Gulf Countries and Qatar Debate

Full Debate: Read Full Debate

Lord Desai

Main Page: Lord Desai (Crossbench - Life peer)
Tuesday 11th July 2017

(6 years, 8 months ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text
Lord Desai Portrait Lord Desai (Lab)
- Hansard - -

My Lords, it is not really an interest to declare, but I have appeared frequently on Al Jazeera, and did so even before it started, because it used me as a person on whom to train their interviewers.

The puzzle about this issue is—what is going on? It makes absolutely no sense on a logical level. Countries known to back extremists and jihadists are accusing each other of backing extremists and jihadists. They may be saying, “My jihadist is better than your jihadist, therefore I can back mine but you are a villain to back yours”. When I was speaking yesterday on the security debate, the noble Lord, Lord King, asked me why I had not talked about Shias and the differences there, when I talked about Middle East history. Of course, the Shia-Sunni problem is there. But the puzzle is that Gulf Cooperation Council countries have been behind the scenes financing and backing the very hard wars going on in Syria and before in Libya and elsewhere. They were like puppet masters, manipulating things. That is a continuation of the Middle East war, which has been going on for at least the last 10 years, if not longer, but is now coming closer to home.

One never knows in these matters, but it may be that President Donald Trump did not quite understand the dynamics of what is going on in the Middle East and that in his first big trip abroad, talking to all his friends, he revealed something that the CIA knew. Perhaps he said to the Saudis, “Let me tell you a secret—did you know that these guys actually support so and so?”. I am just guessing, because there is no reason otherwise why these people, who knew what each other were doing, should suddenly break up.

Now that the Syrian war is about to end and ISIS has been temporarily defeated, the war will move very close to essentially a Shia-Sunni war. Qatar is the friendliest Sunni country for Iran—and it is also a fairly rich country. I am just guessing that basically the Middle East is preparing now, I would not say for a final confrontation, because these things go on for ever and ever, but for the confrontation going on in the GCC region. The war is coming home, and it is partly to do with American suspicion of Iran, but also because the Saudis are trying to get more ambitious about the leadership of the GCC. I see absolutely no reason why anyone should think that the GCC should have a common foreign policy. The ASEAN does not have one, so why should the GCC? What nonsense is this?

I would have very low expectations of success if we intervened, either for us or for the Americans, because we have very limited cachet with these people. We sell them arms and we buy their oil—but we sell arms to all of them and buy oil from all of them, at least with the GCC countries. So we have to be careful, when we go diplomatically mediating, that we do not do something that means that finally the whole thing is blamed on us and everybody else escapes blame.

I have fears that this thing is not going to be settled any time soon. I suspect that America basically wants to get back into the Iran question and break the accord that Obama and the EU have carefully constructed. The voter base from which Trump comes did not like the Iran settlement; the Republican Party does not like it and wants to disrupt it as soon as it can.

As an economist, I can offer explanations without being anywhere near the real world. This is a crisis in which we should be very careful not to assume that the quarrelling parties necessarily want peace. Let us hope they do not fight, but it is going to be very difficult to avoid it, especially because Turkey is spoiling for some larger role in the area and its friendship with Iran has been growing. We could get into very troublesome waters. I urge Her Majesty’s Government to inform us, from whatever knowledge they can reveal, whether there is a serious, rational explanation of what is going on. As I said before, it makes no sense in ordinary terms. I therefore believe that, as in many previous wars, the two parties are spoiling for conflict. That has happened before and it will happen again.