Brendan Ryan (Labour)

That is true about any situation. There has never been a situation which could not have been worse. Therefore, to say it is not as bad as it could be is simply to say it could be worse. Of course, it could.

The fundamental facts are that the Government accepted, without reservation, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that it was a threat to its neighbours and the rest of the world. Neither of these statements was true. One of the ironies of life is that the best summary I have heard is a line from Rudyard Kipling:

If any question why we died,

Tell them because our fathers lied.

The two Governments involved lied to their peoples, parliaments and the world. They knew there was no threat and that there were no weapons of mass destruction but I suppose they will find something somewhere. Iraq was a country with a nasty government and regime but the idea that there was an imminent threat to neighbouring countries, the United States, Britain or the western world generally was a fabrication deliberately entered into by two democratically elected governments and clearly a lie. They did not have any convincing evidence of weapons of mass destruction and the post hoc changing of the analysis to suggest that it was about liberation from tyranny is a convenient smokescreen for the greatest lie perpetrated on the Irish people since Lyndon Johnson fabricated the Gulf of Ton Kin incident to justify war in Vietnam, or perhaps since Leonid Breznev imagined that the liberation of Czechoslovakia was a serious threat to the security of the Soviet Union – one can pick either example, where big powers told lies to the people to justify actions which would otherwise not have been justified.