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Debate on the Address

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to welcome and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Leach of Fairford. I do not have to agree with every word of his speech to recognise none the less that it was a speech of great power. It showed the extraordinary experience that he brings to this House as a partner and director of Rothschild’s, managing director of the Trade Development Bank, chairman of the Open Europe foundation and think tank and author of a book on Europe which, I am told, has run to four reprints, which is remarkable by any standards for a book on that subject. The wealth of experience that he brings here was shown in his speech and it will be very welcome in the House in future. If we had a longer debate, I would alert the House to the fact that progress is checked in the Balkans and that the delay of the decision on Kosovo was a mistake that will not save us from the irredentism that the Serbs in Belgrade now seem determined to follow. The forthcoming elections there will, I regret, show a shift to the right. The country with which I was involved, Bosnia-Herzegovina, seems to be checked in its progress. Those matters will have to wait for another time. I want to mention only one other subject today: Iraq. It is clear that there are now no easy routes out of the disaster which the coalition has brought on itself in that country. I suspect that the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s army may well go down as a classic example of how to fight this kind of war, but it is absolutely clear that how we built the peace afterwards will go down as a classic example of how not to conduct these operations. Let us be plain and blunt about this. We have failed in Iraq. That is not to say that nothing positive can now emerge or that ignominious retreat is the only outcome. It is merely stating the obvious to say that the coalition cannot now achieve the ambitious aims that it set for itself four years ago. Iraq is about to be a particularly painful example of the hubris that attends over-ambitious aims in peacemaking and reconstruction. What should we do now? The question now reverberating on everyone’s lips is not whether we will withdraw but when, how and in what circumstances we will withdraw. Here we have a problem. The coalition no longer controls events in Iraq; it is controlled by them. That applies to the circumstances of our withdrawal, too. We are now in that most dangerous of territories where policy no longer defines outcomes but only gives us the best chance of achieving hopes. In the bonfire of hopes and ambitions that has been the story of Iraq for the past four years, only one ambition remains important and remotely achievable—to do whatever we can to maintain a unitary Iraq and to avoid its dismemberment into chaos. There can be no other aim for our policy now but this. Only if we can achieve that can we have any hope of an orderly withdrawal and any prospect of leaving behind a relatively stable peace. That means a policy with three ingredients, and cutting and running is not one of them. First, we must continue to strengthen the army and the security forces in Iraq. Frankly, let us be blunt: the Iraqi police are a disaster and likely to remain so. The only force in Iraq with the potential to act as the last bulwark against civil war and anarchy is now the army; at least, we must hope that it is. Secondly, we need to be more proactive in seeking a political solution to the future shape of a unitary Iraq. Everyone knows that that must mean a federal Iraq, but no one can agree what this should look like. The international community’s current policy is to have no part in this debate except to stand aside and leave it to the locals. I suspect this is a luxury that we can no longer afford as, day by bloody day, Iraq is reshaped, not by rational dialogue but by murder, violence and ethnic cleansing. We may not now be able to stop Iraq breaking up, but we should not stand idly by while it happens. The best, and arguably the only, way to prevent this is for the international community to take a proactive role in shaping Iraq’s new federal structure before it is too late. This is a job not for the coalition but for the wider international community, including, crucially, Iraq’s neighbours. Iraq’s neighbours are the third element in any plan to avoid a deeper catastrophe. Perhaps it is not quite yet too late. Most of Iraq’s neighbours, except perhaps only Iran, do not really want there to be chaos or a power vacuum on their borders. The only plan for a federal unitary Iraq that could succeed would therefore be one underpinned by an international community agreement and to which the neighbours are committed, such as the Dayton agreement for Bosnia and the recent agreement on Afghanistan. Is it possible? Undoubtedly it will be difficult, but this offers what is now perhaps the only solution to avoiding a catastrophe of collapse in Iraq itself. The United States cannot any longer broker such a regional solution because it has lost all leverage in the tragedy of its failed policies in Iraq, but the EU could and should. There is already a group called the neighbours forum which consists of Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It meets regularly at foreign minister and interior minister level, and it has recently invited the European Union and the United Nations to join it as observers. The EU should urgently use this forum to work towards a wider regional settlement which, as has been said, must include the central question of Palestine and could incorporate an agreement guaranteed by the international community, underpinned by its neighbours, on the future shape of Iraq. There is, I suspect, now no other context within which a reasonable end to the Iraq tragedy might be achieved.