Meeting of the Parliament 29 January 2015
I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the first Government business debate that Nicola Sturgeon has brought forward as First Minister. As Kezia Dugdale said, we could have spent this afternoon debating other issues such as the health service, but Nicola Sturgeon has chosen to prioritise a debate on the yet-to-be-published Chilcot inquiry report, and she is of course entitled to do that.
The Chilcot inquiry was set up because it is vital that we learn the lessons of Iraq, and I agree with the other members who have said this afternoon that the inquiry should report as soon as practically possible. In 2003, I was a student at the University of Glasgow and, like many others, I did not support military action in Iraq; indeed, I marched against it. I had deep reservations about military action but, in spite of them and what has happened since, I believe that the decisions on Iraq were made in good faith and with good intention. As we know, neither the House of Commons nor the Scottish Parliament voted against military action. Although I think that they were wrong, I criticise nobody who was faced with making the toughest of decisions.
It is important to place on record our gratitude to the men and women of our armed forces who fought and died in Iraq because, irrespective of individual opinions on whether the invasion of Iraq was right or wrong, those people do not have the luxury of debating the legal or moral case of military action. For the families of the service personnel who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq, the Chilcot inquiry will have added significance.
Had we known in 2003 what we know now, the invasion of Iraq would very likely not have happened. Members are right when they say that we must learn lessons from those mistakes, which is why Gordon Brown and the Labour Government initiated the Chilcot inquiry in 2009, after combat troops withdrew from Iraq, and why we think that the report should be published as soon as practically possible.
However, I am sure that we all hope that some lessons have already been learned, and I believe that that is the case. A number of senior figures have expressed regret at the decision to take action. Alex Fergusson mentioned David Miliband, but those figures are not just in the UK. In the United States, the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that, in voting for the invasion of Iraq, she
“got it wrong. Plain and simple.”
We know that Chilcot is an important piece of work and there is a real public interest in its findings, but what must not be forgotten in these discussions is the continuing need to support the people of Iraq. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR—the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—says that there are about 3.1 million internally displaced people in Iraq, including 1 million who were displaced between 2003 and 2013 and 2.1 million who were displaced last year. Just this week, we have seen reports of thousands of Iraqis living in extreme poverty and running out of money altogether after fleeing fighting and settling in the south of the country, so there is a clear need for support from the international community and it is absolutely right that the UK Government continues to provide humanitarian aid—