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Mr. Dennis Canavan (Falkirk, West): We would all like to get rid of the ruthless dictator Saddam Hussein, but there is concern on both sides of the Atlantic that the American-British military operation--and its timing--may have more to do with keeping President Clinton in office than with getting Saddam Hussein out of office. Why should the lives of British service personnel be put at risk--and why should innocent men, women and children in Iraq be sacrificed--in what appears to be a desperate attempt to save Clinton's skin?
Mr. Cook: The Prime Minister and members of the Cabinet would never ask our airmen to go into action for such a purpose. We have not done so on this occasion. We have asked them to go into action to preserve the rule of the United Nations resolutions, and to prevent Saddam from developing those weapons of terror that I have described to the House. My hon. Friend would have to have an extremely exaggerated sense of conspiracy to imagine that the timetable of the UNSCOM inspections and of the report from Richard Butler was arranged six weeks ago so that it would come to fruition at this particular moment.
Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough): Is not the reality the exact opposite of the point made by the hon. Member for Falkirk, West (Mr. Canavan)? Is it not Saddam Hussein who calculates when he believes that the west is distracted, and who chooses moments such as this--when the domestic circumstances in America are helpful to him--rather than the other way around?
Mr. Cook: The hon. and learned Gentleman makes a fair point about the calculations of Saddam Hussein but,
equally, we should all recognise that anyone who employs brinkmanship all the time sometimes mistakes where the brink is. He could not have been given clearer warnings on this occasion: he has chosen to ignore them.
Mr. Hugh Bayley (City of York): Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Cook: This will be the last time.
Mr. Bayley: I am most grateful. Does my right hon. Friend agree that, when it came to timing, to delay action would have endangered our military objectives and our service men, who are committed to achieving those objectives? Would not delay have allowed the Iraqi regime more time to prepare weapons to use against them?
Mr. Cook: My hon. Friend makes a very fair point. The longer the build-up to and expectation of an attack on Iraq, the greater would have been Iraq's preparations for it. The result would have been a greater risk to our service personnel. Had we been obliged to delay such action until the end of Ramadan, Iraq would have been able to take advantage of a very long period in which to prepare for any attack.
It is because of Saddam, not sanctions, that people in Iraq are short of food and their hospitals are short of medicine. Indeed, at the very time when children in Baghdad go hungry, Saddam has been caught exporting convoys of wheat and barley to Syria and Jordan to earn the revenues that keep him and his elite in comfort. Iraq has even sold for export food donated by the rest of world for the needy in Iraq.
As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has said, it is not an objective of our military action to bring about the downfall of Saddam. It is, though, our objective to weaken the military machine with which Saddam terrorises his own people and protects himself from their need to be rid of him.
For as long as Saddam remains in power, we will remain resolute in our determination that he will not be allowed to fulfil his ambitions to develop weapons of mass terror. The present military operation must bring it home, even to him, that we will not let him get away with his strategy of deceit and obstruction. It would be far better for him, for his regime, for Iraq and for the international community if he now accepted full inspection by the United Nations to carry out the disarmament on the ground that we have been obliged to do from the air.
None of us who have taken part in the decision to take military action has found it easy. It is a decision that we have taken with great reluctance and real regret. However, I am clear that it was the right decision. The regime in Baghdad has demonstrated appalling brutality towards its people. It has demonstrated consistent dishonesty in its promises to the people of the rest of the world. It has persisted in an extensive programme to acquire weapons of terror and the missiles to fire them, for no other reason than to terrorise the rest of the region and beyond.
Mr. Michael Howard (Folkestone and Hythe):
I am grateful to the Foreign Secretary for giving me advance sight of his speech.
The House has debated the crisis in Iraq on many previous occasions. This year alone there have been four statements--two by the Prime Minister and two by the Foreign Secretary--two private notice questions and six previous debates. On each of those occasions, the whole House was united in the hope that the grave situation that exists in Iraq could be resolved without military action.
Those hopes have finally been dashed. The responsibility that rested on the shoulders of the Government yesterday, and rests on them today, is awesome. No one who has taken part in a Cabinet decision to authorise military action can be insensitive to the very difficult judgments that have to be made. No burden on Government is more onerous.
Conservative Members offer the Government our support for the action that they have taken. We join with them in the concern that we must all have for the safety of our service men and women who could be in action at any time--indeed, we are told that they are in action as we speak.
We agree with the Government that the cause that they are fighting to uphold is just. What is that cause? It has its roots in the Gulf war. That war was a great achievement, in which British Governments, under the leadership first of my right hon. Friend Baroness Thatcher and then my right hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major), played a critical part. It owed much to the skill and valour of British forces, and it was a war in which, once again, they proved themselves to be without equal.
