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Meeting of the Parliament 19 March 2013

19 Mar 2013 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Iraq Invasion (10th Anniversary)

Lamont, John Con Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire Watch on SPTV

I am sure that Saddam Hussein had various sources of weaponry. That does not make it right that those actions were allowed to continue for as long as they were.

Iraq had been harbouring and giving aid to international terrorists, and it was a regime that paid bounties on the heads of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel. It was a regime that had repeatedly used weapons of mass destruction on its own people as well as those in other territories; that had in the past actively attempted to conceal its weaponry; and that had repeatedly and flagrantly flouted internationally imposed sanctions on nuclear and non-nuclear proliferation.

When it came to weapons of mass destruction, Iraq was a latent, if not a patent, threat, but we can now say with certainty that it is no longer a permanent one.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a regime that was no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt, and it was a country whose future could not be a matter of indifference to us, as it seemed to be for some members in this chamber.

Intervention was not only necessary—not only essential—but, because of Saddam Hussein’s own record and decisions, inevitable. We brought to justice one of the world’s greatest war criminals. We put him, as well as the perpetrators of the Anfal campaign, on trial, in a dock, and brought justice to the Iraqi people. Do the Scottish National Party and Alex Salmond think that that is nothing? We brought back to Iraq civil liberties, basic human rights and the entitlement to a Government that is elected by the people to serve the people. Do the SNP and Alex Salmond think that that is nothing?

Most of all, those of us who supported the intervention in Iraq, got to see what Christopher Hitchens described as

“what a people look like when it has been liberated”

and allowed to flourish. He said:

“there is no experience like that, no experience like the look on the face of a people who are no longer the property of a single party state.”

Only yesterday, I heard the words of Ali Al-Rikabi, a former soldier in the Iraqi army, who said:

“What took place in 2003 was a good thing ... Iraqis were crying for anyone to come and help them”.

We came forward. We no longer stood back and watched. We answered the cries of people such as that former Iraqi soldier. That is something that we can be proud of.

Some may not be so optimistic but, as I mentioned, what we saw in the years following the liberation of the Kurds from life at the mercy of Saddam Hussein, we are beginning to see now—slowly, but surely—in the rest of Iraq.

The First Minister has made much of the blunders, the mistakes and the catastrophes that we have seen—that we have made—in Iraq since 2003, none of which I deny, and most of which Iraqi citizens know more about than we could ever dare to imagine. However, none of them impeaches the principle and the fundamental idea that this was a necessary war, that it was an inevitable war and that, most of all, it was a just war.

I move amendment S4M-05981.2, to leave out from “; notes” to end and insert:

“, including 179 British armed forces personnel and MOD civilians; notes the human rights abuses exhaustively documented by the UN as well as other institutions that took place in Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein; notes the estimated 180,000 Kurds killed as part of the Anfal campaign, a systematic ethnic cleansing programme that took place between 1987 and 1989 under the orders of Saddam Hussein; notes the state killing of an estimated 100,000 Shia Muslims in the southern provinces during the 1991 uprising; notes the repeated violations by Saddam Hussein and his regime of numerous UN Security Council Resolutions, specifically Resolutions 678, 687 and 1441; believes that Saddam Hussein’s regime was incompatible with basic democratic or humanitarian principles, and restates Scotland’s commitment to supporting the development of a stable, prosperous and democratic future for all Iraqi people.”

14:48

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Meeting of the Parliament 19 March 2013

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