Charge Blair with contempt of Parliament over Iraq ‘lies’
As crucial evidence is censored by the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War, an explosive proposal by a former Foreign Secretary...
DAVID OWEN, COMMENT
THE embers of one war can spark the flames of another. There can be no doubt that the 2003 Iraq War and the insurgency that followed has been an important contributor to the civil war devastating Syria – a reason, if another was needed, to forensically examine Tony Blair’s actions of more than a decade ago.
Democratic politics make great demands on a Prime Minister in time of war.
However, there is nothing more corrosive to their reputation than the accusation that they have lied to the House of Commons – as Anthony Eden did over the Suez Crisis in 1956.
Blair is increasingly believed to have done the same over Iraq.
The former Prime Minister denies it, of course, and remains unashamedly active on the political stage. According to reports yesterday, he is angling for a Brussels position which would give him a ‘pan-European role’ campaigning against Euroscepticism, which sounds suspiciously like a disguised bid to become the next president of the European Council.
Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq Inquiry was expected to report in 2010. But since then, he has been locked in a dispute with Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood over which Government documents could be released as part of his final report.
SIR JOHN’S position has been strong and principled – he wants to publish the critical pre-war correspondence between Blair and George W Bush, including their personal letters. Last Thursday, a compromise was struck between Sir John and Sir Jeremy which will allow us to see the ‘gist’ of the messages. We will only be able to judge who truly won this Whitehall power struggle when the report is published, and we see the extent of the extracts.
So far, the only details we have been able to glean have come from the selective quotations used by Blair and his former No10 chief of staff and press secretary in their evidence to Chilcot, and in their memoirs.
It seems to run against natural justice that this privileged information can only be disclosed in such a one-sided manner.
If this secretive position continues to hold, I would argue that the public should instead draw their conclusions from one, devastating document which leaked into the public domain before the Chilcot Inquiry.
The highly confidential account of a meeting at No10 on July 23, 2002, between Blair and his most senior advisers, includes a report from the then head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, whose report of talks in Washington was recorded in these terms: ‘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.’
Critically, a Civil Service briefing paper prepared for the meeting said Blair had reached his decision on Saddam when he met Bush in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002 – 11 months before the war broke out.
It said: ‘When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April, he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change.’
In July 2002, Blair sent Bush a letter which is believed – we cannot know for sure because of the ban on its publication – to have begun with Blair promising to support Bush ‘whatever’ he did over Iraq.
The Iraq Inquiry has rightly focused its attention on Blair’s foreword to the infamous September dossier of 2002 on Iraq’s supposed stockpiles of WMD.
Blair wrote: ‘What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme.’
HE WENT on: ‘The picture presented to me by the Joint Intelligence Committee in recent months has become more not less worrying. It is clear that, despite sanctions, the policy of containment has not worked sufficiently well to prevent Saddam from developing these weapons.
‘I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current, that he has made progress on WMD, and that he has to be stopped.’
I believe that the House of Commons should form a judgment as to whether this statement is a lie – and therefore a contempt of Parliament.
In 2010, Sir Roderic Lyne, a member of the Inquiry, asked during an evidence session with Major General Michael Laurie – who played a key role in gathering intelligence about Iraq in the run-up to the war – whether Blair’s foreward was ‘a justifiable encapsulation?’ He replied:
Lord Butler stopped just short of calling him a liar
‘No, because I don’t believe it was beyond doubt.’
Lord Butler, who was Cabinet Secretary when Blair entered No10, and who chaired a report into the intelligence gathering, has told the House of Lords: ‘Here was the rub: neither the United Kingdom nor the United States had the intelligence that proved conclusively that Iraq had those weapons.
‘The Prime Minister was disingenuous about that.
‘The United Kingdom intelligence community told him on August 23, 2002, that we “know little about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons work since late 1988”. The Prime Minister did not tell us that.
‘Indeed, he told Parliament only just over a month later that the picture painted by our intelligence services was “extensive, detailed and authoritative”.
‘Those words could simply not have been justified by the material that the intelligence community provided to him.’
The use of the word disingenuous by a former Cabinet Secretary is a very serious allegation – just short of calling the Prime Minister a liar – and it goes as close as conventions allow in the House of Lords. Despite my urging, Sir John Chilcot failed to call Lord Butler before the committee to explain this position.
So how can the House of Commons best respond to the public’s disillusionment when the Iraq inquiry reports?
I believe the Liaison Committee, formed of the chairmen of the select committees, should consider charging Tony Blair with contempt of Parliament.
This could be done by putting forward an all-party resolution for debate in the House of Commons, a few weeks after the report is published.
Then – and only then – might we be able to draw a line under this inglorious period in our modern political history.
Lord Owen was Foreign Secretary from 1977-79, and sits in the House of Lords as an Independent Social Democrat.