Yet it was an incomplete achievement, because it left in place the rogue regime that had invaded Kuwait and had behaved--and would continue to behave--with such great brutality to its citizens and to others in the region. It left in place a regime that continued to pose a threat to the peace of the region and to humanity.
Mr. Robert N. Wareing (Liverpool, West Derby):
Does not the right hon. and learned Gentleman feel a sense of guilt at the fact that he was a member of the Government of Baroness Thatcher who, throughout the war between Iran and Iraq, were supplying arms to Saddam Hussein?
Mr. Howard:
I do not accept what the hon. Gentleman says. However, nothing could give Saddam Hussein greater comfort than the House of Commons spending the afternoon debating what may or may not have happened in those years, rather than discussing the cause to which the Government have committed our troops to action today.
At the time of the Gulf war and its aftermath, when that incomplete achievement was in place, the threat posed by the Iraqi regime was something to which the international community was not oblivious. The international community did not simply walk away. The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution to deal with that threat.
Resolution 687, adopted on 3 April 1991, dealt with the questions that remained to be resolved in the aftermath of the Gulf war. Foremost among them was the need to ensure that Iraq did not use, develop or acquire any weapons of mass destruction, and that any stocks of the materials necessary to create such weapons were eliminated. Iraq, indeed, gave unconditional undertakings to that effect.
The unhappy story of the past seven and a half years has been the story of how the regime of Saddam Hussein has sought at every turn to renege on those undertakings. The consequences are not academic or abstract. The inventory of Scud missiles, chemical missile warheads and live chemical agents, and the capacity to produce biological weapons, testify to the real, practical nature of the danger. Those weapons could destroy whole populations, and the record of this regime is such that it might well use them to destroy whole populations.
It was precisely because the international community was alive to the danger that resolution 687 was passed. It is in that resolution--and in resolution 678, which it expressly affirms--that the basis for the use of force to deal with the danger lies. Those resolutions embody the determination of the international community to hold Saddam Hussein to the undertakings that he gave in 1991. He has repeatedly given solemn pledges that he will honour those undertakings; he has repeatedly broken his pledges.
In October 1997, and again in January 1998, Saddam announced openly his intention to break the agreements made at the end of the Gulf war. Then, in February, he gave a binding commitment to comply. In August this year, he broke that as well, and suspended all but the most routine monitoring. In October, he ceased co-operation entirely.
It was in order to verify the extent to which those undertakings were being kept that UNSCOM was established by the international community. Last month, Saddam Hussein gave a clear and unconditional undertaking to co-operate with UNSCOM. The latest report from the inspectors, however, is indeed a damning document. It makes it clear that the unconditional co-operation that the inspectors were promised barely a month ago has not been forthcoming, and sets out new ways in which their work has been obstructed. Its conclusions were quoted by the Prime Minister and touched on by the Foreign Secretary, but they bear repetition:
It is true that there are bound to be innocent casualties, and no one should be insensitive to the suffering that will occur; but the Iraqi people are already suffering at the hands of Saddam Hussein, and there are times when action of the kind that was taken by the Government is necessary to avoid much greater suffering at a later date.
Inevitably, there are questions that need to be answered. While we understand the inhibitions that exist on the provision of detailed information, I hope that, when he winds up the debate, the Secretary of State for Defence will tell us a little more about the relationship between the military action that is under way, and the objectives that the Government intend to achieve. Is it possible for the right hon. Gentleman to be a little more forthcoming about what the Government hope to accomplish, and how? What are the criteria by which they will measure success? What can the right hon. Gentleman tell us about the Government's long-term strategy--a question which, when it was put by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), the Foreign Secretary signally failed to answer? Does he agree that the removal of Saddam Hussein from office should be an objective of western policy? Can he tell us about the command arrangements? Will British forces defer to overall United States command? Will there be a right of access to a higher political level, as there was during the Gulf war?
"It must regrettably be recorded again that the Commission is not able to conduct substantive disarmament work mandated to it by the Security Council and, thus, to give the Council the assurances it requires with respect to Iraq's prohibited weapons programme."
If, in the face of that conclusion, nothing was done, what would the consequences be? What would the consequences be for the middle east? Would not Saddam Hussein feel able with impunity to ignore all the undertakings that he gave in 1991, and what would the consequences of that be for the safety of the millions of people who inhabit the countries that are neighbours of Iraq? What would the consequences be for the safety of the rest of the world? If one unscrupulous dictator is allowed to treat the international community with such blatant contempt, what authority will remain to deal with
others? That is the nature of the choice that the Government faced yesterday, and that is why we support the choice that they made.
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