I led a debate in Parliament last week to mark the 10th anniversary of the decision to go to war in Iraq.

Sadly, due to time pressures, I couldn't deliver the whole of the speech I had prepared, so I've posted the full text below.

IRAQ DEBATE

BACKBENCH BUSINESS DEBATE, 13 JUNE 2013

I beg to move,

“That this House has considered the matter of the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war”.

I’d like to thank the Backbench Business Committee for enabling me to secure this debate, which has the support of colleagues right across the House.

It gives a chance for us to reflect not only on the Iraq War itself, but on Parliament’s role in that war.  And it is a debate I believe that our constituents would expect us to hold, as we pass the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion.

All of us, I’m sure, have in mind today the 179 men and women of our Armed Forces who have lost their lives in the conflict.

And I pay tribute to them, and to their bravery, and my deep sympathy goes out to their families for their terrible loss.

Other service personnel have suffered physical and mental trauma as a result of this war, which for many, will be with them for the rest of their lives.

And we also have in mind the many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children who were killed during the war or who have died since in military operations, bombings, acts of terrorism or through sickness and disease.

Possible estimates on the number of Iraqis killed in the invasion and occupation of Iraq vary widely.

A Lancet survey between March 2003 to June 2006 pointed to over 650,000 excess deaths, while an Opinion Research Business survey put deaths as a result of the conflict at over 1m up to 2007.

The Iraq Body Count, or IBC, an independent UK/US group website, reports 112,976 documented civilian casualties, and points out that further analysis of the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs may add 12,000 civilian deaths to this number.

The IBC have always said their number is an undercount because proper records have not been kept by the Coalition forces – a fact that tells its own story.

Whatever the true number, there is no dispute that there has been a grave civilian price.

And one that continues to be paid and threatens to get worse.

For most of us, today, this 10^th anniversary of the invasion is largely history – but for the people of Iraq, it’s a state of continuing war.

Iraqis are being hit by almost daily attacks, with tensions growing between the Shia Muslim majority and the minority Sunnis, raising fears of a return to the worst levels of sectarian violence.

Just this week, we see harrowing reports of at least 70 people killed in a single day, in a wave of bombings and attacks in central and northern Iraq.

Last month was the bloodiest since June 2008, with over a thousand Iraqi civilians and security officials killed, according to the United Nations. (bbc)[1]

It is a grim understatement to say that Iraqi people do not have security.  There are deep concerns about human rights, massive corruption, unemployment, and miserable basic services such as electricity and water supplies.

But even if Iraq finds a way out of its current difficulties – as we all hope it will – there is the legacy of the last ten years of warfare and terrorism.

Part of that legacy are the deeply disturbing cases being taken to our High Court involving more than 1,000 cases of unlawful killings and acts of torture committed in Iraq by UK forces.

We must have public scrutiny of the systemic issues arising from these cases.

And what of our own country?  Do we feel more secure?  Is the terrorist threat diminished because of those ten years of bloodshed and chaos?

In fact the contrary is true.

According to the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Iraq invasion increased the terror threat in Britain, radicalising a generation of young British Muslims and substantially increasing the risk of a terrorist atrocity on UK soil.

A major unprovoked attack without UN authorisation took place with dire consequences.  These terrible and deeply troubling outcomes add real substance to the argument that this is the biggest foreign policy failure of recent times.

As an individual, I opposed the war in Iraq, because it was my view that the burden of justification required to undertake a major, unprovoked attack had not been met.

I joined the anti-war protest in February 2003 that saw between one and two million people marching in London, the biggest political demonstration in history.

In successive polls by different and reputable agencies, around two-thirds of British citizens say that the Iraq war was a mistake.

Ultimately, Parliament was responsible for the decision to go to war.  It was MPs, in this House, who questioned, debated and voted on the decision, both on 26 February and on 18 March 2003.

If this war was a mistake, what should Parliament do now?

Well, if it were a public body – a school, perhaps, or hospital or a local authority – we would expect an admission that things had gone wrong, and a pledge to learn the lessons so that it could not happen again.

That is what I believe is at the heart of today’s debate.

Not a blame game, or resignations. Not heads on platters or humble pie. Not a chorus of ‘I told you so.’

