Middle East: Jihadism

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Dykes]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the threat from the spread of militant aggressive jihadism in the Middle East.

[Lord Dykes (LD)]

My Lords, I am very grateful that I succeeded in getting this debate—a brief debate on a very deep and important subject, particularly at this very moment. I am most grateful to all those participating in it, particularly my noble friend for coming here. I embarrass her deliberately by saying that she is an incredibly hard-working Minister with far too many tasks, and I am grateful that she is fitting this one in as well. I am equally grateful to the Leader of the Opposition for attending and herself responding to this debate.

Just over a week ago, in a searing moment of immensely chilling import, the West as a whole realised yet again just how futile and tragic had been the originally illegal US-UK invasion of Iraq 11 years ago. Although it had to be later certificated ex post by a hog-tied and embarrassed United Nations, the invasion had left a broken country with many thousands of innocent civilians killed. The Daily Mirror yesterday, referring to Tony Blair, estimated the total now to be 650,000 since the invasion. It left a judicially murdered dictator, a demolished professional army and a deliberately wrecked civil service infrastructure. Never before, even including the humiliating defeat of the US in Vietnam, had the United States looked so incompetent in its government and military structures.

I remember with some pride that we as an entire political party marched officially with a million and a half people down Piccadilly to try to stop that wretched invasion. Blair ignored those passionate entreaties, and has for ever lost his reputation as a formerly very effective and distinguished national leader.

We must all have enormous sympathy now for the efforts of President Obama to deal with this subject. Of course, the publication of the Chilcot report later this year will throw what I guess will be an ominous light on the crafty dealings between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair on why they went to war: the US spluttering indignantly about the threat of a French veto—the first ever major one, if they were to exercise it—against the background of more than 30 American vetoes since 1968, allowing increasingly extreme Israeli Governments of growing right-wing tendency to flout international law at will in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Indeed, we are all now led to believe that there has been meddling at the highest level between Washington and London to stop enormous amounts of revelations about the Bush-Blair conversations in the Chilcot report text. I ask myself whether they would also reveal details of collusion between other countries in the Middle East—Saudi Arabia perhaps; I do not know—as occurred in the Suez debacle, when the US, with a virtuous President, stopped Britain and France from geopolitical insanity.

More recently, we were able to witness common sense at last in resisting the strident calls for western military intervention in Syria—less wisdom, of course, in handling Libya, where another dictator ended up murdered without even a show trial, and the usual complete paralysis now over what is happening in Egypt. Meanwhile, the sinister expansion of militant jihadism has been fuelled not least by the geopolitical blunders of the western powers, who have all too often found it impossible not to interfere in the wrong way in other people’s countries, relentlessly telling them what to do as if our democracies were both perfect and powerful.

The latest situation in Iraq is terrifying. I hope that there is no worse news on the military side today; I have not had a chance to see the morning news yet. Least of all can the West ever intervene successfully in what is a medieval struggle between militant and vicious Sunni and Shia factions, whose mindsets are literally unfathomable to occidental minds. Only a part of this imbroglio can be blamed on the USA and its unusually obsequious acolytes, of which the UK is usually one, sadly. The Americans themselves perceive, as we all do, how starkly the isolation of Iran for many reckless reasons was such an enormous blunder by the West. It must have had endless well intentioned senior State Department officials weeping with frustration. Once again, we need to thank President Obama warmly for his valiant efforts to achieve a settlement, aided by a moderate Iranian head of government.

If the geopolitical wreckage is huge, the solutions are very difficult to perceive. Just how does the West help the sea of moderate, peaceful citizens in these hapless and tragic Arabian countries who surely want democracy to arrive to help them but are not experienced in bringing it about, particularly as our record of intervention has been so negative for them? Above all, I am sure, we grieve for the fate of women and children in these tragedies. Only little Tunisia, a small country, seems to be progressing as a good example, if the good will is there.

I agree with David Aaronovitch, who wrote in the Times last Thursday about the “brave journalists” covering these conflict areas and that,

“it is practically impossible to get a good idea of what goes on in areas ‘controlled’ by groups such as Isis”.

In the mean time, the growth of militant jihadism of both Sunni and Shia varieties is spreading not only in the full conflict zones such as Syria and now, alas, Iraq. It is gaining ground in the Muslim areas of west Africa, perhaps slightly more slowly in the Maghreb countries, and of course among Muslim communities in western and some Asian countries, as well, of course, as in Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan.

