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North Africa and the Middle East

I, like all other Members of the House, am pleased at events in Tunisia and Egypt, and I welcome the desire of the people of the Arab world to bring about change in their countries. That certainly puts paid to the myth peddled by some in this House and the media that democracy is somehow incompatible with Islam. We should now provide humanitarian assistance, and help the people of the Arab world to set up a good system of civic governance and capacity-building. I know that the Foreign Secretary and the Foreign Office are supportive of that. Today and in the past, we in this House have talked about the hypocrisy of various countries around the world, and Iran has been mentioned many times, but is it fair to single out one country as hypocritical? Have we not at many—or, indeed, all—times applied double standards in our dealings with different countries? As the senior American politician, Senator Lindsey Graham, observed last month:"““There are regimes we want to change, and those we don't.””" Let me give some examples of our double standards. We talk of democracy, yet there was a democratic movement in Egypt in the '50s, and we quelled it. We did the same in Iran in the '50s: we opposed democracy there, and supported the Shah on the throne. As we see on our television screens, there are many parts of the world where there has been systematic genocide, ethnic cleansing and humanitarian disasters, with hundreds of thousands of deaths, yet we did nothing. Countries we could mention include Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. To those who say, ““Well, those are past conflicts,”” I refer to current conflicts in countries including Zimbabwe, Sudan, Palestine and Sri Lanka, with the Tamil Tigers' rebellion. Thousands and thousands of people died in that war, so why did we not intervene there? Why do we choose where we want to intervene?