What I want to focus on in my contribution to this debate is specifically the role of Parliament.

How was it that – with some very honourable exceptions - parliamentary scrutiny failed?

How was it that the Intelligence could have been so misinterpreted and misused?

And how was it that facts clearly in the public domain were ignored or dismissed?

These are not academic questions.  Their relevance and their consequences are all too real today.

And we cannot leave them to others to answer.

The Hutton Inquiry and the Butler Inquiry had their own terms of reference.

Hutton’s remit was the death of Dr David Kelly.  Butler’s was a panel hand-picked by Tony Blair, which was insufficiently independent, and held too many hearings in private.

Shamefully we still await the results of the Chilcot Panel, fully 5 years after it was established, while battles continue over declassifying material.

I know of at least one FOI battle that is still being had with the Foreign Office, and the sticking point is not national security, but national embarrassment.

All of these processes can play a useful part in revealing some of the truth about what happened in the lead-up to the war and beyond.

But it is not the job of these men, however, eminent or well-intentioned, to stand in judgement on Parliament.

Parliament is sovereign.  And so it must remain sovereign, even when it comes to considering its own failures and the necessary reforms.

As Parliamentarians in 2013, we can ask and answer whether there was sufficient evidence available in the public domain for both Government backbenchers and Opposition MPs to both question and oppose the Government’s case for war in 2003.

We should not shy away from that task.

I was surprised and very disappointed when, back in March, the Foreign Secretary, for whom I have a great deal of respect, wrote what was intended to be a confidential letter, telling senior members of the Government that they should not be drawn on the controversial issues that drew the UK the Iraq war.

They should, he suggested, wait until Chilcot has reported.  But that might not be until after the next election.  And in any case, Chilcot doesn’t have a monopoly on this issue, and I doubt he or his team would want one.

What went wrong

So, to turn to what went wrong.

There is plenty of evidence that shows the case for war set out by the Blair administration in 2003 was deeply flawed.

Intelligence was misused. Concerns raised by experts were suppressed. The legal and political position was misrepresented.

And from this rises the belief, amongst many journalists and members of the public as well as Members of this House, that they were misled into supporting the war in Iraq.

In fact, when you read the documents and listen to the testimony, it is hardly far-fetched to call it a conspiracy.

In brief, Tony Blair decided to join the US in invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein.  He knew that the British people and their representatives were dubious about the wisdom of this, to say the least.

So he used every opportunity to twist the evidence to isolate his critics and encourage his supporters.

Britain was, indeed, spun into war.

This is the foundation of the familiar position that many former war supporters now take: “If I had known then what I know now, I would never have supported the war.”

But is this enough?  Does this really explain what happened?

I say it does not. Why? Because of those Members of Parliament who were not taken in by the spin.

The reality is that Members of Parliament could have known then what they know now.    A vast amount of the evidence available now, was in the public domain then.

And we know this because of those Honourable Members who did see through the lies and deceptions.

Who asked the right questions, who trawled through the documents, who stood up in Parliament and said that the war was based on a false prospectus.

Let me give you three examples.

First, the former Member for Birmingham Selly Oak, Lynne Jones.

She saw that Tony Blair and the Rt Hon Member for Blackburn made the misrepresentation of the French position a centrepiece of their effort to win the vote on 18 March.

As one of the 5 permanent members of the Security Council, France had the power to veto a second UN resolution.

In an interview on 10 March 2003, President Chirac indicated that as things stood, France would use its veto in the unlikely event that a second resolution authorising military action got the necessary majority of nine members of the Security Council.

I quote from the transcript of the interview:

"My position is that, regardless of the circumstances, France will vote "No" because she considers this evening that there are no grounds for waging war in order to achieve the goal we have set ourselves—to disarm Iraq."[64]

By selectively quoting the words ’regardless of the circumstances’ when describing the French position on authorisation of the use of force, proponents of the war blamed France for blocking military action against Iraq, no matter what evidence emerged of a breach of Resolution 1441.

