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Terrorism (Foreign Policy Aspects)

: I am delighted that the hon. Lady made that intervention. It neatly brings me to the central point that I was about to make. That is that victories in such environments depend wholly on having the majority of the indigenous population—however much they have been terrorised, bullied and attacked by extremist minorities—on one's side. We have a long way to go in that respect. I venture to suggest that the Government have not even begun seriously to address the issue. By that I mean that our military opponents are not physically strong. They are not exactly endowed with powerful weapons systems although, of course, we have to fear that they might acquire some. However, they are masters of propaganda, and we are not doing what we should be doing. We should be learning the lessons of the propagandists—I use the term non-perjoratively—of world war two. We should quite openly be going on the offensive with a propaganda operation to make it absolutely clear what the true situation is and what values we are fighting for. The other day, there was a shock-horror story in the press. The Americans had been found to be paying a newspaper in Iraq to publish some good news stories. All I can say is that I would be surprised and annoyed if they were not doing so, and I hope that they do more of it. We must not try to suppress bad news, because that will sink in the same way in which the attempt to suppress the loss of the Audacious did. We must actively promote the good news about what our forces are doing time after time. We must go on the offensive and detail name by name, incident by incident and atrocity by atrocity what our opponents are doing. We must highlight these facts, instead of glossing over the fact that 30 people have been killed in a suicide bombing in a restaurant or a market. We must publicise again and again the nature of the victims, who overwhelmingly will have been ordinary Iraqis. There is one more thing we must do. We must ask whether it is our fault that extremists in Iraq are killing other Iraqis because of the coalition's invasion and are trying to make us lose our nerve and pull out, or whether it is the fault of the extremists who do not mind killing the people whom we went in with a view to helping to build a peaceful and democratic state. One has only to pose the question to arrive at the correct answer. Much has been said about the business of us not besmirching our own record by behaving unacceptably. That is certainly true, but it is also true, as I say time and again in these debates, that free societies cannot survive if they insist on tolerating the intolerant. There is something very wrong with our set-up when it takes us 10 years to extradite from the UK across the channel to France someone who is strongly suspected of being a terrorist. The French Government and the French people were justifiably appalled at the way in which that extradition, which has at last happened, was spun out for so long and with so little justification. There is also something wrong with a system such as ours in which we would not be able to extradite Osama bin Laden or his deputy to the United States of America, if, by some chance, they fell into our hands, unless we were assured that they would not face the death penalty there. This is where the asymmetry of this sort of conflict comes in, because there are groups that do not observe the laws of war and put themselves outside all conventions, yet are the first to claim the protection of the legal systems of the countries that they seek to destroy when it looks as if they are being cornered. Something was said about 7 July earlier in the debate. For me, the lasting image will be of the two suspects—I put it no higher than that—who were arrested on the balcony. Fearing for his life, the first words of one of them were, ““I have my rights.”” Okay, he has his rights, but must we be overly obsessed by the rights of people who want to destroy the very basis of a society that gives rights to anyone at all? We must set up a systematic operation actively to promote the positive case for what the coalition forces and the security services are doing. In promoting that case, we must not paint rosy pictures suggesting that victory is just around the corner; we must tell the British people the truth. If we do that, they will not let us down.