Syria and the Middle East

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, it is clearly difficult to comment effectively on all the countries that we are considering in this debate, but I begin by observing that there is a dreadful similarity in almost all of them, where government and authority—sometimes legitimate, sometimes tyrannical—are losing their grip and/or are under intense challenge. Power is fragmenting: it is not being neatly transferred to new dawns and new bodies, but being fragmented into the street. The monopoly of state-armed power by which the authority was hitherto upheld has been fractured. That is what is happening. It is a new pattern and one has to ask why this new force is anything different from revolutions and rebellions in the past.

The answer, of course, lies in technology. It lies in the tsunami of new weapons that are in the hands of minorities and which, with very few people, can inflict enormous damage on traditionally and classically armed formations. I am thinking of the improvised explosive devices which have done so much damage in Afghanistan, of endless decoys, of shoulder-held missiles which can be purchased in the international arms souk. I am thinking even of homemade drones. Hezbollah managed to get a drone aloft which it had put together itself. These are just the beginnings of a massive miniaturisation of weaponry which makes the vast military machines with which the 20th century tried to equip itself increasingly vulnerable. That is one aspect.

Secondly, and even more powerful, is the fact that the street is empowered. The rebels and the rebellions are empowered by an information revolution of an intensity and an organisational capacity impossible to envisage in the past. It is completely new. It gives connectivity through the 7 billion mobile telephones in the world. Half of the entire planet is on the world wide web. This gives an organisational capacity to minorities and to those challenging authority on a scale we have never seen before. We have only to think of what happened when Mohammed Bouazizi immolated himself in Tunis. Within hours, and certainly within days, the entire street population of the whole of Arabia was militant, aggravated and activated.

So this is a new pattern—a completely new pattern of power, distribution of power, dispersal of power and fragmentation of power has emerged. That is what we are seeing in the Middle East at the moment. In all cases, attempts to crush by conventional force by shooting down the enemy—shooting down the rebels and so on—have not worked and are not working. They did not work for Assad, although he may survive. He may just hang on but he certainly will not win and will never get back the country that he began with. It did not work in Egypt and did not really work with the wretched Gaddafi in Libya, which with all his weapons and money he failed to control. It has not worked in Iraq, where the rate of slaughter has got worse and some thousands and thousands are continuing to die. Indeed, although we are not discussing this today, it quite obviously has not worked for President Yanukovych in Ukraine. He thought that he could use force to suppress the opposition and the challenges but he soon found, as other dictators and indeed democratic Governments have found, that force does not work any more. The old pattern of crushing and bringing in the tanks is now not the weapon that it was.

We will probably hear more from my noble friend Lord Lamont on Iran, as he is a great expert in that field, but even in Iran the trembling elements in protest are rumbling away. That is the universal pattern so instead of the order that one hoped was going to come with orderly protest and cries for liberty, we have on every side chaos. The old saw is that a revolution devours its children. Of course, in Syria we have seen its children devouring each other in the most horrific ways, with a savagery which is almost unimaginable in times of what we thought was peace.

That question of rebel against rebel brings me to a second point which I want to share with your Lordships, which is the colossal complexity of all the situations with which we are dealing. I will give only two examples. In Syria, al-Qaeda controls the small but important oilfields, which produce about 100,000 barrels a day or probably less. What do they do with that oil? They refine it crudely and sell it to President Assad. Wait a minute—can that be right when he is on the other side and fighting them? Yes, it is right: they are selling refined oil so that he can drive his aeroplanes. The bargain is that he has agreed not to bomb the areas controlled by al-Qaeda. That is just one example of the extraordinarily labyrinthine nature of the situation we are dealing with.

Then there are the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, touched on with great authority regarding Hezbollah in Lebanon. Lebanese politics have always been immensely complicated but now we have an extraordinary situation in which Hezbollah, which used to be the state within a state and seemed to be a challenge to Lebanon’s unity, is itself under attack and being protected by the Lebanese army from suicide bombers, some Sunni extremists and, to some extent, al-Qaeda. They are attacking it because it is backing a different side. It is backing Assad and they, with Saudi and Qatari support and a continuous flow of weapons, are backing the other side. The difficulty of saying, “Let us have priorities. What should we do?” is vastly multiplied by the fact that we do not really know who is on which side in many of these areas. The complexities are far greater than the simplicities which we hoped for when we talked about the Arab spring, and how that would bring new Governments, new liberties and new democracy. I am afraid that it is not going to be like that.

The third point which I want to mention is the energy aspect. Energy issues obviously run throughout the whole Middle East situation but there are some new factors, which I think have not been mentioned. I do not know whether they are recognised in London at all. However, in the east Mediterranean vast new gas reserves have been identified. In the case of Israel, the reserves have been found and are being used. They have a very significant effect on the whole pattern in the area. Cyprus and Israel want to work together to develop them. Lebanon, when it manages to get a Government and some kind of laws in place, wants to develop its resource. Turkey is interested in the enormous gas resources around the south of Cyprus. Cyprus itself now has north and south Governments, who are rather readier to talk to each other than they have been for some time.

There is a completely new pattern on the chessboard of the east Mediterranean and I hope the United Kingdom authorities will play a constructive part by supporting Turkey’s aspirations. Turkey is facing instabilities and problems on the street; it still wants to get into the European Union, and it is not feeling very happy about the way things are going. The acquisition of gas resources by Israel is changing its attitude as well to what can be done in the way of supplying gas, certainly to Jordan and Palestine. Indeed, it has already signed contracts, oddly enough, to supply gas back to Egypt—the other way around from the pattern that used to exist five years ago.

The most important thing that my right honourable friend William Hague said when he made the Statement in the other place so skilfully on Monday was:

“I agree that the age of spheres of influence is now over”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/2/14; col. 40.]

John Kerry was saying much the same thing the day after. That is a most profound point. He was talking mainly about the Ukraine, but it applies just as much to the whole Middle East and all the troubled areas we are looking at. We can think in terms of the EU working collectively in some areas very effectively—not always, but sometimes—but the truth is that a much wider coalition of the willing, not just of western powers and the usual suspects of the old NATO world, is needed, embracing the rising powers of Asia and the big players of Africa and Latin America. These areas have just as much say, responsibility for and interests in the Middle East and its stability as we do. It is worth remembering that most of the oil of the Middle East now goes eastwards to Asia and does not come to Europe or the West at all.

Those are the new realities that I wanted to share with your Lordships in my allotted time. There is a completely new international landscape in which we have to operate. We can lay down our priorities, but the question is how do we make those priorities work? How do we implement them? I have the privilege of chairing a Select Committee of your Lordships’ House that is looking at British influence and soft power over the coming years. Of course, we do not produce answers, but I hope we shall clarify a few of the points that we have raised today and that that will be useful for your Lordships.