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Global Security (Iran)

First, I congratulate the Select Committee on its report and couple with that my expression of hope that we can somehow reform parliamentary procedures so that Select Committee reports as important as this one can be debated in a more timely fashion. I encourage the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) and his colleagues to continue their inquiries into the role of Iran in international affairs, because its position in its region and in the debate on nuclear proliferation will continue to be a pressing foreign policy priority for the present and future British Governments. Like the hon. Member for Ilford, South, I have found that a visit to Iran, with experiences such as taking tea under the bridges in Isfahan, going through the bazaars in Tehran, or discovering the phenomenon of blogging ayatollahs, quickly dispels the easy caricatures that are too often portrayed. Iran is a very complex country with an intriguing blend of modern and ancient elements. It has a system of government that even the most experienced academic and diplomatic experts find hard to penetrate and understand fully. Like others, I shall not dwell at length on human rights in Iran, or on the debacle of the recent presidential election results, except to say to the Minister that as Iran is a party to the international covenant on civil and political rights, and given that it, as a member of the United Nations, will be subject to periodic reviews by the United Nations Human Rights Council, I hope that Ministers will continue to press, through the appropriate international forums, for Iran to be held to the treaties that it has signed and ratified. I was very disappointed when, soon after the presidential election result was declared, I read that the UN Human Rights Council had decided not to hold a special session to inquire into the election. That will do damage to the reputation of the council as a new United Nations institution and I hope that the United Kingdom will try to gather support among other countries to reopen that particular issue at the UN. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley) spoke with great passion about the position of the British embassy staff in Tehran. Although I share the relief of all hon. Members that all but one staff member has been released, it is still utterly unacceptable that any members of our diplomatic staff in Tehran should remain under threat of prosecution. I am less sanguine than some about the position of our fellow member states of the European Union in relation to that and I hope the Minister will be able to provide some reassurance on that point. When the presidency of the EU shifted from the Czech Republic to Sweden, there was a distinct cooling of ardour about putting in place firm diplomatic responses to the threat being made against our staff. Within 24 hours, once the Iranians had said that they were going to bring charges against the staff member who was still being kept in detention, the new presidency did start to take a tougher line—and I have a high regard for the experience and the diplomatic skill of Carl Bildt—but I very much hope that the British Government will not let up the pressure at all upon our European Union colleagues. If the EU response to the detention of our staff is seen to be limp and if countries are looking for ways to avoid measures—for example, if we believe that the withdrawal of all EU ambassadors is necessary as a demonstration of how strongly we take the matter—that will not only make life more difficult for British embassy staff now and in the future, but the hardliners in Tehran will draw their own conclusions and life will become more risky for the representatives of other EU nations. That matter is important. I hope that the Minister will also take seriously the points that my right hon. Friend made about looking at the Geneva conventions and seeing whether we should be able to protect our locally engaged staff who are at risk by moving them into the category that he advocated, so that greater protection is provided under those conventions. The truth is that whatever the outcome of the present crisis, it will be in the interests of the United Kingdom that we continue to engage with Iran. Whatever the outcome of the crisis in Tehran, we in Britain will have to engage with the reality of Iranian national interests and Iran's desire to assert itself as an important power within its region. My hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Wallace) reminded us that it is simply wrong to view Mr. Mousavi as being in some way a western democrat who is committed to western liberal ideas. He is, indeed, a child of the revolution and his time in office as Prime Minister did not show the record of a man who was committed to liberal reforms in the way that they would be understood in Britain or elsewhere in the west. A Mousavi presidency would be committed to Iran's nuclear programme and to the assertion of Iranian national interest. My hon. Friend was also right to warn us that demographic change, which is having an increasing effect upon society in Iran, does not necessarily mean a more liberal approach, particularly to foreign policy. I believe that young people in Iran will very much want to have a greater say in how their country is run, but the Chinese precedent suggests that aspirations on the part of a young generation for better standards of material well-being can be coupled with a fervent patriotism that shades at times into quite aggressive nationalism. We have seen that in relation to some of the young Han Chinese reactions to the disturbances in Tibet last year. Our interest is not in Iran changing its regime—whatever we might think of it—but in trying to secure changes to Iran's behaviour, both domestically in terms of respect for human rights and, critically for this debate, in how Iran conducts its foreign policy within its region and more generally. Iran's nuclear programme must be at the centre of our concerns. Before this debate, I read through the most recent IAEA report, which was published on 5 June and was based on an inspection carried out on 19 May this year. The report demonstrated that Iran still refuses to co-operate fully with what the international inspectors require. In a letter of 3 May this year, Iran informed the agency that it would not permit "design information verifications" at the Iran nuclear research reactor. Iran refused to grant the IAEA access to reactor 40 for the Iranian Government's own reasons . The IAEA concluded that that""could adversely impact the Agency's ability to carry out effective safeguards at that facility"." In addition, Iran made it difficult for the agency to report further on the construction of the reactor, despite that having been requested by the United Nations Security Council. I could go on to provide a significantly longer list of details from that report. As with other