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Middle East and Afghanistan

My Lords, I first refer the House to my entry in the Register of Lords’ Interests as I am a director of a number of companies operating in or with investments in the Middle East, including one with investments in Iran. It is my great pleasure to be the first on the Conservative side of the House to welcome two exceptional maiden speeches today. Both of them dealt with the subject of Afghanistan, but in very different ways. My noble friend Lady Warsi gave an eloquent and moving account of the plight of women in Afghanistan. She has tremendous expertise in Muslim affairs, which will be of great value in this House. She comes here with a high reputation for combative oratory, which anyone who has watched ““Question Time”” will know is well justified. She referred to the long line of distinguished ladies from Dewsbury who have arrived here. She is a very distinguished addition to their ranks already and we look forward to hearing her again. My noble friend Lady Neville-Jones also made a powerful analysis of Afghanistan, and I particularly agreed with two of her observations—I am sure that everyone did. The first is that, having committed ourselves, we must see it through and, secondly, that it would be a terrible mistake to impose western liberalism on a traditional tribal society. I first knew her when she was in the Cabinet Office. Her experience there and as chairman of the JIC will be of tremendous value to this House. We look forward to hearing from her again as well. At Heathrow Airport, there is an advertisement for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation which one always sees when one gets on board an aircraft. It says, ““Isn't it a good thing to see things from another person's viewpoint?””. Then, as you walk down the gangway to the plane another poster says, ““Another person's viewpoint is simply the place where you are not””. I am afraid to say that I was reminded of those posters when I listened to the Minister. Sometimes when we have debates on the Middle East we lose the ability to see things as people in other countries see them. We sometimes lose the ability to see how we are perceived in the Middle East. I hate to say this because it gives me no pleasure, but we are seen today through the prism of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and rendition, and through the eyes of Al-Jazeera television programmes that are often made from the point of view of those on the ground who have to pay the price of invasion—what we euphemistically call collateral damage. The phrase ““the war on terror”” has been a terrible mistake. If it were just a phrase it would still be a terrible mistake, because it is so easily confused or wrongly translated as a war against Islam. But it is a wholly wrong concept if the idea is to win hearts and minds and to divorce the passive supporters of terrorism—those among whom the terrorists live—from supporting it. You cannot wage war against a few individuals using all the weapons that demolish homes, kill children and cause collateral damage. When the Minister referred to the French aircraft that were going to be deployed in Afghanistan, I am sorry, but my immediate reaction was, ““I wonder how many homes they will bomb by mistake””. The United States and many in Britain have made the mistake of carrying forward into the war on terror the same mentality that we had in the Cold War. The threat today is not a single ideology that is allied to a military superpower such as the Soviet Union. The threat that we face today is much more diffuse. Sometimes people try to identify a threat by talking about the threat of a universal caliphate. Maybe Hizb ut-Tahrir and Osama bin Laden fantasise nostalgically about the caliphate, but it is most improbable that it could ever be realised. For a start, Shia Muslims—a large part of the Islamic world—do not believe in the universal caliphate. Therefore, Iran, identified as the great danger in this debate, will not be pushing that concept. In fact, the idea of the universal caliphate was not so popular at the end of the First World War when it disintegrated among fighting between Turks and Arabs. We are not facing a war of civilisations but the threat posed by, I accept, a very large number of small groups of Islamic extremists who can mount terrorist attacks. They can kill innocent civilians, damage property and sting us into making inappropriate reactions. These people can murder but do not threaten the West’s existence or our way of life. Combating them is a job for Special Forces and the police, both domestic and international. I accept that there is also a separate problem of nuclear proliferation. I agree with the Minister and my noble friend Lord Howell about the danger of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons which could destabilise the Middle East. It is a serious problem which, as my noble friend on the Front Bench said, has to be tackled with diplomacy and other measures. Unfortunately, our task has been made much harder—as I think the noble Lord, Lord Lea, was hinting—by the fact that we have