Iran

Debate between Jack Straw and John Redwood

Monday 20th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

First, I declare that I co-chair the all-party parliamentary group on Iran, along with the hon. Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace). I congratulate the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) on securing this important debate. I was one of the people who supported him in obtaining the debate, although it will be noted that I have not signed his motion. If there is a vote, as I suspect there will be, I will vote for the amendment in the names of the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) and many other right hon. and hon. Members.

I will first offer the House briefly my experiences of negotiating with the Iranians as Foreign Secretary. I visited Tehran on five occasions and I am the only Foreign Secretary who has visited Tehran since the Iranian revolution in 1979. I will also offer a brief assessment of where we are today.

I want to make it clear to the House that in supporting the amendment, I do not for a moment believe that we are anywhere near reaching the bar for military action. I am sure that I speak for my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench in saying that none of us is giving the Foreign Secretary carte-blanche approval for military action, and I am sure that he would not see it that way. The other side of the coin—I say this to the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay—is that I do not think it reasonable to ask the British Foreign Secretary, on behalf of the British Government and Parliament, to negotiate on this difficult issue, but to remove one option that may, in distant circumstances, be necessary.

Some may ask how I square that position with the statement that I made in November 2004, when I was asked on the BBC whether I thought that Israel or the United States would go in for the bombing of Iran. I said:

“Not only is that inconceivable but I think the prospect of it happening is inconceivable.”

That was my judgment at the time. The fact that it has not happened in the intervening seven and a half years may suggest that I was not far off the mark. The more important point is why I made that intervention as stridently as I did. One reason was that we were engaged in two wars, as was the United States. It was inconceivable at that time, given the difficulties in both theatres, that the United States would wish to engage in a further military action even if it had the capability, which I doubt it did. The second reason was that we were making progress in negotiations with the reformist regime in Iran.

I accept what the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay said about there having been a number of missed opportunities in dealing with Iran. Tony Blair asked me to go to Tehran as a positive response to President Khatami’s reaching out to the west straight after 9/11. Mr Blair took a risk there. He responded in a positive way by sending me. We had the support of the US Department of State. I am sad to say that our efforts were partly undermined by the line in President Bush’s speech at the end of January 2003 and by other efforts to undermine the strategy, although not by the State Department. That said, we made progress with Khatami. After an extraordinary and tense negotiation in October 2003, when Joschka Fischer, Dominique de Villepin and I came very close to walking out altogether, we got the Iranians to agree to a series of measures, including effectively abandoning their work on a nuclear programme and signing an additional protocol under the non-proliferation treaty. The effectiveness of that agreement is shown by the US national intelligence estimate from four years later, which stated:

“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program”.

[Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

On reflection, does the right hon. Gentleman think that the war in Iraq increased the stability or the instability of the middle east?

[Mr Straw]

I hope the right hon. Gentleman will allow me not to go down that particular rabbit hole. I have given endless evidence to the inquiry into Iraq, and I do not resile from my support for that military action, not least for the reasons that my hon. Friend the Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Mr McCann) gave. We can have that debate on another occasion, but it is incontrovertible, as the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay showed, that the Iraq war changed the balance of power in the region. We knew that it was going to do that, but that provides still more reason for us to use better our relations with the US.

Progress was made, but for a variety of reasons, including errors by the US, the reformists lost out and President Ahmadinejad came to office in the summer of 2005. Since then, there has been a gradual deterioration in relations with Iran, despite, in my judgment, the best efforts of successive British Governments and many others. I wish that I shared the view of the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay about whether it will be possible to achieve a shift by the current Administration without any pressure. I have literally sat across a table from President Ahmadinejad trying to negotiate with him—an interesting situation that did not lead to any great progress. Since 2009 and the disgraceful attitude of the Iranian authorities towards the elections, and then following their reaction to the Arab spring, things have got worse, not better.