Syria and the Middle East

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

My Lords, I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Lords’ Interests. I am the chairman of the British-Iranian Chamber of Commerce and have also been involved with several companies on both sides of the Gulf, including some in the past involved with Iran. It was that country that I wanted particularly to talk about today, having in January gone with the parliamentary delegation led by Jack Straw to Tehran. It was in the first week of January but it seems to be an eternity away, and a considerable amount has gone on since then.

We had very good access within the Iranian Government to Foreign Minister Zarif, Mr Nematzadeh, the organiser of President Rouhani’s campaign, now the Industry Minister, and Mr Nahavandian, the head of the president’s office. Almost everybody we met in the Government was western educated. Indeed, it is said that there are more American PhDs in President Rouhani’s Cabinet than there are in President Obama’s. We also, because this was a parliamentary visit, met quite a number of the members of the Majlis, where we met many more hardliners, so we got a feeling of the spectrum of politics within Iran.

There is a lot of argument about whether President Rouhani is a reformist in the Iranian sense, but it cannot be denied that he has the support of the reformist element. His Cabinet is very similar to that of President Khatami. President Rouhani has certainly unleashed in Iran an enormous feeling of optimism on the part of the population, of expectation and a great rise in business confidence. The Government frequently say—and I know that many people believe—that only sanctions have brought Iran to the negotiating table. I would say that that is only partly true. They have had an effect, but it was public opinion, the election and the election of President Rouhani that changed the policy. If the election had gone the other way and Mr Djalili, the previous nuclear negotiator, had been elected, there would have been no change at all.

I believe that there is the capacity for change in Iran. The revolutionaries are ageing and it is moving into a post-revolutionary phase. Of course, there are people who want to keep the spirit of the revolution alive, and we have to be very careful that in our dealings with Iran we do not make mistakes that strengthen them. But Iran has the capacity to evolve without violence and further revolution, whereas I could not express that view about all the countries in the Gulf. Some of them do not have the same capacity to evolve peacefully and will not have the same capacity to evolve into something more akin to a western democracy.

Iran is a complex society, and it does have elements of democracy in it, but it is also an authoritarian state whose record on human rights is extremely bad. We did not flinch at every meeting that we went to from raising the issue of human rights, including that of public executions. The West is right to press Iran on human rights, but it is an issue that should be kept separate from the nuclear issue, which is a prize that is worth winning on its own and could yield considerable benefits to the region and the world.

We discussed the nuclear issue with Foreign Minister Zarif and he professed that he was not very optimistic about the outcome of the talks. I think that the greatest difficulty in the talks is going to be over the objective set out in the initial agreement to reach a mutually agreed definition of a nuclear programme—that is to say, what scale of enrichment should be allowed, if it is to be allowed, in Iran. One can see the gulf in thinking when you consider that Iran currently has 20,000 centrifuges, but in a recent article in the Financial Times Mir-Hossein Mousavi, another previous Iranian nuclear negotiator, pointed out that broadly 100,000 centrifuges are needed—it depends what type they are—for one nuclear power station. Iran has 20,000 at the moment. The other day Wendy Sherman said she could not possibly see why Iran needed 20,000 centrifuges. Of course the West is concentrating on reducing the number of those centrifuges, yet paradoxically it looks as though it wants Iran to reduce the number of centrifuges to a limit which would enable it to produce a nuclear weapon but not to actually power a power station. That does not seem a very sensible approach. I think it would be much better if the West did not concentrate on the number of centrifuges but actually concentrated on transparency, inspection, the additional protocol, the right to go throughout the country and to make undeclared visits. That will be the way in which agreement might be possible.

We spent a lot of our time discussing the nuclear issue but we also discussed the Syrian situation. I agree with everybody who has described that as an absolute humanitarian disaster and I do not for one minute defend the position that Iran has taken. However, Foreign Minister Zarif and others repeatedly said to us—they never mentioned Assad—that they felt the only way in which the situation could be resolved would be through a political solution which led to free elections. I regarded that just as a formula which they trotted out but I notice it is a formula that they use on every public occasion. I suggest that we take them at their word. Of course the idea of elections is light years away in the present situation but we ought to be trying to create that situation. By involving Iran we would be more likely to do that and create a path in which elections could be the ultimate destination.

I believe that Iran regards Syria in exactly the same way that Saudi Arabia and the United States regard Bahrain. They regard it as a very important and strategic interest. They regard Syria as the route to Hezbollah and recall that Syria was of course the only Arab country that supported Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. I was in the Middle East when the recent unrest first began in Bahrain and I recall that a very well-known senior American politician made it quite clear to me that there would be no change to the regime or fundamental political change in Bahrain. He just said, “We have interests there,” meaning, of course, the fleet. That is exactly the attitude Iran has towards Syria. I think Iran’s links towards Hezbollah and Hamas, which occupy a very different space on the political Islam spectrum, ought to be looked at in the context of Iran’s own security concerns. It regards its links with Hamas and Hezbollah as assets. Iran has a very weak air force. I think it was General Petraeus who said the other day that the entire Iranian air force could be wiped out by that of the UAE in one afternoon. Therefore, alternative sources of firepower—asymmetric responses—are very much part of the strategic thinking. It was once rather brutally put by Mr Larijani, the speaker of the Majlis, who said that if there is an attack on Iran, expect Israel to be in a wheelchair. In other words, the response will come from south Lebanon.

I want to say a word about sanctions and the way in which they are being applied. I hope that we will be very careful during this interim phase. I cannot for the life of me understand why, when we are moving towards a situation in which we want full diplomatic relations with Iran to be restored, we will not allow the Iranian chargé in London to open a bank account. How is an embassy meant to operate if it cannot have a bank account? Yet the Government simply refuse to give any help on this. The banking boycott is causing a lot of ill will in Iran. One of the concessions made in the interim deal was on humanitarian goods such as medicines. Lots of supplies of medicines, which are in great demand in Iran, are not getting through because, although they are allowed to be supplied, there is no access to banking facilities. The West seems to be giving on the one hand and taking away with the other. All this of course is due to US banking sanctions being imposed informally by the back door on our own banking industry. If we wish to frustrate the supply of humanitarian goods let us do it openly, not with subterfuge and methods that are hitting ordinary people. We always said that we did not want the sanctions to hit ordinary people but that is precisely what they are doing because of the boycott being imposed, largely informally, by American authorities threatening banks in the UK.

I say that because the likelihood of a successful outcome in the talks with Iran is only 50:50. It is in the balance. Anything could upset it. It could be upset in the United States or it could be upset in Iran. It would be a tragedy if, in our handling of the sanctions issue, we gave the Iranians any excuse to withdraw from these talks, which I hope will come to a successful conclusion.