Iraq

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Wednesday 25th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)]

My Lords, one always looks at a list of these kinds of debates on the Middle East and thinks that one will hear speeches from the usual suspects. Then, of course, one is astonished when one hears a rather remarkable delivery from someone who does not conform to the traditional view that most of us share in this House. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, will not be surprised to know that I disagree with his analysis. I assure him that, although my notes were written before I heard him, he has not persuaded me that his recipe for success would have delivered nirvana in Iraq.

I am sorry that the title of this debate is about security and the political situation in Iraq. I think that points to the fallacy of western thinking in the Middle East which, in an increasingly interdependent and interconnected world, still sees developments there as taking place in sovereign states on the basis that they are entirely autonomous and self-contained units, completely in charge of their own destinies. That was never so in the Middle East, and even less so in the Arab world, which has a religious, linguistic and cultural construct irrespective of boundaries until recent history. Therefore, I will speak about Iraq today in the context too of developments in Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

It is tempting to think of this current crisis and the potential break-up of Iraq as an entirely sectarian war between Sunni and Shia—the settling of scores, we are told, that are 1,500 years old. That is too simplistic an understanding of Islam, of the tribal loyalties and allegiances of the region and, moreover, it is a narrative which detaches the millions of Muslims who have embraced modernity and thrive in the interconnected and globalised world, at peace with themselves and with each other, both Sunni and Shia.

For us in the United Kingdom not to recognise our role in the history and geopolitics of the region is to deny that the West—most notably the United States and the UK—is heavily implicated in what has gone wrong across the region. The current period has its roots in the end of the Cold War when the four left-facing Arab nationalist countries in the region—Iraq, Syria, Libya and Algeria—were left without superpower support with the demise of the Soviet Union. It is instructive to see that not only have three of those countries been engulfed in conflict to a greater or lesser degree, but that the end of bipolarity has extended instability across the whole of the Arab world to include neighbouring countries too.

Our erroneous support for Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war, which resulted in the deaths of millions on both sides, and then US exhortations after the Kuwaiti liberation for Shias and Kurds to rise up against him—and then abandoning them when they did so to Saddam’s further brutality—cost tens of thousands of lives as his repression increased. The years of no-fly zones which enabled the Kurds to establish the roots of their autonomous region, and which was never going to be a long-term solution, culminated in the Iraq war of 2003, for which the party opposite bears so much responsibility. We will have to see the results of the Chilcot report to know the full extent of that culpability.

It is invidious to argue that the Iraq war has not led to where we are now. Of course it has. The House may have forgotten that on 23 March 2003, within three days of the invasion, all 22 countries of the Arab League, meeting in Cairo, supported a resolution condemning the invasion as a violation of the UN charter and demanding a complete withdrawal of US and British troops from Iraqi soil. Kuwait was the sole exception and it had its debts to repay to the US. There was not an iota of legitimacy in that war, as the Arab League saw it. It was no war of liberation for them.

So we moved from the upheaval created by the events of 9/11 and the Iraq war to the Arab spring. In the interim, all the countries of the Middle East experienced a rise of jihadi violence, something not known as a phenomenon in the Arab world until the invasion of Iraq. A comment piece in the New Statesman, a Labour-supporting magazine, says in this week’s edition in a colourful attack on Tony Blair—to which the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, probably referred—that,

“according to a 2007 study, the Iraq war ‘generated a stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks’”.

I turn to the situation in Syria. In 2011, when Bashar al-Assad started torturing and shooting dead unarmed, innocent protestors whose crime was to ask for delivery on his own promised reforms and for some freedom, we were urged across both Houses to do nothing. I called for limited support through the sale of arms for the Syrian opposition forces from late 2011. I kept to that position until the Syria vote in the House of Commons on 29 August 2013 and our debate here in the Lords. Assisting one side in a war is not of itself immoral. If it changes the symmetry of war it may result in a lower loss of life as the other side is more inclined to sue for peace.

Any who are following the debates here in the past five years will have heard extraordinary interventions describing the sacrifices that countries have to make, whether they wish to be there or not. I particularly pay tribute to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay—who is in his usual place and will be speaking today—with which I entirely concur and by which I was enormously moved. His presence in our House is a great credit to us.

In the period between 2011 and the current day it is true that the civil war in Syria has become more sectarian, but it did not start out so. There was a period until the end of 2012 when the conflict was mainly between Assad’s forces and the Free Syrian Army. Latterly it was joined by Jabhat al-Nusra—which was an offshoot of al-Qaeda, not ISIS—and ISIS came into the frame only last year within Syria. My point is that there was a period when action by the West might have resulted in a lower loss of life, a lower cost in human misery and certainly a lower cost in the treasure that is and will be expended to bring stability to the entire region as it faces conflagration.

We are now in a situation where that conflagration, which first engulfed Iraq, then Syria and now Iraq again, seems to be beyond our capabilities to control. I have no solutions to offer that the Government will not already have thought of. Clearly it is a priority to secure a unity Government in Iraq inclusive of all sides. Clearly we need to impress upon the Kurds that doing a land grab in the middle of this crisis does not constitute legitimacy, so they cannot use the status quo ante as a precedent to expand their reach. Clearly we need to work with new urgency on a Geneva III. Surely the facts on the ground point us towards bringing both sides together in Syria in reconciliation and in common purpose against the jihadis.

We also need to use our leverage with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to cut off channels of support for ISIS. It cannot be sufficient for them to say that they are helpless and cannot control private or charitable donations, although I have to say that ISIS is swimming in funds from Mosul and its various extortion rackets; some $3 billion, we are told.

Let me say a brief word about the ideology of ISIS and the extremist jihadi groups. If their intention is to establish a caliphate in the Middle East, they will not stop at borders. Yes, they consolidate their gains, but the very ideology of a pan-Islamic caliphate is founded on the dismissal of boundaries. A further several decades of war confronts us should they be allowed to establish themselves. It is not a prospect we can countenance, and nor should we. We need to be prepared to act when and where there is an opportunity for us to do so, be it through intelligence, strategic support, force protection or the use of bases in the near term. In the longer term, our choices become harder. We are a UNSC power and our interests are engaged in preventing a major threat to international peace and security both abroad and here at home. Our interests are engaged to prevent a terrorist state controlling vital oil fields and maritime trading routes. Our interests are engaged because we are bound with those who are suffering the fatalities of innocent civilians in our common humanity.

I have said in the past that, while we cannot know of the consequences that any action on our part might bring, we know that inaction has consequences as well. This last year has shown us that. In the end, choices will have to be made as the Middle East is too strategically important on moral, humanitarian and economic grounds for us simply to be bystanders.