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Iraq and the wider Middle East

I agree with my hon. Friend. This rearguard attempt to pre-empt the lion’s share of the remaining oil and the massive future profits over a 30-year period—there is no authority to extract it from another country without its agreement—can only intensify the insurgency. It is bound to foster much-increased resentment, as my hon. Friend says, and increase the violent resistance, even when the occupation has come to an end. Above all, this policy is utterly short-sighted, because it is diametrically opposed to the policy into which the whole world will ineluctably be forced by the accelerating onset of climate change. It is not only in respect of Iraq that the United States is raising the stakes. In his speech in Dubai just before Christmas, the Prime Minister again denounced Iran. Anyone who read that speech will know that he took a far more belligerent line than other British or European representatives, or even than patient unofficial US representatives such as James Baker. There is already a huge US military build-up around Iran—in the eastern Mediterranean, the Arabian sea and the surrounding land area—and talk persists about an Israeli attack, perhaps even a nuclear attack, on Iranian nuclear facilities. The truth is that Iran has done nothing illegal. It has demonstrated no territorial ambitions. It has not occupied any foreign country—unlike the United States or Israel—and it has hitherto complied with its obligation under the non-proliferation treaty to allow inspectors to ““go anywhere and see anything””, as the phrase has it, unlike the United States and Israel, which have refused to do so. Indeed, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) said, Israel has refused to recognise the non-proliferation treaty and holds between 200 and 500 thermo-nuclear weapons, targeted at Iran and other middle east countries.