Tony Blair even included this selective and misleading quote in the motion in support of military action that was put to the House on 18 March 2003.[2]

The inclusion of this misrepresentation in the motion was such that some MPs stated that it alone changed their mind on whether to vote for it.[3]

Giving evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry, the Rt Hon Member for Blackburn suggested that President Chirac’s use of the phrase ‘this evening’ did not describe the French position on the evening of the interview, thereby indicating this could change in the future but it was simply an introduction to what he was saying that evening.

He put this argument to the Panel by specifically stating the order of phrasing of Chirac’s words, down to where a comma is used.

However, the transcript shows that the former Foreign Secretary did not give the phrasing in order.  The phrase ‘this evening’ comes after ‘regardless of the circumstances’ whilst, the Rt Hon Member for Blackburn said it comes first, and so he changed the meaning of Chirac’s words to suit his argument.

To quote again, he said:
”…I know there has been some textual analysis of the use by President Chirac of the word “Le soir”, but I watched him say this and I took this as no more than saying, “This evening”, comma, and then he announces, “France will, whatever the circumstances”, he says, right?”[4]

That was not right.

In fact, the transcript shows that Chirac explicitly ruled in the possibility that military action might be needed, stating in the same interview that if the weapons inspectors reported, after more time, that they were not able to do their job then war would be inevitable.

To quote directly:

“But in that case, of course, regrettably, the war would become inevitable. It isn't today.”

The French position was then, that progress was being made with weapons inspections and given this, France was opposed to replacing the existing inspections process with an ultimatum that would lead to war in a few days.

The phrase "regardless of the circumstances" was not a helpful one and it was unfortunate that President Chirac used these words as they were easily taken out of context.

However, this does not detract from the responsibility of those, including Tony Blair and the Rt Hon Member for Blackburn, who misinterpreted and continue to misinterpret the 10 March interview given by President Chirac in order to blame France for the failure to obtain a ‘second’ UN resolution.

The reason it wasn’t possible to get UN authorisation for the use of force was because there was no evidence showing Iraq to be an active and growing threat, not because of French ‘intransigence’ as stated by UK ministers.

The Hansard shows that when Lynne Jones, tried to raise the misrepresentation of the Chirac interview in the House, she was ridiculed.

But the fact that she did raise it shows that there were Hon Members who bothered to get the transcript of what was actually said before the vote and it was not necessary to accept the interpretation given by the Government at face value.

This was not a detail.

The words of President Chirac were placed at the heart of the motion that Parliament debated and voted on.

Let me turn to the Hon Member for Basildon and Billericay (John Baron MP).  He resigned from the Front Bench to vote against the war and against his Conservative Party’s line.No doubt, he will tell the House in his own words, but it is clear from his questions that he did not believe Saddam Hussein possessed the Weapons of Mass Destruction that were at the heart of the case against him.

And he, like other Hon Members who were not just accepting what they were told, he supported the desire of Hans Blix and his team to have more time to verify this fact.

Finally, there is the former member for Livingstone, Robin Cook.

For me, reading his resignation speech brings up the hairs on the back of my neck. It is all there.

The reasons why war was unnecessary and unjustified. The critique of the government’s position. The exposure of the disinformation and deceit.

Delivered with eloquence and with the authority and credibility of a former Foreign Secretary and a current member of the 2003 Cabinet.

Yet his warnings were only heeded by 23% of MPs who voted to oppose war.

How could this have happened?

There are many potential explanations. But most come down to the idea that Members trusted that there was a sub-plot to the invasion that the Government could not be open about.

That the Government knew much more about the risk posed to the UK by Saddam than they were able to say.

That removing Saddam would unlock progress in resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

That the conditions were ripe for establishing Iraq as a democratic, pro-Western state.

In some cases, members were, I believe, taken to one side and given off the record briefing.

But in a way, the answer is more simple. Most members put loyalty to their leaders and their party above their own judgement.

They swallowed their private doubts, accepted what they were being told, and voted accordingly.

This misplaced trust crossed party lines.

It is deeply, deeply regrettable that the tradition of loyalty, meant that Hon Members like Robin Cook, were not heard.

It is also regrettable that the Tory Leadership were such unquestioning supporters of war.

Perhaps there was a feeling that, on an issue as serious as war, that level of deceit was simply inconceivable.

Yet now we know it was not.

