Iran

Lord Mitchell Excerpts

Tuesday 30th November 2010 Grand Committee

[Lord Mitchell]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Corbett for initiating this debate. I do not suppose that any of us are wildly happy about the WikiLeak revelations, but in some ways they throw into sharp relief the true views of the Arab states on Iran. Like many other noble Lords, I have always been surprised by what I have heard Arab diplomats and politicians say in private behind closed doors compared with what they say in public. When talking about the dangers to their countries, they look to the threat from the East—in other words, Iran—rather than to that from the West—that is, Israel. They have one language for the street and another for diplomacy. On Iran, the leaks quote the King of Saudi Arabia as saying that the head must be cut off the snake; the King of Bahrain as saying:

“The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it”;

and about Ahmadinejad that he is “unbalanced, even crazy”.

The Iranians, of course, deny that they are building a nuclear weapons capability; they say that they are building nuclear power plants. Iran is a poor country. Could someone please explain to me why, as one of the world’s largest producers of gas and oil, it should need to build nuclear generators? It is laughable. I see the Iranian situation as a car crash waiting to happen, and it is all in tortuous slow motion. For years, we have known that the Iranian regime is wholly bad. Ever since the revolution, it has been a force for evil in this world. It destabilises Iraq and Afghanistan, and it is our soldiers who pay the price. It set up a state within a state in southern Lebanon, such that Hezbollah today is a major threat to Israel, armed to the teeth with more rocketry than it had in 2006, despite the United Nations trying to prevent it. It finances and arms many organisations that we deem to be terrorists and which are threats to our security. Now it is in bed with the North Koreans, who it seems are to supply it with medium-range missiles capable of hitting western Europe: talk about a marriage made in hell.

I am a firm supporter of the state of Israel. To Israelis, a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat. It sees Tel Aviv as target number one. Ahmadinejad has stated on many occasions—and who are we to disbelieve him?—that the Holocaust never happened and that Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth. So the man both denies the Holocaust and, at the same time, plans for the next one. He plays for time, stringing us all along while he zigzags from side to side. We threaten him but we always back off. We indulge him, hoping that he and his state will change their tune, but they do not. We apply sanctions, which are soft and meaningless, but he ignores them. All the time, the centrifuges keep spinning—at least, they would were it not for the Stuxnet virus.

My conclusion is that nothing will stop Iran in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, except crippling sanctions, and these should be implemented before it is too late.