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Middle East and Afghanistan

My Lords, this has been a very wide-ranging but interesting debate. I agree with a great deal of what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said in his thoughtful opening speech. It has been helpful to tie in the valuable EU Committee report on the Middle East peace process with this debate. We have had two excellent maiden speeches. I was especially interested by the references of the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, to women’s rights, an issue that she is fully engaged in. It is also an issue in this country. Last Friday night, in Bradford, I was interested to hear about a speech that she had given last week on the role of the Braderei, a Kashmiri community in west Yorkshire. I would love to talk further about that with her. We also had a very interesting maiden speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, who was referred to as a distinguished and senior Foreign Office official. When I first met her, she was a distinguished but junior Foreign Office official. I am trying to remember whether it was 1974 or 1975 when she first briefed me on foreign policy co-operation among EU member states, when I was myself only a junior researcher at Chatham House. We look forward to many further contributions from her. There are many larger issues underlying this debate, some of which have been touched on by several other speakers. The first is what lessons we can draw on liberal intervention—the doctrine that our former Prime Minister expounded in his Chicago speech; that underlay a number of UN documents such as the Canadian report and others; and that, in the more ambitious neo-conservative strategy, proposes transforming the Muslim world into democracies—that is, both Tony Blair’s assumption that we could harness American power to a progressive moral international mission and the Bush Administration’s assumption that a coalition of democracies under American leadership could police and reshape the world. We have now discovered the limits of military power and military intervention. Iraq has become a quagmire because we did not think through the extent to which military intervention can be only part of an attempt to reconstruct a state and to assist in redevelopment. In Afghanistan, we find ourselves now caught in the contradiction between fighting the Taliban, state building and economic reconstruction. We are state building in a country where many parts never really had a state and where, for example, the power of Kabul never played a large role in Helmand. We now know that there are limits to what the Atlantic allies can do alone. We need to work with others—China, Russia, India and even Iran—if we are to achieve peace and stability in the area. There are also lessons for the special relationship. I very much support the underlying argument in the EU Committee report that, on the Middle East peace process, we need more Europe and less of following the American lead. The United States has, after all, now been the dominant power across the Middle East for 50 years; the sponsor of Israel; the ally and external supporter of authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and, until 1979, of the Shah’s regime in Iran. Sadly, under the Bush Administration much more than under its predecessors, it has become clear that American policy towards the Middle East is driven much more by domestic lobbies and by ideology than by careful consideration of national interest and international order, and by a deliberate attempt in the US to suppress intelligent and independent analysis of the complex politics of the Middle East region. As an academic and political scientist, I have a great deal of sympathy with some of those in the United States who have felt the political pressures to limit their analyses of the Middle East. For example, the American attitude to Iran since 1979 has been fixated on the Iranian threat while at the same time forgetting how the United States has looked to Iranians since the 1953 coup. No American I speak to appears to be aware that the United States shot down an Iranian airliner some 20 years ago, or that the United States actively supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, or that Iranian nationalism is as important as fundamentalism or anti-Americanism in Iranian attitudes to the United States. As other noble Lords have said, that leads to American approaches to Iran which, because of that underlying sense of aggression, are far more fundamentalist—one has to use the term—than American approaches to North Korea. Then, there is the capture of American policy by the Israeli right through other domestic lobbies. That has also had an unfortunate effect on American policy, in which we see the American commitment to democratise the entire Middle East somersaulting when Hamas does well in the Palestinian elections, leading to active attempts to undermine the Palestinian coalition Government—one that offered us a brief prospect of a constructive way forward. There are lessons for the importance of religion in global politics, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester told us. Radical Islam is now a religious ideology that has replaced Marxism as the rationale for the excluded and the alienated across the world—and in this country. There is great importance, therefore, in how we in the non-Islamic world respond to that challenge. There is a dangerous tendency within the United States to see this conflict as a long war between civilisations, and against an implacable and unchangeable enemy. It was a great mistake for our former Prime Minister