turned a blind eye to the possession of nuclear weapons by countries that we regard as more favourable to the West. I agree with him that it would have been much better if, earlier on, we had devoted our efforts towards trying to create a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The former Prime Minister, Mr Blair, made a speech last week in which he compared the situation in the Middle East with the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s. In the West, we have had new Hitlers several times. Sir Anthony Eden saw Nasser as Hitler, the Americans saw Ho Chi Minh as the equivalent of Nazi Europe and, not so long ago, Colonel Gaddafi was the latest Hitler figure. I am not sure that the former Prime Minister’s remarks are entirely helpful if they are designed to solve the problem that we have with Iran—a country, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester reminded us, which is highly factional and diverse, and which has a defence budget that is 1 per cent that of the United States. If Iran is Nazi Germany on the rise, it seems very strange that it made the offer it did in 2003 to rein in Hezbollah and Hamas, help America in Iraq and introduce transparency in the nuclear programme—an offer rejected out of hand because America felt that it was on the offensive and had the advantage. Today, sadly, the psychology is the other way around. Nothing about Iran today can be understood without reference to the Iran-Iraq war. Trying to understand Iran without reference to that is like trying to understand modern Britain without reference to the two great wars. It is true that Iran displays a highly hostile attitude to Israel, particularly regarding Palestine. Iran has no legitimate involvement in the Palestine question, whereas one can argue that it has a legitimate interest in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Why does it maintain this policy towards Palestine and Israel? I believe it is for two reasons. First, if Iran is attacked, it knows that it cannot retaliate against the United States but it probably thinks that it could do so against Israel. It may be overestimating its own capacity in that regard. Secondly and more importantly, hostility against Israel stops Iran being isolated within the Gulf. Arab Governments are opposed to Iran but I regret to say that the President of Iran’s stance—outrageous that it is—is tremendously popular in the Arab street. There would be no way more effective in undercutting Iran and isolating it than to make progress on the Palestinian question, which is why I hope that the Government will put renewed energy and vigour into that. Another threat identified in Mr Blair’s speech in New York was the rise of political Islam, about which I would like to say a word. We have seen in recent years the rise of political Islam, sometimes called Islamism—the belief that government should be based on the religion of Islam. It is perfectly possible to believe in political Islam without being a supporter of terrorism. There are terrorists who are Islamists but not all Islamists are terrorists. Islamism is a spectrum. There is a profound difference between the political Islam of Sunnis and Shias or the political Islam of Iran and Hamas. Throughout the Islamic world, religious parties have been advancing and advancing in democratic elections—in Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine, Algeria, Egypt and Turkey. William Dalrymple remarked the other day that democracy, not terrorism, has been the engine of political Islam. Religious parties often come to power, or increase their vote even if they do not come to power, because they are seen as representing justice and the interests of the poor. Often they are the alternatives to despotic or corrupt regimes as I think, to some extent, Hamas was seen as the alternative to corrupt Fatah. On several occasions, the West’s response has been to reject the result of a democratic election, if it is the wrong one, as we decided it was in Palestine and in Egypt. While I agree with what the Minister said about human rights in Iran, he would have been more convincing if he had coupled it with a strong condemnation of human rights and the imprisonments of political dissidents in Egypt. We are far less vocal about countries that we regard as more in favour of ourselves. It may be that a religiously based state will be a stage that some countries pass through as they progress towards full democracy. There is no reason why the West should not exist with Islamic states. However, the great mistake that we hope we will avoid making is denying the results of democratic elections when they bring to power those of whom we do not approve. That is simply going to reinforce the Islamist trend and those who sometimes use the democratic process to protest against particular regimes. In the Middle East, as in Ireland, the shadow of history is a very long one. Today’s children are paying for our grandparents’ mistakes. We have to be careful that we are not creating a bitter legacy for future generations. I hope that that will not happen and that we can put aside some of our mistakes in recent years.