countries who are signatories to the non-proliferation treaty, the NPT gives Iran the right to develop a civil nuclear programme. However, I want to be confident in a way that I am not at the moment that the international community can trust Iran to develop a civil nuclear energy programme and to observe all the requirements of the NPT. Iran's renunciation of the additional protocol and its refusal to co-operate with the international inspectors is set against the background of a nuclear programme that was begun and developed covertly, which is itself a breach of treaty requirements, and that will inevitably perpetuate mistrust. If the Iranian programme goes ahead, hon. Members have talked about there being a threat of nuclear proliferation in the middle east and about Israel perceiving that there is an existential threat to its very survival. However, it is not only Iran's nuclear programme that should concern us. Today, we have debated Iran's role in Afghanistan—my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling particularly talked about that. In many ways, it would seem odd for the Iranian Government to be seeking to help the Taliban. The Iranians originally gave some assistance to the coalition when action to overthrow the Taliban regime in Kabul was first taken in 2001. The Taliban are largely Sunni. Iran has had to face major problems from the narcotics trade and from the influx of refugees as a consequence of disorder and violence in Afghanistan. I would be interested to hear the Minister's assessment of the motives for Iran's support of the Taliban. Do the British Government believe that Iran is still actively engaged in supplying munitions and other forms of help to the Taliban to fight coalition forces, including our own? What is Iran's current relationship with the Taliban? Iran has also shown that it is capable of playing a malign role in other parts of the region such as Iraq, Lebanon and the Gulf. Only a few months ago, there was an overt reference by a senior Iranian leader to Bahrain's being legitimately a province of Iran rather than an independent state. That statement understandably caused huge concern among all the Arab members of the Gulf Co-operation Council. It seems that the objectives of British policy must be to try to secure a satisfactory outcome to the crisis over Iran's nuclear programme but also to try to bring about, through diplomatic means, a system of regional security and co-operation in which Iran is willing to play a constructive rather than a malign role, but a system in which Iran's genuine national interests are also recognised. The problem that we have is one that my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre referred to, which is the limited number of policy options that, in reality, are available to the United Kingdom. Despite what has happened in the past few weeks, I still believe that President Obama's approach is the right one. There is an enormous prize to be won through engagement—that of deflecting Iran from a nuclear weapons programme—and it carries with it a prize for the Iranian people of engagement with the outside world and modernisation of their economy, and even a prize for the regime in the form of the end of regime change as a suspected objective of United States policy. I would be interested to hear whether the Minister believes, as some have argued, that the attacks on Britain—the use of slogans in recent weeks denouncing the little Satan rather than the great Satan—are actually a peculiar coded way of Iran's signalling to Washington that it still wishes to explore the possibilities of engagement. Or have the British Government made a more pessimistic assessment of what is happening? On the nuclear issue, it seems that we need to persuade Iran, if we can, to accept suspension of its enrichment programme, although I think that that will be extraordinarily hard if not impossible to achieve, given the public statements made by so many Iranian leaders. If that fails, we may have to deal at some time in the next few years with the reality of an Islamic republic that has achieved control of the nuclear fuel cycle but which has perhaps stopped short of a weapons programme. If that is the world in which we find ourselves, would we be able to interpose between that stage and breakout to weaponisation some system of checks and warnings that would provide at least a measure of regional security? Finally—this is the worst-case option—are the Foreign Office and other parts of the Government thinking about what to do if we wake up one day and find that we are confronted with an Iran that has nuclear weapons, in the way that North Korea and Pakistan now have nuclear weapons? It is not too early for policy makers in Britain, elsewhere in Europe and in America to be drawing up contingency plans and thinking through policy options in such circumstances. For the time being, the main policy option, however imperfect, seems to be economic sanctions. I find it frustrating that the Prime Minister spoke well over a year ago in a Mansion house speech about new sanctions being imposed at European level on oil and gas investment and on export credit guarantees, but that they have still not been agreed by the EU. In fact, the converse is true: some two thirds of Iran's foreign trade is with EU countries. There are more measures that we could take on finance, as the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) suggested, and I would hope that in the wake of what happened in the presidential elections, we would also look at trade with Iran in information technology. I was disturbed to read reports that the software that was used to filter and monitor internet and mobile traffic within Iran after the elections, and to make life difficult for the demonstrators and the opposition, was supplied by Siemens. I do not know whether that is true, but it was reported in the US by quite serious sources. I hope that the EU will at least review its policy and see whether it needs to tighten up controls on that type of trade. Looking further ahead, if President Obama's outstretched hand does not meet with the kind of response that we would hope for, if Iran continues to press forward with its nuclear programme, we will have to look at sanctions that go even further and which would have the effect of isolating Iran as completely as possible from the normal contacts of the global economy. My final point is that if we are starting to think about how the international community would deal with an Iran that had obtained control of the nuclear fuel cycle or worse, we would need to be looking also at very public security guarantees. They would be primarily from the US rather than European powers, but clear, unmistakable security guarantees, not just to Israel but to several Arab countries, would be essential to try to prevent nuclear proliferation in this fragile and tense region of the world, which I believe is the nightmare that we all wish to avoid.