Iran

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Tuesday 30th November 2010 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I, too, begin by thanking my noble friend Lord Corbett of Castle Vale for securing and introducing this debate. I am sure he will forgive me if I disagree with many of the things that he said. The Iranian regime has been guilty of violating human rights but it is not the only one in the neighbourhood or in the world. It has been guilty of ignoring basic democratic norms but, again, it is not the only one in the area or in the world. It has been interfering in the affairs of other countries; well, we have a long record of doing that for the past 70 years, so we are in no position to point the finger at the Iranians. We obviously have a duty to criticise and bring pressure to bear on Iran, but we should not engage in any kind of precipitate action that aborts its natural evolution into a secular, democratic society in the years to come.

Nuclear weapons are certainly a serious matter, but I am not sure how serious Iran’s interest is in developing those weapons. It could be a game of bluff or a negotiating counter, but let us assume that it is serious and embarks upon the programme of developing nuclear weapons. Why would it want to do that and what would it do with those nuclear weapons? It would annihilate Israel. It knows that is suicide because Israel has developed perhaps 200 nuclear warheads. It also knows that Israel would be supported by the United States. Is it a fear of its neighbours? It knows that if it were to embark upon nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia would do the same thing, followed in due course by Egypt and eventually by Turkey. By turning to nuclear weapons for its own national security, it would be defeated by its own actions.

There are two basic concerns with Iran wanting to develop nuclear weapons. There is a sense of national pride. For all kinds of reasons, having nuclear weapons has become a badge of having arrived on the international scene and being taken seriously. In part, there is also the fear that the United States will interfere, as it has during the past 50-odd years, in the internal affairs of Iran. Therefore, we need to ask ourselves how we can normalise relations with Iran and allow its own internal dynamics to develop in a healthy direction when any kind of external pressure or interference will simply abort the process and create more problems for us.

We ought to reassure the Iranians that no one is going to interfere in their internal affairs, apply diplomatic pressure, and provide a carrot in the form of giving it a greater regional and global role and drawing it into global deliberations on a new kind of world order. More importantly, we ought to put pressure on its neighbours because we have been concentrating too much on Iran. We ought to make it clear to them that they ought to engage in establishing cordial relations with Iran, rather than turning to Uncle Sam every time there is trouble—in the hope that Uncle Sam will come down heavily on the Iranians—when no good relations are going to be created that way.

My final point is that Iran is going through a deep internal crisis: economic, political and cultural. If we allow that process to be uninterrupted by external pressure or internal panic, we might be able to create a more sensible order than we ended up creating in Iraq.