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Middle East and Afghanistan

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in the debate, particularly just two speeches away from my noble friend Lord Skidelsky, who was one of the few to talk consistent sense in the weeks before the opening hostilities in Iraq. The noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, as many of us in the Chamber will remember, constantly urged Her Majesty’s Government and the United States Government to squeeze the regime of Saddam Hussein by imposing heavier and heavier sanctions, not by attacking him. Those speeches recall, to those who know anything of recent history, the wise letters which President Eisenhower wrote to Sir Anthony Eden at the time of Suez. They were published as an appendix to volume II of Eisenhower’s memoirs, Waging Peace. Perhaps it will turn out that President Chirac was writing similar letters to Prime Minister Blair in 2003. Many of us share the desire of the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, to avoid war, but, for all sorts of reasons—some naïve, some complicated—many of us foolishly believed Her Majesty’s Government when they assured us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. We also accepted some of the fascinating stories that leaked out that there had been secret dealings between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Of course we did not expect to be told the details at the time; we merely accepted Her Majesty’s Government’s word. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, has said, the problems of Afghanistan and of the Middle East—historians among us will remember that the Middle East used to be known as the Near East; no one quite knows why there was that sudden change from Near to Middle—are quite separate, even if they are interconnected. Her Majesty’s Government share a mission in Afghanistan with the other NATO countries, however inadequately our allies may respond. So far as I know, there is no serious opposition to the NATO commitment, even among countries, such as Spain, that are generally opposed to United States policies and to President Bush. That is because all can see that if the Taliban were allowed to resume its control of the country, or even part of it, we should have a good deal more than poppy growing to complain about. We can assume that, were we to accept defeat at the hands of the Taliban, al-Qaeda would soon be back at home base. It is therefore hard to see that Britain—a responsible country, even if very far from Kabul—can have any attitude for the foreseeable future other than to remain. The Minister, with his statistics on new wells and the number of girls now in schools, encouraged us to think that the mission might one day be able to be fulfilled; but how far ahead is that likely to be? As to poppies, we should not forget how, in the course of another, successful, ethical foreign policy—the abolition of the slave trade—this country persuaded its slave traders to change almost overnight from the purchase and sale of slaves to the purchase and sale of palm oil. Support for the NATO position in Afghanistan does not mean that we have to accept all the arrangements that were made by the United States at an early stage in the war against the Taliban, particularly the establishment of the prison at Guantanamo, which must be one of our great ally’s worst ever actions. If President Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1902 arranged for the US lease of Guantanamo Bay from a newly independent Cuba, knew what has been going on in eastern Cuba, he would be turning in his grave, even though he was known for speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Earlier in the debate, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, called Afghanistan more a collection of tribes than a state. That may be so, but it is an ancient community, with a complicated and interesting history in which Britain has been much involved. Was there not a time in the 1760s when an Afghan empire extended not only over eastern Persia but over Baluchistan, the Punjab and parts of Kashmir? Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq is a very modern country indeed, having been cobbled together in the aftermath of the First World War, as the noble Lord, Lord Luce, recalled, by a distinguished academic, Dr Gertrude Bell; by an outstanding soldier/administrator, Sir Percy Cox; and by the then Colonial Secretary, Mr Winston Churchill. Before 1919, the three former Turkish provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra constituted the area that is now Iraq. That still has a consequence for modern politics. The country, as most noble Lords will know, was a British mandate from 1920 to 1927, and Sir Percy Cox, whom I have just mentioned, was our first High Commissioner. He was the man who drew the straight lines that have characterised the Iraqi frontiers ever since, and who the Dictionary of National Biography recalls as having revised and amplified the Turkish administrative system with rare skill, a commendation that might have been read with benefit by the early United States administrators in Iraq after the conquest, such as General Garner and Mr Brennan. Until 1957, Iraq remained an informal part of the British Empire. This country had no greater friend in the Middle East than the longstanding Prime Minister Nuri es-Said and King Faisal of Iraq, was tutored by a distinguished English social anthropologist in his youth, a