So to return to the ‘If I had known now’ defence, and looking to the future, we can perhaps conclude this:

No Member of this House should ever take on trust the case for war.

They must listen to all sides with open minds, even to the refusniks and the usual suspects, in case this time they may be onto something.

They must look at the sources themselves. They must ask themselves and their leaders the tough questions: is there an alternative? what if it goes wrong?

Mr. Speaker, there is plenty more evidence of the fact that there was material in the public domain that should have enabled more Hon Members to make a more informed decision.

Here are just a few:

First, no doubt many will recall the UK Government allegation that Saddam Hussein had sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Days before the Iraq invasion and our Parliamentary vote, on 7 March 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) voiced serious doubt on the authenticity of the documents to the UN - judging them counterfeit, based on forgeries.

Indeed, by mid 2003, President Bush had to formally retract 16 words from his January 2003 State of the Union Address that repeated the UK uranium allegation.

The UK Government retracted nothing, not before the vote or after it.

Indeed, incredibly, our Government still stands by this position, despite the fact that the IAEA stated it has not received any intelligence to support the claim that was not based on forged documentation, and we know the UK discussed its ‘evidence’ with the IAEA.[5]

Yet there were Hon Members who saw this as deeply disturbing evidence that intelligence was being fixed around policy, to falsely suggest Iraq posed a nuclear threat.

Those who did ask difficult questions were right to be deeply sceptical of any nuclear claims, given that, in 1998, when the US ordered UN weapons inspectors to leave Iraq, it was widely accepted the Iraq's nuclear capacity had been wholly dismantled.

The IAEA, charged with monitoring Iraq's nuclear facilities after the Gulf War, reported to the Security Council from 8 October 1997 that Iraq had compiled a "full, final and complete" account of its previous nuclear projects, and there was no indication of any prohibited activity.

The IAEA's fact sheet from 25 April 2002, entitled "Iraq's Nuclear Weapons Programme", recorded that "There were no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of amounts of weapons-usable nuclear material of any practical significance."

This information was widely circulated to MPs before the vote.  For example, every Labour MP in the House was sent a copy of a document produced by Alan Simpson MP, the then Member for Nottingham South, and the respected Cambridge academic, Dr Glen Rangwala.

This document made it very clear that it was highly unlikely that Iraq had anything more than a residual WMD capability, with most weapons almost certainly destroyed or degraded.

There were others too, like Adam Price, the then Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr and Llew Smith, the then Member for Blanau Gwent, also raised repeated and systematic questions.

A second example of blatant evidence fixing was Blair’s statement in his speech to the House on the resolution to go to war, that after Saddam Hussein’s son in law, Hussein Kamal, defected to the West in the mid 1990’s, he disclosed that Iraq had an extensive WMD programme.

In fact, the transcript of the interview with UNSCOM/IAEA records Hussein Kamal’s statements that Iraq’s WMD programme had been destroyed and that nothing remained.

The details of the interview were public knowledge in February 2003 well before the vote for war.

And third, the infamous Dodgy Dossier, more formally known as: Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation.

This document was put out by the Government in February 2003 as part of the increasingly desperate attempt to secure support UK parliamentary and public support for war.

Channel 4 News reported the revelation of the dodgy dossier which added to the palpable sense of unease that this wasn’t policy driven by evidence, but ‘evidence’ driven by policy.

And badly plagiarised at that.  Whole sections of a paper by a graduate student, including typos were repeated.

There were many other examples raised by Hon Members in this House; and Hans Blix, the head of the UN weapons inspections team made very clear the real progress he had been making, his requests for more time and his doubts about the evidence on WMD.

After the war, slowly but surely, documents leaked out or were published which confirmed what was already apparent before the war.

Perhaps the most notorious was the Downing St Memo.

In the summer of 2002, it recorded ‘C’, the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Sir Richard Dearlove, expressing the view that:

“George Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.  But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

The memo also recorded the then Foreign Secretary, the Rt. Hon. Member for Blackburn, as drawing up a plan to get evidence to support policy, stating the case for war was ‘thin’, and so the UK needed to ‘work up a plan’ to ‘help with the legal justification for the use of force’.

