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Debate on the Address

My Lords, I share the anger of my noble friends Lord King and Lord Hurd over the situation confronting us in the Middle East. It is no use crying over spilt milk, but for the record I remind noble Lords that, before the conflict began, some of us opposed it. Pursuing a policy of invading Iraq has turned out to be a total folly. Shortly after the invasion began, the Egyptian president warned that the action was becominga recruiting operation for al-Qaeda, Islamic fundamentalism and suicide bombers. How right he was. Three years later, that recruitment continues to gather pace, as the United States as well as Britain become more and more detested by more and more people in the Middle East. We have to ask ourselves whether it is too late to retrieve anything from the disaster that faces us in Iraq as the tide of terror continues to grow. There are two points from the past that I hope the Government have taken on board. First, it is no good the United States and the United Kingdom attempting to take on Islamic terrorism, or any other terrorism, on a unilateral basis. As I have said to your Lordships before, I remain convinced that if one is going to take terrorism on, one needs to do so in the name of the world community in a wholehearted, multilateral way. In that context, I was pleased to hear the Minister say in his opening speech that the NATO operation in Afghanistan needs to be shared fairly among the alliance. How right he was about that. We cannot have the caveats of certain countries that seem to indicate they are more interested in staffing canteens and hospitals than in filling body bags. Secondly, I hope that future Governments will listen a great deal more carefully to the military advice they are given. So many distinguished military figures who were free to comment before the Iraq invasion warned that there was a serious lack of planning for the post-conflict period and that there had not been enough thought, particularly in the United States, about what should be done after the immediate conflict was over. Military advice also appears not to have been listened to properly in Afghanistan, where we are clearly suffering from inadequate force levels on the ground and inadequate equipment. Like my noble friend Lord King, I refer to the remarks that Colonel Wilkinson made on the ““Today”” programme this morning about military planners in Kabul being aghast at the lack of troops on the ground. The United States and our Government are seriously culpable in not having listened properly to the military advice that they have been given. Turning to the future, I cannot help feeling that the situation in the Middle East may well get worse before it gets better. There is a new situation in Israel following the conflict with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. That conflict showed that what we believed about Israel’s military invincibility is no longer true and Israel now appears to be militarily vulnerable. That must be of great interest to Syria and other countries that have belligerent attitudes towards Israel. Last week, I was at a NATO assembly meeting in Quebec and heard evidence that tension between Syria and Israel has been growing in the past few months. The second part of the future relates to Iran. I took on board what my noble friend Lord Lamont said, but I hope that the Government are beginning to think privately about how we might all live in the Middle East if Iran becomes a nuclear-weapon state. It is clear that Iran is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons and has lied endlessly to the IAEA over them. There is no possibility of applying sanctions to Iran on this. I was in Moscow a few weeks ago, and the Russians are absolutely clear that they will not have anything to do with sanctions. In any case, if we look at Iran’s neighbours, can anybody seriously believe that sanctions would work if they were to be applied? If Iran is moving in the direction of becoming a nuclear-weapon state, the only other way to stop it would be to start a third war in the Middle East, and I cannot really think that any of us are so daft as to want to do that. We need a Middle East strategy. If we are to achieve one, we will have to go to the fundamentals. We can only hope that the Jim Baker/Lee Hamilton report blazes the way to that, but if it only suggests talks with Syria and Iran, I fear that it will not get very far. When one sees and hears of Israel’s disproportionate revenge on Gaza, one can only feel that that sort of approach will have to change as well as there being a withdrawal from lands stolen from Palestinians. That will be essential to get Syria, Iran and others to begin to have talks in a sensible, helpful way. We can only hope that the United States will think and act fundamentally at this critical stage to avoid a major new conflict in the region, which is a distinct possibility.