Middle East

Lord Empey Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, Captain Boycott, of course, had his debut in Ireland. The House will be aware that that was not a successful outcome; neither will this present arrangement, as the noble Lord, Lord Grade, indicated. In the western powers, we have an unmitigated and impeccable record of failure to understand the Middle East. We do not get it, not from the 19th century, not the 20th century and not even today. We have supported one dictatorship after another, we have supported regimes that would disgrace anybody, and yet we find ourselves here today; even as recently as after Gulf War 1, we encouraged the Marsh Arabs—remember them?—to stand against Saddam. Then what did we do? We sat back and did nothing, and they were slaughtered, their lands were drained and they were impoverished. But have we learned from that? No. We are doing the same thing again with Assad’s people. We said to them that Assad would be finished in a few weeks or months. We encouraged them to rebel. What are we doing now? We are sitting back and watching Putin and Assad slaughter them.

In terms of understanding and spreading understanding, our own Government and the western powers do not have a clue, and yet we are meddling. We have a potentially nightmarish situation with the Turks and the Russians. With all that hardware flying around, sooner or later something is going to go wrong. We do not understand it. We do not have a coherent, justifiable, morally based policy in that area at all. If the noble Lord, Lord Grade, has done nothing else tonight but raise this subject, I sincerely hope that we will go back to basics and start to relearn what we should have learnt many years ago.