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6.44 pm
Mr. Alan Clark (Kensington and Chelsea): It is certainly an experience to follow, and to listen to, the hon. Member for Glasgow, Kelvin (Mr. Galloway). Plainly, he has not had implanted in his skull one of those electrodes programmed by the Minister without Portfolio and Mr. Alastair Campbell to which the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore) attributes the brain power of every one of the hon. Ladies on the Labour Benches. He is on record as having said that in a recent speech.
It is also a great pleasure, which enlivens every debate in this place, to listen to the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn), but I should like to supplement
his trips down the memory lane of history with a recollection of my own. When he ran through all the various episodes in which the United Kingdom had militarily intervened in theatres around the globe since the war, he rather skated over the Falkland Islands. I was in the Chamber on 9 April 1982, and I remember hearing him say--in a magnificent speech, every bit as eloquent and moving as the one that he made today, and at such pitches of volume as we heard this afternoon--that the President of the United States would intervene, that the task force would have to turn round and come back, that it would be a complete rerun of the Suez expedition, and that we were incapable of recapturing the Falkland Islands because we were under the thumb of the Americans and because we were industrially, economically and militarily incapable of doing so. Well, the right hon. Gentleman chose not to remind us of that occasion, but I hope that it at least establishes that his predictive powers are not always impeccable.
The debate is taking place at a time when, for the second time in six years, there is an amphibious and carrier task force in the Gulf, and plainly the whole House must give the members of that force our loyalty, support and admiration for the manner in which they are responding to the task--a task by no means clear--which has been set them. Therefore, I hope that the putting of a number of questions to the Secretary of State will not be taken as impugning to any degree our support for individual members and units of the armed forces. I hope that you will agree, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that those are questions which can, and should, legitimately be asked in the House.
First, what has been done to protect our personnel from chemical and bacteriological weapons? I understand that the full range of available injections is not being administered. Why not? Secondly, what provisions are in place for protecting the lives and safety of United Kingdom civilians in Iraq? Thirdly, will the Secretary of State make it clear that the abuse and torture of prisoners, as happened in the last Gulf war, would not be tolerated, and would be treated as an escalation of the conflict?
Fourthly--I think the House will agree that this is important--to what extent are we privy to, or have we consented to, United States tactical planning and targeting? Fifthly, do these weapons actually exist--that is to say, in capable weapon form--or are we talking simply about supplies and components that are to be interdicted?
Next come the broad strategic realities. What do we hope to achieve? Is it that Saddam will simply roll over, apologise and admit the inspection teams to wherever they wish to go--or, if that is too utopian, that Saddam will disappear, be displaced or assassinated? If we hope for that, we have certainly altered our objectives since the time when I was a Minister at the Department of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Mr. King), when Saddam was deliberately kept in place as a make-weight to the ayatollahs on one side and the unfettered exercise of Israeli power on the other.
If Saddam is to be destabilised by military action--although I suggest that that is no more likely than his being strengthened in his position--what will be the position of a fragmented Iraq? We have heard the Foreign Secretary and others say that there is no intention to break up Iraq but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) pointed out, the break-up of
Iraq is almost inevitable if the Iraqi Government are destabilised in conditions of extreme violence. It is the most likely consequence.
Will Turkey then be reconciled to the emergence of a Kurdish state in the north? How will the ayatollahs in Iran respond to division and demarcation between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims? How will all those repercussions affect the ruling families of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states?
Mr. Donald Anderson (Swansea, East):
Like the right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Clark), I descend from the peaks of absolutes and certainties and recognise, with him, the uncertainties and the judgments that will have to be made, often on the basis of inadequate evidence.
There are indeed problems involving the strategic balance within the region, such as the position of Iran if Iraq is crippled. There are also wider questions that we must consider in the context of our transatlantic relations, as well as the problem of Russian-American relations.
Obviously there are no certainties, but at the end of the day we must seek on the basis of principle, with whatever difficulty, to reach decisions. We are not academics, weighing the series of problems that face us. Ultimately, amid all the gloom and the problems, a decision must be made.
As parliamentarians we must accept the fact that much of the evidence is not properly before us. For example, we cannot make a proper assessment of the strength of the Iraqi opposition. We do not know whether they have been so ruthlessly extirpated by Saddam Hussein that there is no chance of their rising up against him.
We do not know about other key matters, either, such as the possible effect of bombing that goes astray and lands on the anthrax barrels. We do not know to what extent, if any, any serious diplomatic movement has been shown by Saddam in response to the flurry of diplomatic activity over the past few days. We can only wish godspeed to Kofi Annan and hope that he has been given a sufficiently flexible brief, not to negotiate but to take a message that will be seen as reasonable by world opinion.
We are prey to many sources, and we are not sure whether some of them may be designed to mislead us. Last Friday, for example, there was a suggestion in The Times that many, or at least some, of the Russian weapons inspectors were feeding information to Saddam Hussein. If that were well founded it would certainly cast doubts on the idea of increasing the number of Russian inspectors, as well as on Russia's mediation efforts. We do not know.
In that context, I congratulate the Foreign Secretary and the rest of the Government on seeking to throw some light on the background by the publication for Members on 4 February of a paper showing not only the mandate of the United Nations Special Commission, which is binding on Saddam Hussein as part of the peace agreement, but an analysis of UNSCOM's work since 1991 and an account of the increasing evasions and obstructions on the part of Saddam Hussein.
In the light of that paper, surely no one can put faith in the veracity of Saddam Hussein's word, or with any credibility see him as a victim rather than as someone who is the author not only of his own fate but, alas, of that of the people of his country. The Foreign Secretary set out a catalogue of deception and obstructions. Anyone inclined to give the benefit of any sort of doubt to Saddam Hussein should read and reread that note, which hon. Members received on 4 February.
Clearly Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator and a threat to the peace of the region, and perhaps more widely. However, there are other evil dictators in the world--other people who threaten the peace of their regions. What is different about Saddam is surely the fact that, as a result of the war of 1991, he reached an agreement with the United Nations of which he is blatantly in breach. We as an international community are faced with the choice of whether to do nothing, to do something ineffective, or to seek to do something that, despite all the problems, is as effective as we can manage.
We must of course concede that there are far greater difficulties now than there were in 1990-91, when the aim was clear. There had been an invasion of a neighbouring country--Kuwait, a member of the United Nations--and the aim was clearly to expel the invader from that country. Had the United Nations coalition force gone beyond that, invaded Basra, gone on to Baghdad and tried tyrannicide, that would have had no international legitimacy because it would have gone well beyond the remit of the UN resolutions.
I can see that different United States spokesmen have set out different war aims and that Saddam Hussein has used the suffering of his people, which he has inflicted on them for his own ends, for successful propaganda. The difficulty of reassembling the Gulf war coalition is now much greater, in part because of the way in which Premier Netanyahu has behaved in Israel, with his settlements policy and his failure to comply, at least adequately, with the Oslo accords.
All that said, Russia has its own agenda, as does France which, putting the most generous construction on it, is best able, it says, to play the role of "interlocuteur valable" by seeking to distance itself from the other European allies. In the main, our European allies are now very much on board in the current initiative.
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