The Report of the Iraq Inquiry

“The United Kingdom was sympathetic to that view, but wanted to see the United

Nations operating successfully on Iraq because we regarded it as a collective

problem. The French, Russians and Chinese had all abstained on [resolution] 1284,

and were therefore not particularly on the side of just straight containment of Iraq,

because they also wanted to see progress towards the end of sanctions.

“The other members of the Security Council were mainly of that view, that they did

not see that the downsides of sanctions, as far as the humanitarian effects on the

Iraqi people were concerned, were worth the degree of containment which they

[sanctions] provided for an Iraq, the threat from which was not fully proven, in their

view, in terms either of military capability or in terms of possession of weapons of

mass destruction.

…

“I don’t think there was a single member of the Security Council who believed

that Iraq was trying honestly and honourably to meet Security Council conditions.

I don’t think there was a single member of [the] Security Council, throughout my

period there, who supported Saddam Hussein or Iraq. I don’t think there was a

single member of the Security Council who believed that Iraq was innocent, was

not plotting to develop military capability, was not defying United Nations, was not

cheating on sanctions but … [there was a] spectrum of views about how intensely

that was a problem and about how it should be dealt with.”4

Mr Geoff Hoon, FCO Minister of State responsible for the Middle East from May 1999

(and the Defence Secretary from October 1999), told the Inquiry that public leaders

in the Middle East:

“… blamed us for … starving the Iraqi people, for depriving them of medical

supplies … sanctions were failing … they were not delivering the benefit that we

anticipated politically and … worse than that, we were getting the blame for things

that were actually Saddam’s responsibility.”5

Sir William Patey, Head of the FCO’s Middle East Department from 1999 to March

2002, told the Inquiry that Saddam Hussein had been “very good” at manipulating

the sanctions regime, to create sympathy within the Arab world and to preserve

his own regime.6

Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary from 2001 to 2006, told the Inquiry that, without

weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq and “with a collapse in international will to

enforce, or even merely to sustain, a sanctions regime, ‘containing’ the Iraqi regime

became a challenge”.7

4 Public hearing, 27 November 2009, pages 4-7.

5 Public hearing, 19 January 2010, pages 6-7.

6 Public hearing, 24 November 2009, pages 18 and 160.

7 Statement, 4 May 2011, pages 1-2.

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