Tony Blair to feed that tendency in his speech to the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New York, using the language of fascism to categorise Islam—““Islamo-fascism””, which means that they are totally irrational and that we cannot deal with them. There are, after all, four states in the world with religious legitimacy as their primary foundation: the Vatican, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. I suppose that we ought now to add a fifth: the current regime in Iran. Four of those five are in the Middle East. We have to be concerned to promote modernisation through necessary compromise between faith and toleration, or between moral certainty and democratic diversity, which we have painfully achieved in this country, and which has been achieved across other states in Europe, sometimes in our own lifetime. Indeed, we forget how recently some of those developments took place in this country. In the first general election of 1974, I remember Father Kelly taking me round the Catholic clubs in Manchester Moss Side and, before we went in, telling me that I had to understand that we would be distinguished by a number of things. First, we would be the only ones there who were not drunk; secondly, the only ones who did not claim to have cousins in Long Kesh; and, thirdly, the only ones who did not believe that the IRA was entirely right and the British Government entirely wrong. We have moved on from that and now see—or sometimes claim to see—the fundamentalist Muslim challenge. As the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, said, we have to be concerned with the evolution of an Islamic version of democracy. Perhaps in Europe, where we have our own substantial population of Muslim citizens, that is part of what we will now, slowly and painfully, see develop. There are also lessons for the future of NATO at stake in Afghanistan. How many troops does NATO really need? How many more will the United Kingdom provide, as we draw down in Iraq, alongside the dribble of extra forces from the new NATO states? We will fail in Afghanistan if this becomes a war rather than a mission in which economic and political reconstruction are central. We will fail if we cannot constructively engage Iran in Iraq as well as Afghanistan, or persuade Pakistan to control its own radical Muslim groups. Some of those are linked to the military and intelligence agencies. I read an interesting article over the weekend in Survival, the IISS journal, which referred to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as ““passive sponsors of terrorism””—and interestingly compared them, as an American author did, to the United States as a passive sponsor of the IRA. I hope that the Government will make it clear to the Saudis during the state visit that we need much more active support from their regime than we have seen so far on the debate within Islam and on support for liberalising processes in the region. A number of noble Lords have spoken about the importance of the Annapolis conference and prospects for peace. There are real dangers of another half-hearted initiative on this issue ending in betrayed hopes and failure. I have read various worrying reports in the American press that President Bush is not fully committed to this initiative and that domestic lobbies are mobilising in Congress against it. We have, after all, had 40 years of Israeli occupation of Palestine, interrupted by the brief hopes and disengagement of the Oslo process in the 1990s. The situation in occupied Palestine is not stable. There are new Israeli settlement plans east of Jerusalem. Gaza is being strangled. The West Bank economy is sinking. The most recent edition of Survival has a depressing but persuasive article by Yezid Sayigh of King’s College London. The title says everything: "““Inducing a Failed State in Palestine””." That is the direction we are going in, and if the state fails, we will have civil war, disorder and external terrorism. We also have weak government in Israel, with a populist Right, some Jewish fundamentalists and an active and unhelpful settlers’ movement. We have to hope that former Prime Minister Blair will not end in the same depressed state of mind as James Wolfensohn and Alvaro de Soto, who wrote despairing final comments on the failures of their missions. We all understand the outlines of the only acceptable framework for peace and stability—two viable states with agreed boundaries and a special status for the holy places of Jerusalem. The long-term security of Israel depends on the achievement of such a framework. Those of us who see ourselves as friends of Israel find it difficult to defend it as strongly as we would like, as long as new settlements are under way, as long as internal barriers multiply within the occupied West Bank and the blockade tightens around Gaza, or as long as there is a culture within the Israel Defence Force that permits the ill-treatment of Palestinians, as Haaretz reported last week. We understand that there are many, many weaknesses on the Palestinian side within Fatah and Hamas, but we understand also that one has to deal with unpleasant people if one wants to achieve peace. We are faced in the Middle East with the United States as the dominant but flawed power, bogged down in the area, declaring a ““war on terror”” but unwilling to tackle its profligate use of oil or reduce its dependence on foreign purchases of US Treasury funds by raising domestic taxes. As the EU Committee report remarks, we need more active and coherent European diplomacy and we need to engage other major players as much as we can, including those two difficult global players, Russia and China.