Iran

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ben Wallace (Wyre and Preston North) (Con)]

At the outset, may I declare that I co-chair the all-party group on Iran with the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), and that I have held that position for the past six years?

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) on securing this timely debate, because it is important that the House move to more discussion of Iran. From what I have heard so far, the debate has been very good, and I have certainly enjoyed the contributions of my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames), whose speech was extremely good and clear about where we are trying to go and the problems we face, and the right hon. Member for Blackburn. I also congratulate the Foreign Secretary on making it clear that the Government are not advocating force or even calling for force to deal with this problem. One of the problems I have with the motion is that although I do not think military action is the correct way forward, given the current position in Iran, I also do not believe that we should ever tie a Government—I do not believe in the principle of ruling something out of such a policy. We have to examine events as they come and see what develops.

I am not going to argue the point about the International Atomic Energy Agency and whether Iran is developing a nuclear weapon. It might be more suitable to have this debate after the inspection is completed and we see the reports from the recent access in Iran. What worries me is what happens after this stage. In the six years that I have done this job in the all-party group, I have never met an official in the United States Government, in the Foreign Office or in the Israeli Government who privately has not said to me, “If Iran thinks it wants a bomb and is really determined to have one, it will get it.”

I have also yet to find many officials who say that they think sanctions will work in the long term to prevent Iran from getting what it has desired not for five or 10 years, but since 1968. In fact, the Americans helped the Shah to build the reactor in Iran; General Electric was involved in that. It has been a long-standing ambition of Iran to possess nuclear power for energy and, I suspect, for nuclear weapons to add to its view that it is a superpower not only in the region, but in the world. It did not launch a tortoise and an insect up into space a few years ago just for fun; it did so to show that it, too, could enter the space race. Unfortunately, Iran was entering that race about 40 years too late, but that was very much about the psyche of Iran and Iran saying, “We, too, can do it. We, too, can be a superpower.”

We have to ask ourselves the question: what happens if Iran produces a bomb? Both Pakistan and India produced a bomb, as did North Korea, in isolation. If Iran does produce a bomb or gets close to doing so, we must ask ourselves what the plan B is and what we are to do. That is where the question for the United Kingdom becomes separate from the question for Israel and the United States. The question for Britain and Her Majesty’s Government is: is it in Britain’s interest to take military action? I know what is in Israel’s national interest, and I defend Israel’s taking that action to defend itself, but that is not the same as what is in Britain’s national interest. The challenge for the policy makers and for the Government will be to prove to this House and to my constituents why taking some form of military action, most likely outside the United Nations and perhaps in support of only one or two other countries—Israel and the United States—is in the interests of my constituents and in the interest of the national security of Britain. That is a much further jump to make.

We need to point out differences between Iraq and Iran. Until recently, Iran certainly ruled by consent—we did not like it and we did not choose the policies, but it ruled by consent. Saddam Hussein never ruled by consent and was a military dictator in the region, and although we should rightly be concerned about Iran’s moving—it is more than drifting—towards being a totalitarian state, we must remember that there are differences.

We must also remember how things appear from an Iranian point of view. If you are an Iranian, your neighbourhood is not very nice; Saudi Arabia is ideologically opposed to the Shi’a sect and thinks that you are heretics. I come from and live in Lancashire, where in the 17th century puritans and Catholics were hammering each other, and the view is the same in this region. Pakistan developed a nuclear weapon and was rewarded with a seat at the top table. That part of the world is unstable, and the arms race has already started; Israel possesses a nuclear weapon and it refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Iranians will feel that there is an inconsistency in the west’s position. A number of resolutions, both at the IAEA and the UN, have asked Israel to sign up to that treaty, but it is has consistently refused to do so. That consistency is where we have to start.

We could also try to redouble our efforts on other measures. I congratulate the Foreign Office on the investment that has been made in the past few years to try to double our presence around the world, or to increase it in many embassies. However, we have to know our opponent when we are dealing with Iran. It is full of a separation of powers and full of personalities, because that is how the politics is decided there. The right hon. Member for Blackburn knew that when he tried that communication.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend mentions differences within Iran, and there are huge differences of opinion with Ahmadinejad; hundreds were killed after he was elected, five people were hanged last night in Tehran and the middle classes are against him. We may well find in the next few months or years that he cannot stay in power and is replaced. Let us just hope that that happens and sense comes from the people of Iran, because I am not sure that we can do very much from the outside.

