---

Iraq and the wider Middle East

I begin by declaring an interest in a company that operates in the middle east. On 12 January, the Prime Minister made a powerful speech in Plymouth, in which he tried to defend the Government’s failed policy in both Iraq and the middle east. He chose to make that speech from the deck of HMS Albion, and as he laboured through it, I had an irresistible recollection of the boy who stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled. The Prime Minister made two claims in that speech. He claimed that the extraordinary and terrible events of 9/11—the attack on New York by al-Qaeda—were the origin of all the problems that we face. He went on to argue that to deal with the problems of terrorism caused by those events, it was necessary to have not only soft power, but hard power. I have no difficulty in agreeing with much of what the Prime Minister said: of course he is correct to say that the events of 9/11 were seminal, and have dominated much of our thinking since then. He is also correct to say that in dealing with terrorism and threats from around the world we need both hard and soft power, but I am sad that it has taken him 10 years as Prime Minister to come to the conclusion that our armed forces are undermanned, and that the Ministry of Defence needs its requirements to be met. However, the Prime Minister made two basic mistakes. First—and this underlines his whole policy on the middle east—he assigned an unjustified importance in global terms to al-Qaeda as an organisation, and to the events of 9/11. That has meant a dangerous oversimplification of the world in which we live. Secondly, by concentrating on hard power and interpreting the world in that way, he has given the impression that if one accepts that there is a threat from al-Qaeda, and a need for hard power, that by itself justifies the attack on Iraq, and its invasion. The reality is, and will always be, that one cannot justify a pre-emptive attack on another country merely by reference to some universal principle. That war was a terrible mistake. The Prime Minister should have reflected on Bismarck’s observation that pre-emptive wars are rather like committing suicide because of a fear of death. The Prime Minister’s mistakes essentially stem from fundamental misunderstandings about the course of recent history. The real seminal date in our recent history is not al-Qaeda’s attack on New York. It is the end of the cold war, which opened up a series of circumstances, of which al-Qaeda is one consequence. When one looks, for example, at the rebirth of xenophobic nationalism as seen in the Balkan wars, Azerbaijan or elsewhere in the Caucasus, that is all a consequence of the collapse of communism and the end of that period in our lives. The emergence of democracy throughout Latin America, the far east and eastern Europe, too, has been a consequence of the end of the cold war. The emergence of China and India as major powers in the world is a result of their adoption of capitalism, which became possible only because of the elimination of communism as an alternative economic theory. Against that background, al-Qaeda’s threat, important though it is, should be seen as simply one of the consequences of this extraordinary period in human history. That is not only a theoretical point. It is highly relevant in explaining why so much of the Prime Minister’s foreign policy has gone so disastrously wrong. He has been required, as has George W. Bush, to attempt artificial linkages in order to produce some overall theory of the world in which we live. So there was the absurd attempt to imply that Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda that justified the invasion of Iraq—obvious nonsense, which Congress has now ruled definitively against. A second example was the embarrassment of having to be ambivalent about the Russian oppression in Chechnya. The Russians claimed that they were suppressing not just a nationalist movement but an Islamic terrorist movement, which would justify the support of the United States and the west. There has also been the foolish attempt to say that the way to make progress in Baghdad starts in Jerusalem. I agree with anyone who argues that progress in Israel and Palestine is crucial to the wider world, but to imply that somehow that is the solution to the problems of the middle east is absurd. The suggestion that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait because of Israel and Palestine, or that al-Qaeda, which has hardly a single Palestinian member, is a consequence of the frustration of the Palestinians, are examples of how the Government, and the Prime Minister in particular, regularly go wrong in their analysis and bring us to the circumstances that we now face. An interesting comment was made by Ferdinand Mount in a recent issue of Prospect, when he wrote:"““What changed in 1989””—" the end of the cold war—"““was that the anti-communist rationale melted away and western leaders have since failed to construct an alternative narrative for their actions that would bear the heat of public scrutiny.””" What the Prime Minister and President Bush have been doing is trying to provide some new world paradigm, and all the real facts have to be forced into this artificial construct. That explains the mess that we have today. Where do we go from here? First, with regard to Israel and Palestine, things are not all bad. Looking not just at the past couple of years but from an historical perspective, we see that there was an enormous breakthrough in Israel’s relationship with Egypt, the withdrawal from Sinai, followed by the peace with Jordan, and followed, even with the Palestinians, by a mutual recognition of a need for a two-state solution, which very few Israelis would have conceded a few years ago, and very few Palestinians would have acknowledged. What produced that breakthrough were statesmen—Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, King Hussein—people who looked to the future, not backwards. I believe that there is now an opportunity to make progress, but I must make one fundamental point, to the Israeli Government rather than to anybody else: there cannot be any prospect of long-term peace based on a two-state solution in the middle east unless there is not only a Palestinian state, but a viable Palestinian state. It must have boundaries that enable it to take its place among the world family of nations, and not be a combination of small fragmented entities nominally called a state, but without the realities that are required to produce the substance of statehood. Otherwise, young Palestinians in particular will not be able to begin to think of themselves as ordinary citizens of an ordinary nation, and thereby contribute to growing tranquillity in the region. Secondly, with regard to Iran, it is one of the great ironies of recent events that the United States and our own Prime Minister have been the single greatest contributors to the emergence of Iran as a hegemonic power in the past few years. Iran traditionally had two opponents in recent times—Saddam Hussein on one side and the Taliban on the other. Thanks to George Bush and our own Prime Minister, both were eliminated without the Iranians having to act in their own interest. But Iran is a serious regional power, and our objection to Iranian policy is not its aspiration to play an important role in the region, to which it is entitled, but its aspiration to acquire nuclear weapons. A response is required by the United States, which has more influence than anyone else, offering not only dialogue with Iran but a serious opportunity of normalising relations—similar to the opportunity that it offered to, and was accepted by, Gaddafi and Libya. If the United States could accept the Libyans after Lockerbie, it should be able to contemplate the prospect of full normalisation of relations with Iran.