friend of mine, Julian Pitt-Rivers. After 1957 in Iraq there was a dictatorship, first of the army and then of a political party, the Socialist Nationalists of the Ba’ath party. Despite that bizarre and unsuccessful history the Iraqis nevertheless—this is something that strikes one whenever one meets someone from that country—quickly developed a sense of patriotism and of what a nation should be. Perhaps that was assisted by the fact that the territory of Iraq has a very grand place in history. It is after all, the birthplace of civilisation, of law and of writing. Unlike some new countries, such as Ghana, Iraq did not have to invent a past, for the past in Iraq was always there between the Tigris and the Euphrates. In 2003 as we all know, the United States decided to invent a new stage in the history of Iraq, by establishing a sun of democracy there which it was hoped would radiate throughout the region. One United States neo-conservative spoke of a ““tsunami of democracy”” sweeping throughout the Middle East. That policy was not directly reflected in the speeches justifying the war itself. Instead, the pretext—that was the word used by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Mr Wolfowitz—was the nuclear weapons allegedly possessed by Saddam Hussein. It would have been far preferable, as I am sure noble Lords would agree, if Britain and the United States had been completely honest in 2003 and announced that their plan was indeed regime change—getting rid of a regime of brutal wrongdoing. The United States at least could have remembered those words as they figure in the at-one-time famous Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of 1905, which specifically justified US intervention in foreign countries in Latin America if ““brutal wrongdoing”” was proved. From listening to several speeches in the House in this debate, I have the sense that some noble Lords—the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Conwy, for example, and the noble Lord, Lord Jacobs—might have supported such a policy of intervention if brutal wrongdoing was plainly written down. As we all know, the military operation in Iraq was brilliant. It is right to give credit where credit is due, but as the noble Lord, Lord Blaker, said, no one seems to have taken any trouble to consider what would happen after the victory. Someone else—I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby—wondered where the British planners were at that time: why did they not consider the future? Alas, there was no Sir Percy Cox able to reconstruct the former Administration ““with rare skill”” and—again alas—the emblematic sight of post-war Iraq was not the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad but the sight of American troops standing by while great museums were being looted. Now the case is everywhere being put frequently for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, even—most unusually—by our leading soldier. But even those who questioned the desirability of the war at the beginning, such as me, must now wonder whether a serious withdrawal is possible if the alternative in Iraq could be what the Chief of Staff to the United States President, Josh Bolten—not Ambassador Bolton but Josh—described recently as, "““a failed state, a haven for terrorism, a real threat to the United States and the region””," and of course the United States’ allies. That, for once, is a realistic statement by an American neo-conservative. So the odds are that we have no alternative but to stay. One distinguished Member of this House, the late Lord Harlech, is credited with telling President Kennedy in 1963 in respect of a Central American civil war, ““Every country, you know, Mr President, has a right to its own Wars of the Roses””, but all civil wars have unforeseen consequences, even more than all wars. However desirable it must be, I cannot see that a British-US role in Iraq can be abandoned once it has been begun. Before we seriously contemplate any withdrawal, we should consider much more seriously the future politics of the country and in particular whether the place of the three Iraqi provinces that I mentioned earlier as existing under the Ottoman Empire—Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra—might be re-examined to give historical backing to a real federal state with a balance between the Kurds, the Sunni and the Shia. The democratic creators of the Bush Administration never seemed to be interested in the details of what democracy was going to be, but the fact is that they should because one democracy is better than another. The great successes in recent years in history has been the federations such as those in the United States but also those in Germany, Australia, Canada, and—without the use of the actual word—in Spain. A solution along those lines has begun to be mentioned to the United States following the thoughtful writing on those questions by Ambassador Peter Galbraith; and the noble Lord, Lord Howell, referred to it in his speech. My noble friend Lord Hannay opposed the idea of any break up of Iraq into three separate entities, but that is not what I am suggesting. All the same, I recall, as my last reflection, that Churchill at the Cairo conference in 1920 as Colonial Secretary instinctively favoured the creation of an autonomous Kurdistan as a buffer zone between the new Turkey and the new Iraq. I suspect that Churchill’s instinct, as so often, was right, even when he knew far less than the experts such as Sir Percy Cox.