Above all, it remains to be seen how this will play out in Afghanistan, where western intervention was at its most supine and foolish. I am glad that British forces are now leaving at long last. The USA was obsessed with the equally unwise invasion by the Soviet Union of that complex country and worked with the previous generation of Taliban to drive the Russians out—ironically ending, at the same time, the best civil society that women with jobs and children in schools had ever enjoyed in that sad country. In the infamous film “Charlie Wilson’s War”, those in Hollywood conveniently failed to mention the Taliban at all, yet their country is now fighting the Taliban.

President Obama has at last espoused non-direct intervention, although even in his second term he has to wrap up the rhetoric in case the wrong people in Washington and elsewhere seek to undermine and make mischief. I fervently pray that this will be the permanent American doctrine from now on, replacing Theodore Rooseveltian imperialism with modern international self-restraint and a devotion to the genuine wishes of the whole UN, not just to partial and limited lobbies nagging the Security Council endlessly. We must for ever remember the startlingly sagacious warning of President Eisenhower in his valedictory: “Beware the inexorable rise of the military-industrial complex”. His advice was totally ignored for reasons of oil, money, imperialism and the helping of the rise of the aggressive form of Zionism which is letting down the marvellous country of Israel itself.

No longer can we therefore leave all this chaos in the febrile hands of one country, let alone the USA. A major problem right now is handling the Iraqi PM, Mr al-Maliki, who has apparently been far too fierce as a partisan and authoritarian Shia leader. He is deeply unpopular as well with many Iraqis who are not very political, such as the Sunni minority and a lot of people in the Kurdish entity. Some locals think that human rights are more abused nowadays than they were by Saddam Hussein. Incidentally, on the only visit that I have paid to Iraq, in 1988, he was then the chief friend of the USA—so much so that we recall that the Americans publicly declared that the Halabja killings had been done by the Iranian regime since Iran was then the devil, as it was later. Saddam himself was a client of the US and the UK. Who in the Middle East and elsewhere, I wonder, persuaded them to change their minds about this person?

All this confusion and cynical manoeuvring leaves the broad public of the western countries in a state of total bewilderment. Having accepted with some reluctance the need to fight al-Qaeda after 9/11, the outrage in America which gave us all enormous sympathy for the United States, they now see other groups with strange names springing up both in the ghastly Syrian civil war and elsewhere. The trouble is that we all rush to denounce them as terrorists—for those who wish to offend, there is an even worse description—but we never bother to ask what they want of their own countries and of the West. I do not recall a single TV or radio programme where a senior Taliban person has been allowed to air their views on the western media. We know that the Taliban, all too brutally, discourages women from having human rights and equality, but is this hyperbole from the western media as well? Is there any rationale to it? Why do we not know? We are ignorant of the facts. We urgently need to secure further guidance and information from Turkey in this multifaceted contextual struggle. I take no pleasure in echoing the conclusion of many western observers that somehow the errors and blunders of the West have spurred on the spread of the jihadi impetus. That conclusion seems unfair to a well intentioned western society, but we need to probe its depths.

However, we can start with some initiatives. For a start, the UN, especially its Security Council, can no longer be the plaything of the leading powers in the old historical context. I want to say something at the risk of offending other people who, like myself, are long-standing friends of Israel: I have been a friend of Israel ever since I went there in 1970 and it is a fabulous country with a wonderful people, but they are increasingly badly let down on foreign policy and policies towards Palestine by an increasingly extreme, right-wing Government, sadly doing the wrong things and making the wrong decisions. I say that even now, after the tragic kidnapping of the three young Israeli seminary students; I hope that they will be released as soon as possible, but the way to deal with that is not the way in which the Israeli Government are doing it.

The Palestinians must have their place in the sun and we should respect, not denounce, their common Government of technocrats and Hamas. The quartet has been hopeless in this sense for many years; it has simply betrayed the Palestinians, whose elections have been postponed for far too long by President Abbas. After all, Palestine cannot be the only country in the world literally without its own Government and elections. The UN has to respond if this tragic situation continues.

We also need to accept that the eventual outcome in Syria will be the Syrians’ decision, not ours, and that President Assad is as legitimate, unfortunately, as most leaders in Arabia. The US seems never to criticise Saudi Arabia despite appalling human rights abuses there, especially those visited on women. I hope fervently that the UN will act to halt the mass executions now threatened by the courts in Egypt. Has the US said anything about this?

New elections must now surely be held in Iraq to seek to secure a moderate sectarian outcome, which will need to be supervised by the UN in what is still a broken country. I hope too that the European Union will try to play a greater role in helping Arabia out of its agonies, first of all having apologised for being so hopeless in the quartet set-up, as the EU can now earn more respect in the area than, sadly, the US does—despite Obama’s heroic efforts, for which we should wish him well.