So it is not a question about whether there is evidence. We would prove our credentials earlier than you guys would."

I want to put the Conservatives on the block over this inquiry. People who ask what led us into that war need only look at the voting record from the debate on 18 March 2003 to find out. Some 245 Labour Members voted for the war—the Government were provided with a Majority of 179—but 140 Conservatives also did so. [Interruption.] Some 16 extremely honourable Conservative Members voted against, but we ended up in the war because the principal Opposition refused to be an Opposition. Their loyalty was to the President of the United States and to being on the front line, or to having other people there, a week before Labour. So let us put the Conservatives on the block.

I welcome the prospect of Mr. Hague being able to give evidence to an inquiry. I wish he could give evidence in his own defence before an inquiry at The Hague, because those who knowingly voted for that war and continue to try to justify that illegal act ought to be required to answer before an international criminal court. That is not within our jurisdiction, but being able to set up an inquiry of our own is. We should not be afraid to say that in a catastrophic experience for the British Government we have led ourselves into a disastrous, dishonest, destabilising and downright illegal war. We owe it to our credibility with our own people and our own armed forces to address the questions of why and at what point people signed up to a war that was a betrayal of the interest of the UK rather than an honouring of it.

It will take me just three minutes to put together what I would like to say. I am one of those people who was not elected when the debate on Iraq first took place. I made it clear that I was against the war at that stage, but I am more concerned about what happened in the aftermath of the decision to go to war—the peacekeeping that took place. It is why I strongly believe that it is time for a review.

The fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is a useful time to take stock of what is going on there. This weekend's attacks left 47 people dead, and it is clear that that is a typical weekend death count. We do not see the headlines as much as we used to, because not so many British deaths are taking place, but Basra is involved in a turf war and the Anbar province has been ethnically cleansed almost across the board. In Baghdad, where the surge has had an impact, again areas are being cleared of one type of population or another, unemployment is rife, electricity is intermittent and the queues for petrol remain long. More than 4,000 US soldiers have died, as have 175 from the British side, including 11 from my regiment, so now is the time to ask whether we can call this a success story.

The counter-argument is that we got rid of a tyrant, but as my right hon. and learned Friend Sir Malcolm Rifkind pointed out, we could have used the military in many other different capacities to end up with a better result. The justification for war moved from weapons of mass destruction to regime change, and intelligence was cherry-picked to make a case. As happens with these things, details are now emerging to suggest that the WMD argument came from a spy codenamed Curveball, who was involved with German federal intelligence, and the Americans never had an opportunity to speak to him directly.

This has been a fascinating debate. It has focused a lot on what has happened to the justification for going to war—but we have made a complete mess of the peace process. We could have done a lot better in the direct aftermath—from the days when President Bush stood on his ship declaring that the mission was accomplished—because that was when the hard work should have begun. There was clearly no plan. Even Colin Powell felt embarrassed having to justify the invasion when he went to the United Nations. The consequence is that we are living in Iraq today and our military are picking up a lot of the criticism, if I can put it that way, for the fact that international development agencies could not take advantage of the fragile peace when we moved in after the invasion. A lot of work needs to be done. There are many questions outstanding, and I believe that an inquiry is well overdue.

This has been a significant debate, in terms both of the passion and quality of the speeches by Members from all parties and of the sheer flimsiness of the arguments advanced by Ministers in defence of the Government's position.

A couple of speeches will stay in my mind. The historical knowledge of my hon. Friend Sir Peter Tapsell and his references to the Ems telegram, Cavour and successive Iraqi leaders certainly set the debate in context. I confess that I was somewhat entertained when I listened to Mr. Davies give the House a lecture on the importance of constant principle in the context of politics today.

Of course, I have been extraordinarily constant on this issue. I publicly dissociated myself from the Conservative party when it first supported the Scottish National party's proposal for an inquiry. I explained back in 2006 why I thought it was an extraordinarily irresponsible idea. I did exactly the same last year.

The hon. Gentleman has been constant on this issue; I doubt whether many of his constituents would believe that he had been consistent in many others.

We have heard agreement in the debate, the common ground being that we should have an inquiry. The argument has been over its timing and, to some extent, its scope. The Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Mike Gapes, concentrated on its scope. I want to reassure him that, as Angus Robertson said in his speech, the motion was deliberately chosen. It follows the terms of a Scottish Nationalist and Plaid Cymru motion that was debated in the House in 2006. That wording was the outcome of cross-party discussions, which included Labour Members.

Our purpose in choosing that motion rather than one that could easily have been phrased to score party political points was to try to unite as many Members as possible throughout the House in support of a measure that we believe it is in our national interest to support. Its scope is wide, rather than as narrow as the hon. Member for Ilford, South said. I draw his attention to the words in the motion, particularly those that state that an inquiry would have power

"to review the way in which the responsibilities of Government were discharged in relation to Iraq, and all matters relevant thereto".

It is open under our proposal for a committee of inquiry to search as far back in history as the hon. Gentleman proposed, or even further, if Privy Counsellors on that committee so decided.

