Iraq

Lord Soley Excerpts

Wednesday 25th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest in the register as a director of the Good Governance Foundation, which operates in the region. I say straight away that I do not think that this is, or should be, a debate about the Iraq war of 2003—much as I would actually welcome that, and I hope that we get time for it. I agree with a lot of what my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours said; like him, I voted for the war but not on the basis of WMD, which I thought was an important part of it but not the central part. The failure was, frankly, a failure of the post-conflict plan and the dysfunctional nature of the United States Administration, particularly when they replaced Colin Powell, who had a plan, with Donald Rumsfeld, who simply felt that all we had to do was take away Saddam Hussein, get rid of the Baathist party and its operations in Iraq and everyone would welcome democracy with open arms. It never works like that, and it certainly did not then. Along with my noble friend’s colleague Ann Clwyd MP, I wrote a whole pamphlet for the Fabian Society on this very issue back in 2004.

I shall leave that aside, though, because—I agree with everyone who has said this—you cannot pin the current situation on the removal of Saddam in 2003. It is very hard to conceive of the war in Syria not affecting Iraq even if Saddam had been in power. We have to look slightly deeper at this. It is pointless to look at historical causes. You could point to the nature of the Ottoman Empire, which, although a very civilising and progressive empire, at its end was very brutal in the region. Gertrude Bell has been mentioned, and you could point to our division of the Middle East in her time—but going back in history does not actually solve current problems.

I want to say a couple of things. First, and I know that the Minister has a particular interest in this, we have not talked enough about the Sunni/Shia divide. There has always been a division within Islam; at times it has been bad and at other times not so bad. You could say the same of Christianity. The present division got dramatically worse in 1979-80 with the arrival of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and then the following Iran/Iraq war. Only a few weeks ago I was talking to the King of Bahrain and some of his people there about this problem. His generation feel quite strongly that they do not want to be labelled as Sunni or Shia because they regard themselves as Muslims—and I suspect that the noble Baroness takes exactly the same view. My concern, and this is one of the things that we have to address, is that the younger generation is becoming increasingly pushed into support for either Sunni or Shia. The more that we go down that road, the more difficult it will become as that view is entrenched in that generation as they grow older.

I say to the Minister that one of the things we ought to be thinking about in our discussions with various Arab and Islamic states is how the whole issue of the divide between Sunni and Shia can be headed off and brought back to a more unified sense of the religion, accepting that they will never agree on the original cause of that division. That divide will always be there, as it is for many Christians, with Catholics and Protestants and so on. In Islam right now, though, that division is getting deeper and it is hard to see how that can be in any way helpful in the present situation.

We ought to look on the terrible situation at the moment as an opportunity. I agree that military intervention would not make sense and would not work. I am in favour of military interventions when I am clear about the objectives, but if you are going to intervene militarily, you must have a clear objective. It is difficult to see what that objective would be in the current situation. That is why you should not do it. However, we can look at how we can assist in the area. Unless there are groups within ISIL that will take over the more extremist groups, one hope is that the Sunni tribes will rise against that extremism, as they have in the past. There is a real possibility of that. That is what we ought to be discussing, and if we can assist in any way, we should do so.

I want to say something about the way we use our power and influence. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, will know about soft power. We need to readdress it. I have worked on and discussed this issue over the years, and I have found that there is general acceptance that people would like the rule of law and there is general, but not quite so ready, acceptance that they would like democracy. However, in some of the countries in that region, democracy is being interpreted as “winner takes all”. You saw that in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood. That does not justify what the current regime is doing in Egypt, but you could see the problem as soon as the Muslim Brotherhood took power.

You can also see that with the Maliki Government in Iraq. There was a real opportunity. There was plenty of pressure from the West generally on Maliki in the early days of his Administration to include the Sunnis, but he found that incredibly difficult. I know that spokesmen of the Government of Iraq say that they have Sunnis in the Government and in administration. Yes, they have some, but it is very clear that an awful lot of Sunnis felt excluded. More than that, they felt powerless and threatened. If you feel powerless and threatened, you start taking extreme actions. The bombings and killings that have taken place in Iraq in the past few years are an expression of that, plus the aggravation of the Sunni/Shia divide.

There are some positives here. The rapprochement between Iran and the United States ought to be built on, and the involvement of the Sunni tribes might well be critical. We also have a role in refining our soft-power approach—if I can use that shorthand way of saying it—in a number of countries. When we talk about the rule of law and democracy, we must start focusing much more on the recognition that you cannot have a winner-takes-all situation not just in these conflicts but in any state. You must give something to opposition groups because if you do not, you breed dissent. Indeed, we saw that in Northern Ireland. I remember my early involvement in the 1980s. It was very clear that a large section of the community—a minority, but a very important minority—felt discriminated against and excluded. That was bad enough in Northern Ireland. In the Middle East, it is deadly.