Iraq Inquiry: Public hearings with John Prescott

These are the most significant quotes from the session of the Iraq Inquiry with former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott .

You can read the full transcript of the session here

And you can watch the video here

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On Tony Blair and his critics

Reading the evidence and listening to all the arguments, I know it is quite fashionable to be critical of Tony Blair inside and outside this Inquiry. We have seen a few people gloss over their part of the history and what happened, but let me say that no-one in Government took this decision to go to war lightly. We thought considerably about it. I personally and privately witnessed the Prime Minister agonise over each and every death over Iraq, civilian and military, British and Iraqi. I learned that true leadership is not about having the benefit of hindsight. It is about having a gift of vision, courage and compassion, and I believe that Tony Blair had all those three. If you want to see if his humanitarian interventionism, which has been a discussion here, succeeded, then go to Kosovo and go to Sierra Leone. Hopefully we will soon be able to say the same for Afghanistan and Iraq and finally welcome our brave troops back home, confident of a job well done. I think that’s my conclusion, having worked with Tony Blair, and witnessed it at close hand, and privileged to do so. That’s the point I want to make as a lesson that people should take into account when they are looking at this Iraq Inquiry.

On the Prime Minister’s humanitarian interventionism approach

The Prime Minister passionately believed in the humanitarian interventions and we used to discuss that from time to time, which he set out in his speech in Chicago in 1999 which you have discussed in your evidence as The Doctrine of International Community. This was consistent in his approach to Kosovo in 1999, Sierra Leone in 2000 and Afghanistan in 2001, policies that were all endorsed by the Cabinet and Parliament. This belief in humanitarian interventionism stemmed from his desire to prevent the repeat of the genocide that he saw in Rwanda in 1994, when the UN failed to act and almost 1 million people were murdered.

On WMDs

LYNE: Chemical and biological weapons, but didn’t the JIC assessment suggest that the nuclear programme was effectively frozen, although he was trying to make some efforts to procure materials? Wasn’t that the message from them?

LORD PRESCOTT: It was, yes, but I think the suggestion also was: this was a serious situation. I mean, since then, with hindsight, we do see that they are perhaps thinking they had not gone as far as they had done that, that the early stages of dealing with the weapons of mass destruction had been effectively dealt with, but at that stage we were saying it is still an active part of the use of them and here was a guy who had used them. This was not something who was just developing something, he had actually used them against his own people, particularly in regard to chemical weapons.

On the Prime Minister’s commitment to President Bush at Crawford 2002

1. PRASHAR: That’s what they wanted, but what was the level of his commitment? Were you aware of what kind of commitment he had given?

LORD PRESCOTT: I don’t think he was — I think the evidence you have received here was that he was not giving any commitment and he certainly never told me that he had, that he was clearly being pressed on the matter. His, obviously, policy was to go for the UN.

2. Even if he did make that decision, he did come back to the Cabinet and he did go to Parliament. Those decisions then confirmed that policy. So even if he had done that, it wasn’t him that made the final decision, as we always said to the Americans, it had to be a political one, and it had to be Parliament. That’s what happened.

On the Middle East peace process

PRASHAR: During any conversations with Prime Minister Blair did you actually impress on him the importance of the Middle East process?

LORD PRESCOTT: I did, but I didn’t need to. He actually believed that and still believes it now and spends an awful lot of time trying to get that road map still on the road. So he was — he felt very much about this business about — in this international bipolar kind of thing that the whole issue about Muslims and the conflict that was beginning to occur, which is at the heart of an awful lot of this, that we had to settle a grave injustice that had been perpetuated in Palestine, vis-a-vis Israel.

PRASHAR: Why do you think he failed to kind of influence President Bush?

LORD PRESCOTT: I don’t think it is a case of us failing. Well, he failed, yes, but the Americans failed, and anybody who knows the American position and the personalities and pressures that come in the American political system, the Israeli influence is phenomenal, and you don’t change a great deal of it, and every time when the good hopes of finding an agreement have failed on the political facts and elections in my view.

On the Anglo-American relationship

I think Tony in our early discussions when we came into Government always was impressed with the fact that every British Prime Minister has to decide what kind of relationship he wants with American or she wants with America, and it has often been with their alternative political friends, if you like. Macmillan was with Kennedy. So to that extent you have to make up your mind about that. He was very strong about that. If you believe in the internationalism, he does believe that America had the assets to make that policy work, that Britain wasn’t big enough. We did it in Sierra Leone, but in Kosovo, without the kind of military invention we got with the aeroplane support from Clinton, you couldn’t have achieved what he called the pursuit of this humanitarianism. So you need America to achieve it and that’s what he felt strongly about.

On the UN route

1. LYNE: — whether or not to go to the UN. Then the President goes to New York, announces that he wants UN resolution, Security Council resolutions, and by November you get, after a very long detailed negotiation that I don’t think we need to discuss now, resolution 1441. How critical was it to obtain UN support?