The thrust of the debate has been about the timing of a proposed inquiry. The Foreign Secretary, to his credit, laid at least one argument to rest when he said that the morale of the armed forces was not an issue, and would not be harmed if an inquiry were to take place now. The argument was rather that holding an inquiry now would interfere with what he described as important operations under way in Iraq. In effect, he was saying that the effectiveness of the military could be harmed if we were to press ahead with the inquiry now rather than delaying it.

The Foreign Secretary told us about significant actions taking place in Basra today, but those actions do not involve British troops, except possibly in a supporting or specialist role. In a written answer given to my right hon. Friend Mr. Hague, the Secretary of State for Defence said:

"UK Forces have not received any requests from the Iraqi authorities to re-intervene in Muthanna, Dhi Qar or Basra since the handover of security responsibility to the Iraqis in these provinces."

He went on to say that

"we have provided specialist support to operations led by the Iraqi security forces on a number of occasions."—[ Hansard, 10 March 2008; Vol. 473, c. 14W.]

Minister after Minister, from the Ministry of Defence and from the Foreign Office, has hailed the changes that have taken place in the last six to nine months as evidence that responsibility for security and the lead role in Iraq is being progressively handed over to the Iraqis, with British forces taking a much more limited role. However, at the same time, Ministers appear to argue that that role—which includes training, securing supply routes and policing the Iran-Iraq border, as the Foreign Secretary described—is still such that an inquiry should not take place until those duties have been completed, and, logically, until the last serviceman or woman has been withdrawn from Iraq.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if we consider the contributions that have been made to the debate, and if we took a poll of those who contributed or intervened, we would—by a Majority of probably four to one—have an inquiry starting tomorrow?

I agree completely. The weakness of the Government's case can be analysed in this way. First, the case that an inquiry would harm the ability of our forces to carry out those duties has so far rested almost entirely on assertion by Ministers, rather than on evidence. The Foreign Secretary was asked by Mr. Marshall-Andrews whether any military commanders, past or present, had lobbied against an inquiry being held now or had counselled delay. The Foreign Secretary replied straightforwardly that none had made any such objection. Indeed, senior former commanders—such as Lord Inge, Lord Guthrie and Sir Mike Jackson—have supported calls for an inquiry.

The suggestion—which, in fairness, only the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford made—that we would somehow face the prospect of rank and file servicemen and women being hauled back from Basra airbase to London to be quizzed by the great and good in a Privy Council inquiry, is nothing short of bizarre. It is a feeble argument on which we do not need to linger.

The Government then resort to saying that it is not only the soldiers about whom they are concerned. The fear is, the Foreign Secretary said, that senior Ministers and diplomats will be distracted from concentrating on their duties on Iraq. The Foreign Secretary echoed words previously spoken by the Prime Minister, as my right hon. and learned Friend Mr. Howard pointed out. He asked who these people are who are so consumed now by duties relating specifically to Iraq that they cannot give evidence about events that took place, for the most part, between 2002 and 2004. Many, probably most, of those who were in senior positions in those years will now have moved on. In fact, we can measure their career progress by consulting the publishing schedules for memoirs and the television schedules for interviews.

The idea that senior Ministers or officials will ever reach that miraculous day where their diaries are clear and they can fill in the empty hours by preparing evidence to submit to the inquiry is fanciful in the extreme. And yet the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister have said that fear of distracting such people is a key part of their case for refusing to have an inquiry now. Well, look at what has happened in the United States. It has suffered far greater casualties, and continues to commit a far larger number of troops to Iraq than we do. It has had five separate inquiries, and senior military, diplomatic and political leaders have given up their time and energy to respond to those inquiries. It is to the credit of democracy in the US that both the Bush Administration and both sides in Congress recognise the importance of holding themselves accountable to the American people for the decisions that they have taken, and of arguing their case openly on the basis of evidence.

Then the Government say that we cannot have an inquiry because of the state of Iraqi politics, and that we have to wait until Iraq is a stable country. The mixture of disbelief and ridicule with which my right hon. and learned Friend Sir Malcolm Rifkind greeted that element of the Government's argument did it perfect justice. Does anybody seriously believe that decisions by Iraqi leaders about petroleum revenue sharing or forming a stable coalition Government, or the outcome of Iraqi provincial and local elections, will be influenced one jot by whether or when we hold a Privy Council inquiry in London about how the decision to go to war came to be taken? The idea that Iraq's leaders are sitting inside the green zone scanning Hansard online, or waiting for minutes of a Privy Council inquiry to appear, is just ludicrous.

The Foreign Secretary shot down Tom Levitt when he tried to ramp up that argument in an Intervention. The words slipped out of the Foreign Secretary's mouth—and were true—that the Iraqi Government have more important things on their mind.

Frank Cook, argued that an inquiry would give encouragement to al-Qaeda and other terrorists. Terrorists need no excuse for their campaigns of slaughter. If they did not have Iraq, they would have something else. I do not believe for a moment that they would be swayed one way or the other by the existence of an inquiry. The hon. Gentleman also mentioned 7/7 and the risk that an inquiry could feed extremism in our own country. He is now returning to his place, and I say to him that on the basis of my Constituency experience, it is the absence of an inquiry and the impression of secrecy that allows conspiracy theories to run rife and plays into the hands of the extremists whom both he and I wish to see defeated.

