Syria

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 29th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes (CB)]

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, has made some very interesting points, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

It is with great glee and enthusiasm that I thank the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno, for launching this debate. He and I came into the Lords at the same time in 2004. We have been friends for many years and I was in the same party group for a while. It has always been a pleasure to work with him and to listen to his natural proclivity to be a man of peace—peace in Europe after the Second World War and peace in the world. He has done great work in that field. A notable feature of the Liberal Democrat Party is that that is one of its priorities, as we know.

It is also a great pleasure to speak in the same debate as my good friend, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry. We have at least one shared interest: we are both patrons of the Dresden Trust, which works for peace between Coventry and Dresden. The right reverend Prelate knows far more about the symbolism than I do, but that body also helped in the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche by paying for the orb and the cross on the top of the dome, as well as other things. It is a great pleasure for us to reflect on those things from time to time. Again, that sends out a message of peace in a place that experienced what he called a ferocious European civil war. I think there were 22 years between the first instalment, the First World War, and the second instalment, the Second World War. Fortunately, after the Second World War, the victorious allies handled the situation much better than they did after the First World War, when Germany was humiliated beyond all measure.

It is also a great pleasure to follow the excellent speech of a good friend and colleague on the Cross Benches, my noble friend Lady Cox, who is an expert on the Middle East. It was interesting to hear about her church-sponsored visit there. The right reverend Prelate, too, spoke about what he did when he visited on a separate occasion.

So many complications in this situation are created by local elements and by international actions and mistakes. I first went to Baghdad in 1988, when the city was full of American and British businessmen and officials and supporters of the United States and Britain saying that Saddam Hussein led the finest Government in Arabia. He was popular with America at the time. America supported him very strongly against Iran in the terrible tragedy of the Iran-Iraq war. Even after the gassing in Halabja, I remember vividly that the Americans publicly said that the Iranians had done it—because they were the devil then whom the Americans disliked and hated, and they thought Saddam Hussein was fine. Subsequently, Saddam Hussein made a mistake by not consulting the Americans before he invaded Kuwait, and was quite rightly driven out by the international community a year later.

A good friend of mine who lives in Israel has great experience in these matters. He holds moderate views and his support for international peace is well known. I will not give his name as he has not given me permission to quote him. However, he remarked that the man and woman in the street in Arabian countries see double standards in the international community, because Saddam Hussein was rightly expelled from Kuwait a year after the invasion but Israel is still in the West Bank, 50 years or more after the 1967 war. That double standard is one of the elements in this terrible tragedy of the conflict in the near East and the failure to resolve it.

I had enormous sympathy with the United States after the 9/11 attacks, as I am sure does everyone here. However, in its response after those attacks, America made mistakes in the near East and Middle East. Having worked with the Taliban in the old days to get the Soviet Union to leave Afghanistan, the Americans then fell out with the Taliban, or the Taliban fell out with them—and look at what is happening now in that tragic country.

Over 1 million people marched down Piccadilly to protest against the UK’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq. It was the first time I had ever been on a march. Millions of people thought that the UK’s involvement was a mistake, but the march was ignored by the then Prime Minister. However, by then, of course, we were devoid of proper information about the invasion, and we wondered about some of the details. I was then in the Liberal Democrat group, trying to monitor some of the effects of the war on civilians in Iraq. As we know, it was an illegal war and we admired France’s resistance to it—although it was vilified in the United States for that.

We tried to monitor what was happening to civilians but we could not get any names. A leading defence figure in the Liberal Democrat group, who, sadly, expired many years ago at the very young age of 62, managed to get the numbers that were going into mortuaries and hospitals. The figures were huge. But even now we do not know how many casualties there were in the Iraq war. No information has ever been given by the then Government or by the current American-sponsored Government in Baghdad.

Iraq remains a broken country—and so does Libya, because of the mistakes that were made, not so much by America this time but by France and Britain with the final NATO attack on Gaddafi, which caused his death following the previous judicial murder of Saddam Hussein. Perhaps he should not have been hanged—I do not know. There are lots of arguments about these things.

