Iraq Inquiry

Lord Carrington of Fulham Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carrington of Fulham (Con)]

My Lords, as has been said, the Chilcot report is a dispiriting document. It is a sad catalogue of failure and incompetence. However, we need to move forward. Certainly there are lessons to be learned. I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, in her pessimism, I fear: I hope lessons will be learned but I am not confident that they will be.

Your Lordships, as keen students of history, will know that the mixture of political and Civil Service hubris and military overconfidence has not been confined to the Iraq war. It has characterised many British military engagements over the centuries, the Boer War, at the zenith of the British Empire, being a classic example. However, I do not want to speak about what went wrong. I want to look at the problems that our invasion of Iraq has created in the Middle East and what, if anything, we can do to help the region back on to an even keel.

I spend a great part of my life involved in the Middle East, as recorded in the Register of Lords’ Interests. For more than 30 years I have studied Islamic banking and finance and, indeed, at times earned my living as a Sharia-compliant banker. Over the years this has brought me into contact with many devout Muslims from all walks of life—rich, poor, traditional and western-educated. If there is one lesson I hope we can learn from the Chilcot report it is that, as the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, said on Wednesday last week,

“these Middle Eastern societies are extremely complex”.—[Official Report, 6/7/16; col. 2031.]

I would add that the variations in the Islamic religion are also much more complex than we often suppose. The conflicts in the region are not just between the Sunnis and the Shias, serious as those are. They have an overlay of historic disputes and enmities quite divorced from religion. Some are tribal—the historic differences between the Bedouin and the coastal Arab are far from forgotten. Some are interfamily, some are based on disputes over land, some are legacies of the Ottoman Empire, some inevitably go back to the League of Nations mandates given to us and the French, and few Gulf Arabs ever forget that Shia Iranians are not Shia Arabs.

If there is one message from all this, it is that we do not and cannot know what we are doing if we interfere in the politics of the region. Still less can we understand and anticipate the consequences of sending in troops.

That is not to say that we cannot be involved. We have very strong interests in the Arab world, but to think that we can tell Arabs and Arab nations how to resolve their conflicts, let alone impose a resolution on them, is deluding ourselves. As in Iraq, it leads to unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences, most of them very bloody. What we can do is to help our friends, of whom we have many in the region, to find their own solutions and to support them in implementing these solutions.

Western Christian nations interfering militarily in Muslim Arab conflicts cannot bring peace. Quite apart from our inability to understand the undercurrents of the conflict, a sure way of creating a temporary unity among the warring Arab parties is to give them a common enemy of a Christian soldier to fight. I would go further. If the Christian soldiers are replaced by Muslim soldiers that would be little better unless they are Arab Muslims.

I am not a Muslim but, as I have said, I have studied the religion for as long as I have been involved in Islamic finance and economics. Islam is a great, peaceful religion, quite as devoted to the values of human life, co-operation and love which many of us hold dear in Christianity and other Abrahamic religions. Many Muslims see no conflict between their religion and modern western life. However, other devout Muslims are torn between the modern world and the teachings of the Koran as interpreted by fundamentalist scholars. It would be a mistake to think that this is confined to the extreme fringes such as Daesh/ISIL. Many devout, kindly, deeply religious Arabs are at best ambivalent about their reaction to the acts of terrorism on western nations. Until we grapple with this and change these attitudes we will not be able to help in pacifying the Middle East.

Possibly, hope lies in that there are many Islamic scholars who wrestle with this challenge on a daily basis, seeking to provide guidance to the faithful in reconciling modern life with the teachings of the Koran and the Hadith. While non-Muslims cannot advise followers of Islam how to come terms with the modern world—or perhaps, more specifically, the western world—and the place of their great religion within it, we can encourage those who seek to do so.

We have a large Muslim population in the United Kingdom. We do a lot to support the study of the Koran and the Hadith in our universities and we have many distinguished Muslims in public life. However, we could do more. It is in helping an understanding of Islam, and by materially assisting those religious leaders who seek to find solutions to this problem, that lies our best hope of helping the forces of peace to prevail in the Middle East. Sending in the troops is never the solution.