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Foreign Policy

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Howell, for introducing this important subject. I speak as amere layman in political terms. It certainly is notmy intention to offer a wide-ranging critique of government policy over the past 10 years. However, I should like to draw the attention of the House to certain ongoing issues in relation to our policy, particularly in the Middle East, which might benefit from further reflection and to which we might pay more attention. I should like to remind the House of the almost incredible shift that has taken place in how we speak of and experience warfare. The point has been made many times that, until the fall of communism, most warfare was still conceived of in terms of the nation state; that is, in territorial terms. The events of 9/11, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, referred, made it clear that this is no longer necessarily the case. This is perhaps a somewhat simplistic analysis. Nevertheless, in all the talk of the war on terror, perhaps insufficient attention has been paid to the obvious fact that terrorism is not territorial but is systemic. A complementary perspective has just been offered by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig,on this. Following what many saw as the knee-jerk bombing of Afghanistan in the hope of killing Osama bin Laden, one American commentator suggested that it was like hitting a mature dandelion with a golf club: the original plant might be destroyed but the inevitable spread of the seed would make things infinitely worse. When I met Tariq Aziz in Baghdad before the invasion of 2003, he denied emphatically any connection with terrorism in the normal sense of the word. He of course had plenty of experience of terror in other forms. He assured me that if a member of al-Qaeda dared to set foot on Israeli soil, he would be shot on sight. The original plant, Osama bin Laden, has, of course, not been destroyed, but the seed of al-Qaeda has spread and taken root, most notably, and perhaps most ironically, in Iraq. To some extent, the systemic nature of the problem has been acknowledged with the talk of winning hearts and minds. Invading and conquering sovereign territory can be only the start of a process. But I wonder whether we pause sufficiently to ask how such language plays into a culture that is so radically different from our own. Is it not the case that phrases like ““western democratic values”” are heard, not as self-evidently desirable, but as an implicit criticism of Islam, a religion which finds the concept of political pluralism hard, if not impossible, to integrateinto its strictly theocratic view of society? The term ““democracy”” may sometimes need to be relinquished in favour of different forms of culturally appropriate representation such as are to be found in many ancient societies in Africa and the Middle East. Winning hearts and minds is perhaps too readily heard as code for arrogant western imperialism. This leads me to ask how seriously we take the deeply religious dimension to the current conflict, not only in Iraq but in the Middle East generally. Todo this represents a profound challenge to the predominantly secularised basis of most western political theory. The fact of daily life in most parts of the world, the Middle East included, is that religion is at the heart of everything. It is not simply an optional add-on. In Iraq the Coalition Provisional Authority was, in general, lamentably slow to acknowledge the role that might be played by religious dialogue at an early stage after the invasion. Consequently, very little money was put into that process until it was too late. Ayatollah Hussein al-Sadr came to visit me in Coventry before the invasion and he was more willing than most to be approached; but the invitation never came. Ayatollah al-Sadr is the relatively moderate uncle of the now notorious Moqtada al-Sadr. There is a further aspect of the religious dimension which cannot be ignored. In one sense, this will sound like special pleading, coming as it does from these Benches, but I take courage from the fact that the Pope recently tackled President Bush on this issue. The migration of Christians from the Middle East is due to a multiplicity of factors, religious, socialand economic. In percentage terms, the Christian population in towns such as Bethlehem is at its lowest for centuries. The overt persecution of Christians in Baghdad by Islamist extremists has led to a regimeof terror and appalling danger: death threats and illegal confiscation of property are commonplace; kidnapping and ransom for religious reasons occur daily. One of the many reasons underlying this persecution is the utterly false perception that Christianity, far from having its origins in the Middle East, is a western import, and therefore all Christians are regarded as stooges of America. The Government rightly pride themselves on a policy of inclusivity. As a nation, we have in the past 50 years offered hospitality to large numbers of adherents to non-Christian faith traditions, such that the UK is now regarded very much as a multi-faith society. Might the Government, perhaps through the FCO, have a part to play in encouraging a degree of what we might call religious reciprocity? After all, they represent a nation where the clear majority, in all the polls at least, still identify themselves as Christian. The continued exodus of Christians from Iraq and from the wider region diminishes the potentialfor initiatives aimed at promoting peace and reconciliation, as called for by the Baker-Hamilton report. This migration of Christians from the Middle East not only threatens the church’s existence as a viable and sustainable community in the region but also reduces the valuable contribution that the church has traditionally made to the diverse fabric of Middle Eastern society.