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[Mr Bob Ainsworth (Coventry North East) (Lab)]

I apologise, Mr Deputy Speaker, for any mix-up that may have occurred.

There are two people to whom the House ought to be grateful including, first, the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron). I attended the Backbench Business Committee with him to push for this debate. I made it clear that I did not agree with the motion he had drafted, but that it was important that it should be tabled. He has come to the Chamber to express an unpopular point of view. Long may people do so, because challenging the consensus in the House, as elsewhere, is enormously important. He has done so tonight to good effect, although I disagree with the motion and will not vote for it. I will vote for the amendment tabled by the other Member who has made a particularly important contribution tonight: the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind).

We ought to be grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman because I have the greatest respect for his knowledge and experience, and for a Member with such knowledge and experience to reveal that he believes that an American military intervention in Iran would have temporary, limited consequences is of great value. It reveals—and he is not alone in this—that there is, both in America and in this country, what can only be described as a war party. That justifies the motion tabled by the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay in the first place: the notion that America could intervene militarily in yet another Muslim country with only limited, temporary consequences is believed, but it is complete and utter nonsense.

The consequences of an American military intervention, let alone an Israeli intervention, in Iran would be profound and long-lasting, as has been said by many other Members, and it should be avoided. That is not to say that we should take the option of military intervention off the table. We are dealing with a police state. Iran is a proud country with a rich culture, a strong middle class and a young population, but they have been repressed by a bunch of paranoids. Yes, those people put a religious connotation on that, but we are dealing with a police state. History surely teaches us that we do not deal effectively with a police state by telling it before we even talk to it that, in the final analysis, if all else has failed, we will do nothing about it.

Let us be equally wary of the people we are dealing with who are repressing the people of Iran, and of the war party, which is happy, whether it does it in the tones of the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington or in the more belligerent tones of some American politicians who are pushing us towards an end that we are all—one would hope that people in Iran wish this too—desperate to avoid. Let us voice our desperation at the same time as our determination to find a reasonable solution that suits the Iranian people as well as peace in the region and peace in the world. That is enormously important.

[Bob Stewart]

We are already doing as much diplomatically as we can, but we have to put as much effort as we can into encouraging the growth of democracy and encouraging those people who are against the Iranian Government so that somehow they have the courage and support from outside to break out and get rid of the hoodlums who are running the country and causing so much chaos throughout the world.

[Mr Ainsworth]

That is exactly the point that I want to come on to: the limitations of soft power on its own when dealing with a regime such as Iran.

There are two issues that I want to raise: first, satellite communications to the people of Iran have been jammed locally, with possible health consequences because of the powerful jamming equipment that is used, and they have been jammed at source as well. We are effectively doing nothing about that. The victims have been punished, but not the perpetrators. The Iranian regime has jammed those signals, but when Eutelsat and other providers raised that with the Iranians, they were told, “Oh, dreadfully sorry, there’s not a lot we can do about it.” Then we wind up the BBC Persian service, with Farsi1, Asia News Network and Voice of America being taken off those satellite platforms, which would effectively be shut down if that did not happen. We are depriving the Iranian population of access to international opinion. We are allowing those stations to be closed, rather than taking effective legal, international action against the regime, which prevents its own people from listening to world opinion. We have to do something about that. I ask the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), who is on the Treasury Bench, to take effective action within the European Union and within the international forum of the United Nations to prevent such activity to the maximum extent possible.

There is one other area in which we can help. Increasing numbers of diplomats and others are defecting from Iran. “Defecting” is a cold war word that has almost slipped out of our vocabulary, but there are people who are so contemptuous of what they are being asked to do by the Iranian regime that they are walking away from their jobs and defecting. We are not making them as welcome as we should and thereby encouraging others to do the same. We are not allowing them access. We are not giving them visas or platforms to tell us what is going on within the system to the extent that we should do in order to expose the iniquities of the regime.