Many Members have spoken about the importance of an inquiry to learning lessons for the future. My hon. Friend Mr. Blunt asked why we could not learn from Iraq and apply in Afghanistan the lessons about the failure of the coalition in Iraq to recruit, train and supervise an effective police force. A number of my hon. Friends, including my hon. Friend Patrick Mercer in an intervention and my hon. Friend Mr. Ellwood, talked about the lack of connection between the military moving in and securing territory, and the relief and reconstruction effort moving in so that ordinary Iraqis or Afghans can see greater security and a benefit to the quality of their everyday lives from the intervention of western forces.

Those lessons need to be learned, but there is a further important reason why we should have an inquiry without delay. Mr. Keetch, in a passionate speech, spoke about how future Governments might one day wish to seek agreement from Parliament to take this country to war again. We cannot predict now the circumstances of such decisions, but I fear that one result of the decisions on Iraq has been seriously to harm public confidence in this country about the capacity of the British Government to take such decisions correctly and explain their reasoning honestly to Parliament and the people.

I want to believe that the Government of my country, whichever party happens to be in government at any one time, measure the advice given to them by their professionals in the diplomatic service, the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces. I want to be confident that the Prime Minister and the full Cabinet have access to all the information, including the dissenting opinions, available in Whitehall and from outside advisers. I also want to be confident that the Government will be straight with Parliament and the public about the decisions that they recommend on the nation's behalf.

The debate has shown that the Government are bereft of any plausible reason to resist an inquiry. It is in our national and democratic interest to press ahead with one, and I hope that hon. Members of all parties will feel able to support the motion this evening.

We have had a good and passionate debate. It has covered well trodden ground, and I contend that the arguments for an inquiry have contained little that is new.

Five years on from the decision to invade Iraq, our armed forces are still there. They are helping the Iraqis to rebuild their country on a foundation of democratic institutions, after decades of the most appalling tyranny. We are involved in helping with Iraq's economy and infrastructure, and with basic services such as health and education. We are also helping with security—the essential prerequisite to progress in those other areas.

Better security is the reason why Iraqi security forces are deployed right now in Basra city on an Iraqi military operation to improve Iraqi security. The operation has been initiated at a time of the Iraqis' choosing, although we continue to provide the specialist support that they may need. It is really encouraging that the Iraqi security forces are both leading and conducting the operation, as it shows that the transition of responsibility for security is working, with Iraqis implementing Iraqi solutions to Iraqi problems. The operation also shows that the Iraqis increasingly have the will, capacity and leadership to take on the irreconcilable militia elements in the south.

Basra remains of vital economic importance to Iraq. Historically, it was the country's commercial centre and a major gateway for trade, with 80 per cent. of the country's oil coming out through that city. Today's events there only underline the need to focus on the requirements of the operational theatre.

My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has said that an inquiry into the Iraq war will be necessary. There are always lessons to learn, and it is clear that there will be important practical lessons about post-war planning. We must examine them if we are to maintain confidence about matters as important as any future military interventions.

The question that divides us is when an inquiry should take place. Mr. Hague sees no difficulty with holding one now. He said that there was no need to wait until our involvement was concluded, and he does not accept that an inquiry would be a distraction from the job at hand. He believes that an inquiry can be held now—with witnesses summoned, deployed equipment scrutinised, and intelligence and policy examined—but that none of that will have a detrimental effect on the ongoing operation.

My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary set out the four points on which the right time to hold an inquiry hinges. He also demonstrated that there is no precedent for conducting an inquiry while troops are still deployed. Mr. Simpson came as close as anyone did to punching a hole in my right hon. Friend's defences when he said that there was indeed a precedent—namely, the inquiry that was held while the Mesopotamia operation of 1916 was ongoing. I have a great deal of respect for his historical knowledge, but let me tell him that we surrendered in Mesopotamia on 29 April 1916, that the commission was set up on 17 August 1916, and that we re-engaged— [Interruption.] Hold on! We re-engaged in December 1916. Let me tell him also that when the inquiry was set up, it said of its terms of reference:

"We believe—and we have acted on that belief—that our main duties were to enquire into the operations antecedent to our appointment, and that to investigate into and report upon pending or present operations might seriously hamper the action of those now in charge of the campaign."

I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman, who came closer to winning his argument than anybody else, simply appears to be wrong on that point.

I am grateful to the Minister, a member of the parliamentary breakfast club. I thank him very much, because he has just proved my point. The campaign in Mesopotamia went on from late 1914 all the way through until 1918. The report looked into the disasters that took place in Mesopotamia, sadly, before the end of 1916, so that lessons could be drawn and learned for the future campaign. Game, set and match; thank you, Minister.

And the commission said, in terms, that it felt it would be wrong for it to look into "current operations". The commission was looking into operations antecedent to its establishment.

rose—

The hon. Gentleman was probably there, but I will not give way to him. [Hon. Members: "Give way."] Let me make some progress. [Interruption.]

Order. We must have order. Will the right hon. Gentleman give way to Sir Peter Tapsell?