Syria and the Middle East

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, we are having a very rich debate. My noble friend Lord Wood started by mentioning the collapse of the Ottoman empire. We were then treated to very good historical accounts by the noble Lords, Lord Howell and Lord Ashdown, while the noble Lord, Lord Bates, gave us a flavour of what he has been reading. I could have spared him the trouble had he read my book, Rethinking Islamism, where I do it in 100 pages.

Let me put it this way. I see the Syrian civil war as just one chapter in a 40 year-old crisis of Islamic society in the Middle East. It started in 1973 after the third defeat of the Arab armies by Israel and of course the quadrupling of the price of oil. The secular socialist alternative in all the countries of the Middle East lost its prestige and a lot of people in the region turned to religion as the answer to their problems. If we follow that trail—we could go back to the Sykes-Picot affair, but let me stick to past 40 years—in country after country, and between countries, there has been a revival of religion, a hardening of Sunni and Shia identities, and among the Sunnis the revival of Wahhabism and Salafism, which has been encouraged partly because the Saudis got lots of money from the rise in oil prices.

The Iran-Iraq war lasted for eight years. It was one of the biggest wars in the Middle East, but none of us intervened. We may have supplied arms, but we did not intervene. Saddam proceeded to destroy as much as he could all the Shias’ means of livelihood in Iraq. I supported the Iraq intervention, not because of weapons of mass destruction but because I considered Saddam to be a danger to his own people. We have to think further along those lines. We now have a much more explicit chapter in the Shia-Sunni conflict in the Middle East and it is not going to stop. Whether we intervene, whether we have a Geneva II or a Geneva VI, the conflict will break out in another location, because this is a deep crisis in the Muslim society of the Middle East that has not yet been resolved as it has to confront modernity and its own weak position in the Middle East and to reconcile religion and civic life. We have here something that we ought to take a much broader view of.

If we do not intervene now, we will intervene later. I assume that it is going to go on and I do not think that we have the choice of not intervening. Sooner or later we shall intervene because this war is not going to come to an end any time soon. If we consider this to be a long-running Shia-Sunni conflict, we have to ask what the dangers are. In this case, and for the first time in 40 years, there is a serious danger of this war becoming much more general across the Middle East than any previous war has done, such as that between Iran and Iraq.

Noble Lords have already mentioned that Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan have been affected. Very soon, Israel will be affected. Given the strategic weapons that the Russians are giving the Syrians, it will not be much longer before there is a general war in the Middle East. It has nothing to do with whether we intervene or not; the dynamic of the war is such that there will end up being a general war across the Middle East. Whether we do or do not give any weapons, we will end up with Sunni terrorist groups or Shia terrorist groups. It is true to say that we are watching a general conflagration in the Middle East, and unless we understand its full dimensions we will be too preoccupied with our own particular, narrow and local role in this conflict to see the more general picture.

We ought to be thinking about this in the following terms. Would an intervention on our part now bring about all the unintended consequences that the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, told us about? There are always unintended consequences following any action, so that is nothing new. Obviously we will do some things wrong, we will get into a mess and it will take a long time, but eventually some good may come out of it. There is one good thing that we would like to come out of any intervention, whether an armed intervention or a diplomatic one: a lessening of the probability of this crisis continuing for another 40 years. It would have to be a general confluence of all the Middle Eastern countries, not just Syria. The Israel-Palestine question would have to be a part of it. Unless we take a view on the very comprehensive nature of what is going on here, we will not be effective in our intervention. Obviously if there is an armed intervention, it would be better if we had friends to come along with us, but it is more important that we get along with them and take a comprehensive view of where we can intervene so that the next chapter is not even bloodier than this one already is.

Let me make a couple of points that are perhaps more controversial. The two subsequent big questions are going to be Iran and the problem of Israel-Palestine. I have not actually understood why Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. If India, Pakistan and Israel can have them, why cannot the Iranians? Pakistan is a very unstable democracy; or rather, not even a democracy at all. The more countries that have acquired nuclear weapons since 1945, the less the probability that anyone will use them. Indeed, nuclear weapons are among the few weapons that have not been used since their invention, unlike gunpowder. We ought to take a much broader view of what we object to in the Iranian plan for nuclear weapons. Obviously there is the fear that if Iran has nuclear weapons, the existence of Israel will be threatened. Therefore, any general and comprehensive dialogue on the Middle East has to include Iran’s ability to have nuclear weapons while at the same time guaranteeing that the Israeli nation will survive and is not threatened by anyone in the Middle East.

That leads to the Israel-Palestine problem, which a number of noble Lords have talked about. I do not believe that the two-state solution has any future, but I am old enough, and I have been a member of the Labour Party for 40 years, to recall that a long time ago the party had a one-state solution: a single, secular, multifaith state in which Muslim Arabs, Jews and Christians could live together. That will not happen and we will never be at peace.