Indeed, Tony Blair never satisfactorily answered the ‘why invade now?’ question and his assertions that Iraq was an‘active and growing threat’ were not credible in 2003 and should not have been accepted as so.

Regime change v WMD

The case that Tony Blair put to doubting colleagues was that regime change was not the purpose of military action in Iraq, but rather, disarming Saddam Hussein, whom he personally considered to be both a current and long-term threat because of WMD.

Regime change by outside military force, and the disarmament of Iraq’s WMD capability via the UN were 2 distinct and separate policy objectives, both politically and legally.

Tony Blair clearly told the House that regime change was not the purpose of military action in Iraq.

The question is, was he misleading the House?

The Chilcot Inquiry questioned Tony Blair about whether he signed the UK up to military action during his private meeting with George Bush at his Crawford ranch in April 2002.

He responded that the essence of his assurance to George Bush was only that “we are going to be with you in confronting and dealing with this threat” and that his private position was no different from his public position.[6]

He cites the evidence of his Prime Ministerial foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, to back up the assertion that he had not committed the UK to a policy of regime change. In his evidence to Chilcot, David Manning appeared to confirm this:

“Our view, the Prime Minister’s view, the British Government’s view throughout this episode was that the aim was disarmament.It was not regime change.”[7]

However, a leaked memo from Sir David Manning to the Prime Minister dated 14 March 2002, reporting on discussions in Washington with US Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, clearly records that Tony Blair had committed the UK to a policy of regime change and that Sir David Manning was fully aware of this and the ramifications for managing this position in public:

“I said [to Condoleeza Rice] that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States.”[8]

After writing this memo, Sir David Manning remained the Prime Minister’s Foreign Policy adviser and was subsequently promoted to be British Ambassador to Washington.

It is therefore fair to presume that David Manning accurately transmitted Tony Blair’s view to the US administration.[9]

The Chilcot Inquiry was criticised in the press for not raising the 14 March 2002 memo from Sir David Manning to the Prime Minister with Sir David[10]

There is a discrepancy between this memo and the evidence given by Tony Blair and Sir David that the British Government's objective was not regime change.

Evidence from the UK’s Ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, is also that Tony Blair had committed to regime change by March 2002[11] and he makes reference to a memo he sent to Sir David Manning on 18 March 2002 in which he stated:

“I opened by sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice.We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option.It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe.”[12]

The memos referred to above are the closest to any high level record of UK policy on Iraq in early to mid 2002.

They lend considerable weight to the conclusion that Tony Blair did commit to a policy regime change, but knowing this would be difficult to ‘sell’, went about trying to secure international and domestic support for military action on the basis of the different stated objective of compliance with UN resolutions on disarmament.

Tony Blair’s assertion that he did not sign up for regime change in March/April 2002 has little credibility, and neither has his later argument that the policies of regime change and disarmament with respect to Iraq in 2002/2003 were ‘a different way of expressing the same proposition’.

Mr Speaker, I hope I’ve been able to drive home today that the MPs who scrutinised thoroughly did see that the case was ‘thin’ before the momentous vote for war on 20 March 2003.

I said at the start of this speech that the justification for the debate today was that Parliament must accept that it made a mistake in 2003, and it must set out how it will prevent such a mistake from happening again.

I believe that this comes down to the acceptance of one principle: that there must be a limit to party loyalty, and even of loyalty to the leader of a party.

Loyalty is in some ways an admirable quality. There are times when it is right to bite your tongue, right to go along with the majority, right to set aside your own opinions and accept the judgement and experience of others.

But there are also limits. And committing our country to war, asking our young men and women to fight, accepting that men, women and children will die in our name – that must be beyond the sway of party loyalty.

I would like to see the end of the Royal Prerogative on War and the establishment of a constitutional convention that votes on war are not subject to party whipping.

I know that some people might scoff at this suggestion.  But it is a serious one and I urge Hon Members to consider it carefully.

Of course, informal whipping would have taken place anyway.  But it would have been different.  Taking away the formal obligation to vote according to the party line would have pushed more Hon Members to look at the evidence for themselves and to vote according to it.

It would have given their constituents more power and put more responsibility on the shoulders of each Member.

