---

Global Security (Iran)

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay). I am speaking today both as an individual and Chair of the British all-party group on Iran, which I have chaired for some three years. During that time, we have met with the Secretary of State, the Foreign Secretary, Ministers of State, members of the US State Department, Turkish and Syrian ambassadors, Members of the Iranian Government and Iranian clerics and academics, as well as other people who represent the interests of the area. In my short contribution, I should like to introduce some context to the matter, which has been missing right from the beginning. The Iranian elections were, and are, a serious schism in the current problems that we face with the regime. I suppose that we could say that the lid has come off the pressure cooker. There was some bad reporting at the beginning. The BBC egos got off the plane in Iran and nudged out of the way the journalists who had been working very hard in the region for a long time, often when the rest of the world was not interested. When those egos stopped at the nearest polling station and saw women wearing lipstick, they assumed that there had already been an Iranian revolution. The expectations that came from the first reporting of the Iranian elections were unnaturally high. That explains why so many people attached themselves to Mousavi and pronounced him a great revolutionary reformist. They treated him as a "Hampstead Liberal" and no doubt felt that if he was elected, everything would change. Most of the reports at the beginning came from north Tehran, which is the rich area where the Shahists and the elite of the regime used to live. They are the people who have suffered under the Ahmadinejad regime because of economic incompetence. So, we need to put that in perspective. Next, we should consider the three candidates. Anyone who knew Mousavi when he was a Prime Minister would know that he is not campaigning for a completely European, liberal style democracy; he is a child of the regime. This election was predominantly about the competence of Ahmadinejad and not about whether he was a moderniser, a conservative or a reformer. General Rezaie, who was a founding member of Hezbollah and a senior general of the Revolutionary Guard, does not criticise the regimes of which he has been part lightly or easily. What I found in Iran last year was that across the board, there was a coalition of people who felt that this President was not only destroying the country economically through his incompetence but damning the country to an isolation that would end up like that of North Korea. That anger at his incompetence built up during the election. When he did not even competently fix his own election, people felt that he had taken a step too far. It is possible that Ahmadinejad could have won the election. However, he would not have won it on a 60:40 basis, but he might have won it on a 51:49 basis. He might have had to go to a second round, but he could not even fix his own election. Last year, there was a debate in the Majlis in which he tried to install his son-in-law or brother-in-law as Minister of the Interior, but the Members blocked it, knowing what he was doing. The three candidates were there to deliver change and hopefully to solve one of the west's real worries. As Iran is a non-party political state, it is very hard to do anything but deal with personalities, and personalities come and go in Iran. In the series "Iran and the West", the former Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) dealt with the personalities in both the Iranian and American regimes. He had to hold the circle with a Bush Administration, which had to deal with Mr. Bolton on one day and General Powell on the next. There were personalities across the foreign policy divide, and it was very hard to get a settled foreign policy—it must have felt a bit like catching soap. I would like to pay tribute to the European powers. The Foreign Office has been given a tough time throughout the debate, but it had to walk the line when no one knew whether the Americans were going to take the neo-con view of Mr. Bolton, or what view the Iranian regime, which swapped personalities in the same way, would take. Interestingly, when we nearly got to a resolution on the nuclear issue, it fell apart on both sides of the table. The deputy Secretary of State of the United States left, and in came Mr. Bolton with his neo-con view of the world; off went Mr. Larijani and into the Iranian regime came someone of whom we had never heard.