Iran

Debate between Louise Ellman and John Baron

Monday 20th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Baron]

I ask the hon. Gentleman to be patient. I promise to deal directly with that later in my speech.

At this point, many invoke President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the face of the map. Surely, they say, that is proof of irrationality; surely that is evidence that Iran cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. However, a careful examination of the translation suggests that President Ahmadinejad was badly misquoted. Even The New York Times, one of the first outlets to misquote Ahmadinejad, now accepts that the word “map” was never used. A more accurate translation offers

“the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”.

Given that Ahmadinejad compared his desired option—the elimination of “the regime occupying Jerusalem”—with the fall of the Shah’s regime in Iran, it is quite clear that he was talking about regime change and not about the destruction of Israel itself, just as he did not want the end of Iran in his comparison. The pedantry over the translation is important. Some Members may scoff, but this is a terribly important point. The immediate reaction to Ahmadinejad’s speech in 2005 was the then Israeli Prime Minister’s call for Iran to be expelled from the United Nations, and the US urging its allies to “get tougher” on Iran.

That mistranslation is used to this day, even by former Foreign Secretaries outside the House. I wonder why the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has not provided more clarity on the point. I hope that it is not to do with a hidden agenda. Perhaps it is to do with a shortage of properly qualified Farsi speakers, but we would appreciate clarity from the Foreign Secretary in due course. I ask him to tell us whether he denies at least the possibility that President Ahmadinejad was misquoted.

[Mrs Louise Ellman (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab/Co-op)]

If the hon. Gentleman is so dismissive of Iran’s statement that Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth, can he explain why, in February 2011, Ayatollah Khamenei repeated the statement that Israel was a “cancerous tumour” that must be removed?

[Mr Baron]

If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I must say that we need to examine these statements very carefully, because that translation too is open to dispute. It is all very well coming to the House with these translations, but Farsi is a complex language, as she will know, and we have to make sure that we get them right. Many scholars outside this place verify that President Ahmadinejad’s original statement was misquoted—theses have been written about it—which is why I ask the Foreign Secretary to clarify the situation. We need to get this quote clarified.

There can be little doubt that the west’s policy of sabre-rattling and sanctions has failed; the Iranians are not going to back down on their nuclear programme. Mr Mousavi, the unofficial leader of the green movement and one of the great hopes of the west, said during the 2009 presidential campaign that any backtracking on the nuclear issue would be tantamount to surrender. Iran’s statement that it is introducing an oil embargo for certain countries shows that it is impervious to sabre-rattling, yet we in the west still pursue that policy when confronting Iran. Indeed it is considered “naive”—I have heard that word used a lot—to rule out the use of force. We are told that all options must be left on the table. Some people go further: there seems to be a hairshirt auction among Republican candidates for the presidential nomination in America as to who can be toughest on Iran, with Mitt Romney openly advocating war over the nuclear issue. I would counter that by saying that what is naive is pursuing a policy that has clearly failed. Sanctions and sabre-rattling are yesterday’s policies and they have brought us to the brink of a military conflict, which is hardly the sign of success.

What compounds the error of that approach is that most agree that a military strike would be counter-productive to the point of being calamitous. It would reinforce the position of the hard-liners at the expense of the pragmatists within Iran, just as the Iran-Iraq war boosted patriotic support for the regime and helped to cement the revolution. Military intervention would not work; the US Defence Secretary judges that it would delay the Iranians for only a year at most. Knowledge cannot be eradicated by military intervention, and such intervention will only delay the inevitable. If Iran is set on acquiring nuclear weapons, she will not be scared away; and if she is not, a military strike would encourage her to do so. We even hear voices from within Israel against a strike. Meir Dagan, the hard-line former chief of Mossad—nobody could accuse him of being a pussycat—has referred to an attack on Iran as “a stupid idea.”

I ask hon. Members to reflect on a wider historical point. It is perhaps relevant to reflect more generally that military action often has an embedding effect: it reinforces the position of the existing regime. For example, communism has lasted longest in those countries where the west intervened militarily—North Korea, China, Cuba and Vietnam.