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Defence in the World

I was thinking more in the generality. We should be saying that we will not be able to fix a broken country such as Afghanistan in five years. It could take 10, 15 or even 20 years to achieve what we want. People believed that things in Iraq would get better much more quickly than it was realistic to expect. The consequence has been disappointment domestically and resentment abroad. We need to be more realistic about long-term time scales. I entirely agree with the Government that to put a timetable on the reduction of our forces is asking for trouble, and would give insurgents the green light to try to disrupt it. We need to try to make judgments on the ground, in light of the prevailing circumstances, but that is a matter for our commanders. The House of Commons cannot set an artificial timetable, because that would fail to take account of what is happening in the real world. I would very much oppose any attempt by politicians to set an artificial timetable that did not take into account the reality encountered by those at the sharp end. I want to say something about Iran, and were it not for the time constraints of the debate, I am sure that the Secretary of State intended to do the same. The House and the country need to understand and confront a number of issues that relate to Iran. The bottom line is that it is not acceptable to the UK, in either the specific or the generic case, for Iran to become a nuclear weapons state. In the specific case, it is not acceptable because of the nature of the Iranian regime, especially its president. Furthermore, some of the rhetoric of the current Iranian president and his association with a particularly aggressive fundamentalist type of religious interpretation of Islam makes it extremely unacceptable in the region that Iran should become a nuclear power. Iranian rhetoric and the country’s involvement in Iraq—to which the Secretary of State alluded—and potentially further afield means that there is a danger of middle east conflict shifting from the historically rooted Palestinian-Israeli conflict to a wider one between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims throughout the region. That would be a dangerous escalation of tension in the region. The more generic case against Iran becoming a nuclear weapons state is that such acquisition of nuclear weapons would be the end of non-proliferation as we understand it. If Iran has nuclear weapons, other states in the region will want them, too. If we fail to control Iran’s aspirations in that direction we are likely to live in a far more dangerous world than we do now—although when looking at that region, that is sometimes hard to believe. As my right hon. Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary said yesterday, it is incumbent on all western powers to put up a united front to the Iranian regime and to demonstrate that it cannot hope to have a divide-and-rule policy, and to tighten our financial sanctions to make it clear that we are serious about stopping its aspirations. However, even during the most difficult times of the cold war, we in the west kept a substantial diplomatic presence in Moscow. Even when the Soviets were pointing new and larger numbers of nuclear warheads at us, we continued our process of diplomatic engagement. It is not sensible to say that just because we do not like a regime we will not talk to it at all. Taking the perspective of international opinion, it does not help the west’s case if we are seen as intransigent in dealing with Iran. Of course, we may not get anywhere with the current regime—I would be extraordinarily naïve to suggest that we might—but when we dealt with the Soviets we were always trying to find the next Solzhenitsyn, and the reasonable voices from the next generation. We must make it clear that our current problems are with the regime in Iran not with the nation of Iran. Our conflict and quarrels are not with the people of Iran, so diplomatic engagement—the carrot and the stick—is the sensible way to proceed and would have widespread support in the region. It will not be easy and there will be obstacles to overcome, but if we are to be involved in a complex regional situation, and more generally, we must fully understand the concept of soft power—as the Secretary of State said—as well as hard power.