LORD PRESCOTT: I think from our point of view absolutely critical. I am not sure the Americans felt the same way about that. They had already got the Clinton one about Iraq and the regime change effectively on their own books. With us it was absolutely critical, because quite frankly you could not have got the political support here in the UK without at least making a very serious effort to get and work through the UN and Tony Blair absolutely believed in his concept of internationalism that the UN needs to be at the centre of it.

2. The important part for any Cabinet member then is: if you haven’t got the UN, is it legal? Then you go back to the UN resolutions and the discussions you have had in this committee, whether it was justified to say there was a breach and therefore the authority in those earlier resolutions gave you an authority to intervene. Now that was the judgment Peter Goldsmith had to come to, whether it was legal. We in the Cabinet then asked, “Is it legal?” We were told yes. That means we crossed the line, but Parliament had to agree it. Parliament did agree. Probably the first time a Parliament had had a vote on a military intervention of this scale and size. So the democratic accountability was satisfied even if the President — the Prime Minister had come in his mind to, “I might have to be into a regime change, but I am going to have to do it without the UN”. Though it is not totally without the UN the legal justification was based on UN resolutions.

3. I think to that extent the point I was making before, perhaps risking my arm in it, is to say that if you had gone for a vote in the UN and got defeated that would have been a very clear and different situation. But of course as in Kosovo they didn’t go to the UN. As in Sierra Leone we didn’t go in. A lot more people are alive today, thank goodness, because we made that decision.

On the role of parliament

1. I think the reality of a failure to secure, whether it was due to the French or not, I think poor old French got blamed for an awful lot of it, you can make your judgment what Chirac meant by his comments, but at the end of the day the UN was at the end of the road. Then you have the judgment: does regime change come into your mind? I am sure that’s exactly what Tony Blair had to face. But don’t forget, even if that was in the air, Parliament endorsed it.

2. FREEDMAN: You just mentioned then the American view that this was an odd thing to be doing. How were you aware of that? Was this something that the Prime Minister said to you, that, “The Americans are wondering why we are doing it”? Did you hear it that way?

LORD PRESCOTT: Yes, in the discussions you would hear, because Tony used to make clear that, “At the end of the day whatever happens here, it must be endorsed by Parliament”. It was his very firm view. I think the American presidential system, they thought this was rather quaint, because the President has the powers to make these decisions. He had to point out, “In a Parliamentary system that is not the case. They can, in fact, remove us. They don’t have to wait for November, whenever, the election of the president. That can happen in Parliament”. Prime Ministers have to be constantly aware of that.

3. I think in all the issues of contention, whether it was in the Select Committee, whether it was the Prime Minister, which is his initiative, appeared before all the chairs of Select Committees to be answerable, I think probably we could claim there has been more democratic accountability and checking on what we are doing than any other military situation we may have been involved in. So to that extent I don’t know that you can improve it any more, but I am still left with the major question in my mind about this business about if you are on a UN tack and you have military preparing where the logistic timetable is a lot longer than the tail end of a UN one, could you have given that three-option paper at the stage when it was being developed to a Select Committee? Would the argument have been, “Well, it is intelligent, of course, to plan like this in case it doesn’t happen”? I suspect, given our press — I am not the greatest admirer of them — given our press, they would have actually said, “This is the evidence we are going to war”, and there were people in the Cabinet like Clare who were saying basically this is what it was. Even Robin, when he resigned, made it clear, “Because I didn’t get the second resolution, I feel I have to resign”. He didn’t talk about the changing containment and regime policy in that speech, but he did talk about that. So I don’t know that you can do a great deal more than was actually done, and I am quite proud that we did try to give as much information to them, given a press that — you know, it is a quite vigorous press in our situation. It also has its own ways of looking at and interpretation of events. So politicians have to work within that framework.

On the support of his colleagues and himself for the invasion

1. FREEDMAN: So in your book you say, looking back at the Iraq invasion, you mention its tragic effects: “I would still do the same again.” That remains your position?

LORD PRESCOTT: I think so.

2. FREEDMAN: Did you face any — he indicated to us this was a difficult time for him. None of your colleagues were happy. You weren’t happy. Did you ever think, yourself, that when it came to the crunch you might not be able to go along with it?

LORD PRESCOTT: No, I would support the Prime Minister if he had the legal judgment and I think that’s exactly what I would do, and did so, in fact, calling constantly in Cabinet to maintain our unity in Cabinet, which I think is one of my responsibilities. If I didn’t think it was right then I could resign like Robin Cook did or anyone else, but there would be political fall-out from that. I don’t think there is any doubt. All of us were faced: do you want to then, if you held the view Jack Straw said he held, make a decision? Stay in or get out.

3. I note that Jack Straw in his evidence did actually say there were times he couldn’t give the full information because he thought it would leak. I think that’s unfortunate but it is the reality of political life, and does affect the general atmosphere of debate about Iraq.

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