Iraq questionnaire
To try to elicit some information on this topic, I emailed the following questions to the candidates (except Moritz of UKIP, who doesn't appear to have an email address).
| 1. With hindsight, do you think that the decision to participate in the invasion of Iraq was a good one? |
| a) Yes - regime change in itself justifies the expense and loss of life. |
| b) No - with no WMDs and no UN sanction it was in breach of international law. |
| c) No - it has not achieved its practical aims of improving world security by reducing WMD and terrorist threat. |
| 2. Tony Blair said in April 2002 that "there is no doubt at all that the development of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein poses a severe threat not just to the region, but to the wider world." Butler, however, found that the available intelligence did not justify this certainty. Do you think: |
| a) Blair was correct - Iraq did have WMDs that have never been found, he could be confident of this because he was in possession of incontrovertible evidence whose existence has been kept secret from all the enquiries. |
| b) Blair was incorrect - he misled the country because he had not read or did not understand the intelligence. |
| c) Blair was incorrect - he deliberately misled the country by exaggerating and distorting the intelligence. |
| 3. Jack Straw said on 17 March 2003 that "there is no question about the legality of the action that we propose to take." What is your position: |
| a) There is no question about the legality of the war. The arguments that it was illegal have no plausibility. |
| b) The legality of the war is dubious; it is difficult to predict whether a court would find that the perceived threat, and/or the minor non-cooperation with UN inspections, justified it or not. |
| c) With no WMDs and no concrete evidence of their existence at the time, the decision to go to war was clearly against international law. |
| 4. Do you think it would be in the public interest for the Attorney General's full advice on the legality of the Iraq war to be released? (Given the precedent that the Attorney General's advice has been released in a number of situations as recently as 2003) |
| a) Yes |
| b) No |
| 5. Should Tony Blair: |
| a) Be applauded for his bold leadership on Iraq. |
| b) Resign because although he believed he was acting for the best, he has contributed to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people. |
| c) Be impeached/forced to resign because he used deceit to lead the country to war. |
Responses
| Paddy Tipping (Labour) |
|
Dear Aidan Thank you for your email. I had very real reservations about the Government's approach to Iraq. These have been borne out with the passage of time. I did not vote in favour of military action and the deployment of British troops to Iraq arguing for greater involvement from the UN. The important thing now is to rebuild Iraq and its democratic structure and withdraw troops at the earliest possible date. Paddy Tipping
CommentsWhilst Paddy didn't participate in the vote for war on 18 March 2003, his voting record repays examination. His reservations were certainly not expressed when on 26 February 2003 he voted against a motion which stated that the case for war had not been made. In addition on 10 September 2003 he voted against a motion that the UN should assume responsibility for the occupation. No doubt he would argue that at the time this would not have been practical, as the US wouldn't have allowed this and the UN wasn't showing much enthusiasm either. Nonetheless the motion if passed, would have given the government a clear responsibility to work towards this end. The rebuilding of Iraq so far seems to have been a miserable failure. For example a recent report revealed that the number of children under 5 suffering from malnutrition had doubled since the occupation. Given that the last thing that most parents would do is to let their children starve, it is an indication of how desperate things have got. Perhaps if Blair feels unable to apologise for removing Saddam, he could apologise instead for this. Paddy's reference to troop withdrawal is somewhat ambiguous. By the 'earliest possible date' does he mean tomorrow, the point at which the government decide they've had enough (a year or two?) or when peace is restored (possibly never). |
| Bruce Laughton (Conservative) |
| No response |
| Peter Harris (Lib Dem) |
| No response |