---

Terrorism (Foreign Policy Aspects)

I shall confine my remarks to the situation in Iraq, which is obviously a subject of much comment in the Foreign Affairs Committee report and central to the debate about the war against terrorism. I say immediately in that context that we are all very concerned about the four hostages held by terrorists in Iraq, particularly, of course, Mr. Norman Kember, the British citizen. I am sure that we all support the efforts of the Secretary of State to do what he can in a very difficult situation. It is always difficult for Governments in this situation to bring about a successful outcome, but we must hope for one. I voted against the war in Iraq for reasons that would take rather long to explain, so I shall not rehearse them again now. It has to be said, however, that the jury is still out on whether what happened was a good thing or a bad thing. I would not go along with Zhou Enlai, the former Chinese premier, who once said when asked whether the French revolution had been successful, ““It's too early to say.”” However, I think that it will be some years before there can be a real judgment on whether the invasion of Iraq by British and American forces and others has been a success. Having gone into Iraq, the questions are whether we should come out, when, how and what staying in is doing to the politics of the area and the war against terrorism. They were lively, immediate topics during my participation in the recent trip to the middle east by the Foreign Affairs Committee. I should perhaps explain that we split into two groups: one went to Israel and Gaza, and my little group went to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. That was economical for taxpayers: we covered more ground at less cost. It is sensible for Committees to do that. In the end, the questions whether we come out, when and how boil down to the security situation in Iraq, and that in the end boils down to the Iraqi army and police force. How strong are they? How far can they produce an orderly situation? The problems of achieving a strong Iraqi army and police force are immense. First, there is the language problem. Very few Arabic speakers have been seconded to the American and British forces there. After Pearl Harbour there was a huge effort in America to get Japanese speakers seconded into helping with the war. No similar attempt has been made, as far as I am aware, to get the 600,000 Arabic speakers in the United States involved in helping with that enormous problem. An inability to speak the language of the people whom one is dealing with leads to missing all the subtle signals that are so essential to training a foreign group in the art of counter-insurgency. The culture of the American army is against a training role of this kind. It is a shooting army, designed to kill, which it no doubt does and has done extremely effectively in many theatres. It is not a training army. Indeed, training is regarded as a career loser in the American army. Someone who gets involved in the training of that army does not seriously promote their advancement. People are also concerned about the effect on the morale of and recruitment to the army. There are problems with the national guard, too, which has been heavily relied on in the Iraqi theatre. The space of time that soldiers spend there is therefore extremely short. That, again, is inimical to a proper training role. I do not think that American forces have quite the depth of knowledge that British forces have traditionally had in this context. One thinks of the old India hands in the British Army in India, which would no doubt have the sort of people we now need. In the romantic fiction of John Buchan that I used to read as a child there was someone called Sandy Arbuthnot, the third Baron Clanroyden, well known in the Tweeddale yeomanry, but even better known in the foothills of the Pamirs, in Samarkand and Tashkent and through the Taklaman desert and the Hindu Kush. It was all second nature to those redoubtable Scots—they were mainly Scots—who set out to play the great game in the north-west frontier. We are rather in need of such people nowadays, who could get into the skin of an Arab and find out what he thinks and feels. People from Carolina and Louisiana may be good in other respects. That is a huge problem, but it is not only a training problem; there is also an equipment, logistics and support problem. I can say in favour of the American effort in Iraq that when Ambassador John Negroponte took over he switched huge resources from reconstruction to training. About $2 billion was simply switched from one column to another to help with the problem before the elections at the beginning of the year. That was wise and sensible, because those elections would not have proceeded as smoothly as they did if the effort had not been made to get 130,000 Iraqi soldiers up to speed for the purpose. Some major American soldiers, such as Generals Petraeus and Dempsey, who are career soldiers, are taking the issue seriously and trying to train Iraqi soldiers in the way that they perceive to be necessary to deal with the situation. Efforts are clearly being made, but all the reports about the atmosphere in the White House and at the centre of Government suggest no real sense of urgency about developing such solutions. Paul Wolfowitz is now elsewhere doing other things. Meghan O'Sullivan, the President's special adviser on Iraq, has not even spoken in public since she was appointed a year ago. I do not know what she is doing. Donald Rumsfeld is dealing with the wider issues of army reform and the difficult problems that that entails. He is not solely focused on Iraq any more, if he ever was. All that suggests that there is not the necessary sense of direction to grasp such a difficult nettle with the appropriate firmness. Although, according to most commentators, there is a reduced sense of urgency, the situation with training and logistics that I have described needs an intensification of effort. People need to be trained differently and to be there for longer periods, not for short tours. There is a growing gap between what is necessary on the ground and what is actually happening, and the view in Washington. That is the conclusion drawn in an article, which I recommend to all who are interested, in the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly by James Fallows, who is an expert in this area. In the final paragraph, he concludes:"““America's hopes today for an orderly exit from Iraq depend completely on the emergence of a viable Iraqi security force. There is no indication that such a force is about to emerge. As a matter of unavoidable logic, the United States must therefore choose one of two difficult alternatives: It can make the serious changes—””," which I have just been trying to describe,"““including certain commitments to remain in Iraq for many years—that would be necessary to bring an Iraqi army to maturity. Or it can face the stark fact that it has no orderly way out of Iraq, and prepare accordingly.””" I do not think that he is suggesting that the Americans should in any way embark on a kind of Vietnam exit of that sort. All the people to whom I have spoken about this—including the highest in the land and my colleagues—were a little divided about whether we should pull out. In so far as people felt that we should pull out, they preceded that with two caveats. First, there should be a diplomatic démarche to ensure that it was done after parliamentary elections and over a period of time in which there could be clear explanations about why what was happening was happening. Secondly, they emphasised that there would still be some need for coalition forces to guard the frontiers of Iraq against Iran, and perhaps in the north. Those caveats were mentioned to us by Government Ministers. None the less, there was a clear understanding that it would be in the best interests of the conflict and of the credibility of Britain and America—there is no doubt that America and Britain have a lot at stake—as well as important for the war against terrorism that that should be considered. The Government face the more difficult question of whether, if the Americans do not wish to pull out, the British should pull out anyway. That is more difficult because there are questions of honour, which were put to us plainly. We went in together, so can we reasonably come out separately? There is also the issue of logistics. Most of the American armour and equipment goes through the southern part of Iraq and Basra, which is controlled by the British, so there are delicate questions, such as: should the coalition forces pull out in those circumstances? Should Britain pull out separately from America? Can we really see the main alternative put forward by James Fallows in his article—a real reinforcement of the efforts necessary on the ground—being made by Washington in its present political stance? I do not pretend to have any answers to those difficult questions, and I am not proposing anything now, but the Government need to do some hard thinking over the next few months, which could be critical to the whole future of the effort in Iraq, whether one voted for or against it.