I appeal to the Government to consider how those defectors can be encouraged. Yes, I know there is a political imperative to deal with the immigration regime, but let us look at visas for that category of people so that we can be educated about what they are being asked to do that is against the interests of their own people. Those are two areas of soft power that we ought to make work.

Although I do not support everything he said tonight, I totally support the amendment of the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and the tone and content of the speech from the Foreign Secretary. That is absolutely the right policy, which we must stick to.

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[Mike Gapes]

I will give way in a moment.

With the Defence Committee several years ago, I visited the KBOT terminal at the top of the gulf of Hormuz, just south of Basra, from where, along with the ABOT terminal, most of the Iraqi oil from Basra leaves. That was a few weeks after motor launches from Iran had set off bombs underneath the terminal to try to destroy it. The area is now much more strongly protected, but the potential for a conflagration involving Iran, leading not necessarily to a blockage of the strait of Hormuz, but at least to attacks on facilities, urban centres or bases in the area, is great. We as an international community therefore need to be careful and measured and to send out clear signals, whether in relation to mad speeches by Newt Gingrich or to the Israeli Government, that the use of language referring to military action is not necessarily the best solution to the crisis.

I can understand why politicians in Israel are worried. I would be worried if not just the President of a country but a succession of its leaders had said that they wanted to wipe out my state, which they regarded as a cancer, but we need also to point out, as senior figures in Israel have, that military action by Israel will not be in its own long-term interests regarding its relations with the Arab world.

[Bob Stewart]

Military action would be extremely difficult. There are at least 10 different nuclear sites in Iran, and trying to obliterate them would be almost impossible for Israel alone, so military action by Israel alone is probably very unlikely or, at the very least, unwise.

[Mike Gapes]

I agree, and that allows me to move on to what I think is actually happening.

Somebody once said that war was diplomacy by other means, but we have a third way, which is Stuxnet, targeted assassinations and unexplained events. I am not sure whether we can attribute blame or responsibility in any particular direction, but it is quite clear that over recent months and years various things have happened to aspects of Iran’s nuclear programme, and events have occurred which might indicate that, without having a war, attempts are being made to delay the nuclear programme, the development of centrifuges and other things.

If the Iranian regime is really determined to get nuclear weapons, and I fear that elements of it are, it will do so at whatever cost, but others in Iran, including some in the regime, recognise that there are benefits to be gained not by acquiring nuclear weapons but by saying, “We are a proud country and we want to be noticed, so we will give the impression that we are moving in that direction so that people notice us, states in the Gulf region become fearful of us and the rest of the world says, ‘Iran is a country that matters.’”

The Foreign Affairs Committee went to Iran in 2007. Mention has been made of its chief nuclear negotiator, Mr Jalili. I was involved in an hour-long exchange with him in a meeting. It was a fascinating exchange, because he started off by explaining that having a nuclear weapon was un-Islamic and forbidden. We went on to have a long discussion about the additional protocol, the non-proliferation treaty and various issues to do with the IAEA. I came away realising that he was very intelligent and calculating. He must be a tough person to negotiate with. I was not involved in real negotiations. Speaking with me was like practice for him before he dealt with the Ministers. It was apparent that Iran is clear in the way that it uses the arguments.

I suspect, as the Foreign Affairs Committee said in 2007, that Iran will at some point get to breakout capability. However, as was said earlier, that does not necessarily mean that it will have a nuclear weapon. It will have the capability to get a nuclear weapon quickly when it gets to that technological position. However, it might choose not to go that far, but to have just the potential, because that will make people notice it. Iran is a country that wants to be noticed.

The tragedy is that Iran has a young, dynamic population that wants to engage with the rest of the world. Anybody who has been to Iran knows that. People come up to visitors in the street and talk to them openly. They criticise their Government openly in a way that does not happen in all other countries in the region; and yet, at the same time, Iran has a theocratic regime at its cap. I do not think that it matters who succeeds Ahmadinejad, because he is not the power in Iran. The power is Ayatollah Khamenei, who is the supreme leader. It is he who rejected the approach from President Obama. It is he who determines where the political process goes, including who can run as a candidate and who can stand for election. Iran has a quasi-pluralistic and quasi-democratic system, but with a theocratic cap. Somehow or other, that system will have to change. Revolutions run out of steam. At some point, the voice of the Iranian people will come through. We have to be clever and not undermine that in the way that we handle this crisis.