Scrutiny would not have been dulled by loyalty in the same way.

Like capital punishment, like abortion, committing troops to war is a matter of conscience.

And MPs should be at least formally freed from the heavy hand of the whips.

And this principle is relevant now.  As we grapple with the terrible situation that is unfolding in Syria, Members should demand not just a vote on whether we arm the rebels, but a genuinely free vote.

If Iraq teaches us one thing, it’s that if MPs are to vote on grave matters of conflict, for that vote to be meaningful, it must be the view of their own conscience, not their party’s line.

Illegality and consequences relating to today’s abuse cases

This is not just an academic debate. It is still live. The illegality of the Iraq War matters. In and of itself has had real and dreadful consequences.

Statements Kofi Annan made before the vote for war, made it plain that he believed the absence of authorisation from the UN would make a US/UK attack on Iraq illegal.

That the Iraq war was illegal under international law is a view widely held view today.  This fact is still so live as very sadly, as with the decision to go to war, we now see that the rule of law was being flouted by some of our troops on the ground.

A recent High Court judgement of over 1000 cases makes it clear that there has been systemic abuse of Iraqi citizens by UK forces in Iraq.

And the word systemic here is important.  I want to make it absolutely clear that I have very real respect for the very brave individuals who put their lives on the line as British soldiers.

The soldiers involved in this abuse have been badly let down.

The training of interrogators used in Iraq involved blatant illegality: forced nakedness, screaming foul abuse into detainees' faces, sensory deprivation and other techniques designed to abuse and degrade without leaving physical marks.

How was this possible?  I believe it stems from the fact that the war was conducted under the UN radar and was the brainchild of people in the US administration who did not care about human rights.

As a result, there was no proper planning for occupation and this appalling abuse was allowed to proliferate.

Sir Nicholas Mercer, the army's former chief legal adviser in Iraq has accused the Ministry of Defence of moral ambivalence and a cultural resistance to human rights that allowed British troops to abuse detainees and beat the Basra hotel worker Baha Mousa to death.

It was the Inquiry into his death that uncovered the systemic level of abuse.

Mercer tells us that his advice on how British soldiers should treat prisoners was repeatedly ignored.

Six years too late, he was vindicated in 2009 by the Supreme Court which upheld the advice Mercer had given at the start: that British troops occupying a foreign country were bound by the Human Rights Act.

But this official judgement didn’t come in time to prevent the abuse of hundreds of Iraqi detainees, the deaths of others in the custody of British troops, and millions of pounds (rightly) spent on compensation to Iraqi families.

In an interview with the Guardian, Mercer painted a devastating picture of the MoD.  Referring to the "sheer arrogance" of senior officials and lawyers, he felt as though he was controlled by "a long screwdriver at the top" [13]

The failure to plan meant that soldiers were not properly directed or appraised of their legal responsibilities.  This lead to terrible acts that have occupied the attention of our courts for the last decade.

Public Interest Lawyers have courageously led this fight for justice and reform.

Asks on detainee abuse

Their work shows that we must introduce a new fitness-for-service test for all would-be soldiers (as with British police, we must ensure that soldiers must be able to pass a straightforward test on the relevant law).

And we must rewrite the rules of engagement for various conflict situations so that the golden thread of legal compliance shapes all acts of force.

With that, we must bin the UK's interrogation policy, introduce a lawful one and train those responsible to use it correctly.

I know the lawyers who have pursued these cases have many more suggested reforms to put to the military and the MoD.  I urge Ministers to look at these and to urgently implement reform so we can lead the world in a modern and lawful approach to conflicts abroad.

Conclusion

As individual constituency MPs, many of us have constituents who have died in Iraq or have lost relatives there. It is no answer to them to say that, on a matter as serious as this, that we did not challenge the case, and satisfy ourselves that war was justified and unavoidable.

In future, when we are faced with a decision about whether to go to war, we simply cannot have a situation where the Government of the day tell the story and we take what they say on trust. MPs have to do the work themselves.

In any future vote, we and our successors must establish, to our own satisfaction, on evidence that we have heard and seen ourselves, that the case for war has been made.

Three lines on a whip sheet are not enough.

ENDS

Notes

 [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22850770 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22838865