Then we come to the current tragedy of the Syrian civil war. Has the West sufficiently understood that it has to be careful in handling the response to this? In this case, France under François Hollande was too fierce. I did not expect that but that, too, was a mistake. However, the Americans and the British decided that they could continue their historical primordial right of having a presence in those areas—mainly for oil, of course, in the case of the United States but for other reasons too. There was the Sykes-Picot agreement and other events in the history of that tragic development. We thought that we ourselves would decide who would be in charge of those Middle Eastern countries, with the exception of Israel, which we are leaving alone. The United States had 35 vetoes to stop Israel behaving and following international law. I am a friend of Israel but I think that that was a great mistake; the situation would otherwise be very different now.

In Syria we now see the effects of those mistakes, and the West, either deliberately or accidentally, continues to misunderstand the details of what is happening. It is a classic civil war, much of it between Sunni and Shia, although the media hardly ever mention that—in fact, the BBC has never mentioned it. Various elements from outside have come in, and we know the tragic history. More recently, the Russians have come in with the Iranians. What a mistake by the West was the isolation of Iran. I am so pleased that Britain and others in Europe decided to end that and not to go along with the United States, which still wants to pursue Iran’s isolation. How ridiculous that is when it is such an important country.

Iran has resisted the efforts of Saudi Arabia to create hegemony in Syria, and we now see the last elements of this tragic, awful war. I have never been there; I am simply talking about what I see in the commentaries in the press, in social media comments and on the internet. It looks as though the Syrian Government are now winning as a result of assistance from Russia and support from Iran, with subsequent groups coming in from Lebanon and so on. That may be the best result—I am not enough of an expert to say—but it is a tragic civil war. You can always cite crimes on both sides and among all the groups, but it has to be resolved.

I was told that the Syrian Government were always very accommodating towards Christians—both those from abroad and the large Christian community of various kinds living in Syria, who were always a big feature. However, they are now reluctant to accept that the West has much of a role to play, and that is a tragedy. In view of what has happened in the past, they are suspicious of the West’s attempts to become involved in these matters. The West had a one-sided approach of saying, “We’ve decided from outside that this incumbent Government is a rebel Government without any legitimacy”. That is not what outside parties should do. Leading international countries should let the local people decide these things themselves. The final outcome in Syria will be what the Syrian people want it to be —they know best. There are faults and mistakes on all sides but we must encourage a decision by the Syrian people; otherwise, once again, the West will be seen as flimsy and inadequate and its response will be badly received. Israel will remain without a solution to a problem that should have been solved years ago. Mahmoud Abbas is incompetent. He is now 85 years old; he has ruled for 11 years beyond his election mandate and Hamas is still locked into Gaza. The whole thing is a grotesque tragedy.

Given its use of vetoes, the United States’ recent criticism of Russia and China for trying to veto what it is doing is grotesque hypocrisy. The United States bears a heavy responsibility for misbehaviour in the Middle East and for the way it has abused the United Nations, particularly the Security Council. Years ago it was a member of the high-level panel which wanted to reform the Security Council and the rest of the UN, but that was vetoed by the US. It refused to allow the Security Council to be examined and the high-level panel could only initiate other reforms—but even then the United States responded by saying that it did not agree with those either. It put forward 600 suggested reforms and amendments for the proposed modernisation of everything but the Security Council, and the initiative just petered out. No reforms were carried out, apart from to agencies—a few details at the margin.

The West must learn these lessons. Until we get a real, solid and lasting peace in Syria, with all its complicated elements, and until the Sunni/Shia element is pulled out of the situation which has been created at the expense of the brave Syrian people who have suffered so much, the more difficulties we will find in the future. The West must rehabilitate itself and its reputation by now being intelligent, open-minded and pragmatic, and genuinely seek peace, including with the incumbent Government in Damascus.