Jeremy Corbyn: ..., bizarrely, the Prime Minister is not here. There is a motion for the Adjournment of the House and apparently no opportunity for the Government to set out a statement of their case for the war in Iraq and their policies on the middle east. The only way in which the House can express dissent from the Government's policies is by calling a procedural vote on the Adjournment later. I...
Jeremy Corbyn: My hon. Friend has made a good point. My constituency has often welcomed asylum seekers from conflicts all around the world. The Iraqi asylum seekers there include those who came during the Saddam regime and those who have come since. Interestingly, those who fled persecution under the Saddam regime did not, for the most part, support the war, and they certainly do not support the continued...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...not the gung-ho President Bush of 2002, whose axis of evil speech promised war all over the world. He was a President desperately trying to find some way forward. He was offered a way out by the Iraq Study Group, which he seemed to reject, and has now gone for the bizarre option of putting in more troops to try to control the situation. President Bush will be for ever remembered as the...
Jeremy Corbyn: ..., and it ended up with the US being defeated and forced to withdraw. This debate is timely and important. We ought to have an opportunity to vote on the policy that the British people want towards Iraq and the middle east. I want to conclude on the situation in Palestine, which also relates to the middle east. During the Christmas-new year recess, I visited Palestine for a week, of my own...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...of State explain quite simply to an increasingly sceptical public why he is opposed to the establishment of a parliamentary inquiry that could take wide-ranging evidence on the policies relating to Iraq, the aftermath of the invasion and what we are going to do about getting the troops out?
Jeremy Corbyn: ...this debate today. Never before have international affairs so dominated domestic politics. Certainly for all of the last five years it has been one of the major areas of debate, and the war in Iraq and the linked war in Afghanistan are part of that debate. We should be aware that the war in Afghanistan generated an enormous amount of opposition at the beginning and still does, and the war...
Jeremy Corbyn: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what the total weight of depleted uranium used in munitions expended in Iraq (a) was in the Gulf War of 1991 and (b) has been since March 2003.
Jeremy Corbyn: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what information has been provided to the World Health Organisation on the location of depleted uranium munitions in Iraq in (a) 1991 and (b) since March 2003.
Jeremy Corbyn: My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House will have noted that we had a short but interesting debate on Iraq on Monday because the nationalist parties succeeded in using one of their Opposition Supply days for that occasion. Can he assure us that in the next Session we will have regular debates, in Government time, on foreign policy and specifically on the situation in Iraq and...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...people's confidence in the democratic process in this country, we should support the motion at 7 o'clock. We should do that for several reasons. The inquiries that are necessary into the war in Iraq might spare us involvement in future conflicts. They will open up the books and the record on what happened in the run-up to the war in 2003. In an earlier intervention, I asked the hon. Member...
Jeremy Corbyn: No. I have only one minute left. I want the motion to be carried so that we establish a committee of inquiry into all the circumstances surrounding the run-up to the war, the aftermath of the war in Iraq and what we do in future. We live in a world where terrorism has been encouraged by the invasion of Iraq, and, I believe, by the continued presence in Afghanistan. If we want to live in a...
Jeremy Corbyn: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the military families campaign—many of whose members have lost loved ones in Iraq in the past three years—has sent a letter to many hon. Members before today's debate supporting the call for an inquiry, because they want to know the truth about what happened to their loved ones, and whether they died for a legal or an illegal war?
Jeremy Corbyn: Does the hon. Gentleman also concede that any inquiry should look in some detail at the circumstances under which the UN weapons inspectors, led by Hans Blix, were withdrawn from Iraq in January 2003 and not allowed to go back, having confirmed that they believed with 99 per cent. certainty that there were no such weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
Jeremy Corbyn: ...it. I shall be brief because others want to speak, but we should just consider the Lancet report, which came out last week or the week before and which indicated that 650,000 people have died in Iraq since the invasion in 2003. The death rate is accelerating as a result of insurgencies and all the problems associated with the disruption of normal civilian life. There is no prospect of it...
Jeremy Corbyn: My hon. Friend might well be right about many trade unionists in Iraq, but is he aware of the position of Basra oil workers, who are calling for a British and American withdrawal from Iraq?
Jeremy Corbyn: May I press the Leader of the House again on a debate about Iraq and Afghanistan? It seems absolutely extraordinary to many people outside this House that we should have had the report by The Lancet, rumours of policy changes in the USA, and the general's comments about the presence in Iraq, and yet no debate in this House. May I press him, seriously, to have an urgent debate on the presence...
Jeremy Corbyn: Will the Secretary of State give us an estimate of the number of soldiers and civilians—in addition to the tragic loss of British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan—who have died in both countries since the operation began five years ago in Afghanistan and three and a half years ago in Iraq?
Jeremy Corbyn: When does the Foreign Secretary expect British and American troops to terminate their tour of duty in Iraq and actually leave?
Jeremy Corbyn: ...renewable lease to the US for the base to be sited there. I would like to know whether the base on Diego Garcia has ever been used as a staging post for flights from Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, Iraq or anywhere else, through which prisoners on rendition flights have eventually ended up in Guantanamo Bay. If that were the case and there had been human rights abuses as a result, the...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...the point. The decision to deploy British troops is made under the royal prerogative. Parliament was consulted by the Prime Minister before we went into what I believe to be an illegal war in Iraq. Surely the issue is the legality in international law, which has not been argued for and has not been sustained in the case of Iraq.