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[Patrick Mercer]

I am most grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend. However, the words still sit uneasily with me. I do not believe that we are in the business of tinkering with world peace.

I found Defence questions earlier today very depressing. The right hon. Member for Belfast North said in this debate that this situation is the biggest threat to world peace. We are already involved in a regional war in this area. As my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) made so very clear, the country that we are talking about borders Afghanistan, and the regional war stretches through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and touches nuclear-tipped Russia at one end and the potentially nuclear-tipped Iran at the other. We cannot afford any ill-judged military action.

I do not want to sound like a stuck record and to go through all the points that have been made about Iran’s hideous rhetoric; the fact that she may be working on a weapons programme: the fact that, as we speak, she has troops involved in an exercise in southern Iran, called in support of the military leadership; the fact that she is threatening to close the strait of Hormuz; and so on. However, I will say this. When I visited Tehran, some interesting things came to mind. For instance, until I was taken down the boulevard of Bobby Sands—there is a boulevard of that name in the centre of Tehran—I had not realised that Great Britain, and Iran’s relationship with Great Britain, had such high relevance in Iranian and Persian thinking. I had not realised that Great Britain punched above its weight in Iranian thinking. I had not realised that Iran saw Britain as perfidious Albion—I am generalising hugely, of course.

Much of the west’s foreign policy is seen, obviously wrongly, as being dictated by ourselves as a tiny but important nation. I had not realised that a Tehranian might say, “Heavens above, it’s raining again. It’s typical British weather.” All the ills of the world seem to be laid at this country’s door. That puts us in an extremely important position in negotiating with Iran. Many of the Foreign Secretary’s comments therefore give me heart.

When I was in Iran, the Iranians said to us, “Are you honestly suggesting that we support al-Qaeda? Please demonstrate.” Of course, we said, “Well, we have the evidence.” “Do you?” “No, we only have circumstantial evidence.” Of course, we are used to hearing misinformation and black propaganda—we need look no further than our intervention in Iraq under the last Government, in the second Gulf war. In Iran, we said, for instance, “We have heard that the central shura of al-Qaeda is resident here in Tehran”. The reply was, “Please point it out, because it is not. There is no evidence to suggest that that is the case.”

Similarly, we asked British troops in Afghanistan whether they could demonstrate whether any of the weapons being used against them had come from Iran. The answer was yes, but there were also weapons that had come from France, the USA, Germany and Britain herself. There was nothing to indicate a relationship between al-Qaeda and Iran, despite everything that we were hearing from the western press.

Here is the rub: the single most important thing I heard in Iran was that the current generation of leaders there fully understand what it is like to be involved in a war of national survival. Many of the individuals who are now of political maturity were young men of military age during the Iran-Iraq war. One Member—forgive me, I cannot remember which—said earlier that nuclear weapons had only ever been used once. That is true, but let us not forget that in the Iran-Iraq war, when hundreds of thousands of men were killed in action and millions of people died, weapons of mass destruction were used willingly.

[Bob Stewart]

I am sure my hon. Friend would agree that that war was started by Iraq and, to the best of my knowledge, Iran has not started a war.

[Patrick Mercer]

I thank my hon. and gallant Friend and entirely agree. My point is that many of the current generation of decision makers, if that is the right phrase in Iran—we cannot look at them as one cohesive political body—have experienced war at first hand. They understand what weapons of mass destruction are like, and my opinion is that if they are allowed to get hold of such weaponry, they will probably use it.

That puts us in an exceedingly difficult position on the one hand and an exceedingly powerful position on the other hand. I say to the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary that if we want our military position to be credible, let us make it so. Let us not have instances, such as we had in the past, of the Royal Navy being embarrassed in the Gulf. Let us ensure that our operations are above reproach. We cannot be anything less than credible.

In the current white-hot and dangerous situation, we have the opportunity to negotiate. When it comes down to it, no side really wants to fight. Let us therefore take the opportunity for Great Britain to prove that she is not perfidious, and to speak to her friends in Israel and America and lead the way. We can use our influence, to use an awful aphorism, to punch above our weight. Although we have the military option, let us pray that we never, ever have to use it.