Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Debate between Richard Ottaway and Jack Straw

Thursday 29th August 2013 Commons Chamber

[Richard Ottaway]

We have to take the world as we find it. The situation has been made quite clear, including by the Prime Minister: the aim initially is to attempt to degrade Assad’s capacity, so it is essential that our strategic objective be focused on the command and control of the chemical weapons programme. If that is not successful, I am sure that he and I will be back here asking, “Where do we go from here?”

I turn to the Attorney-General’s view that there is a legal basis for intervention without a Security Council resolution, which poses more questions than it answers.

[Mr Straw]

Will the hon. Gentleman be a bit more precise? Today, the Prime Minister widened the objectives to include degrading the chemical weapons capability, but General Dempsey has made it clear that that is possible to a significant degree only with the deployment of thousands of troops and hundreds of ships. Surely we have to be clear about what we anticipate will result from the use of Tomahawk missiles and such things before, not after, we embark on their use.

[Richard Ottaway]

The right hon. Gentleman put that point to the Prime Minister, and I thought he dealt with it. General Dempsey was talking about the wider picture, whereas the motion and the proposal concern the chemical weapons regime, which we will attempt to degrade.

Iran

Debate between Richard Ottaway and Jack Straw

Monday 20th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), who is a valued member of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, on securing this debate. He is at least consistent: he voted against the intervention in Iraq, the intervention in Libya and the Foreign Affairs Committee report on Afghanistan, and now he wants to rule out an attack on Iran. I respect his point of view, but I believe that he is underestimating the challenge facing the western world and the civilised world.

The Iranians are tough so-and-sos. As the Foreign Secretary rightly pointed out, they have sacked our embassy in Tehran, they are propping up the regime in Syria, they are undermining peace efforts in Afghanistan and Syria, and they are supporting terrorism around the world. In my view—it is quite clearly also the view of many people in this Chamber—it is critical that we do not blink first. The production or potential production of nuclear weapons has the ability to destabilise the region, with profound global impact. My hon. Friend says that the threat of military action is counter-productive. I am sorry to say this, but I simply do not agree. I believe that if we take this option off the table, the Iranians will go full throttle, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) pointed out, in a speech of lucidity that I can only envy. It ill behoves anyone to quote Chairman Mao in support of their argument, but it was he who said that peace comes from the end of the barrel of a gun. That is particularly pertinent here, and we must keep the option on the table.

There are four ways through the growing mess: diplomacy, sanctions, a military strike or learning to live with a nuclear Iran. Diplomacy has clearly not succeeded, despite countless United Nations resolutions. I remember when the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) was making regular visits to Tehran. I was a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee at the time, and I remember meeting him there on one occasion. He tried valiantly, but I felt at the time that he should have pushed harder and that we should have threatened sanctions at a much earlier stage. I was left with the feeling that he was trying to do something about the situation without having any conviction as to what it might achieve.

[Mr Straw]

If the hon. Gentleman looks at the record, he will see that we were working in concert with Germany and France, and with the tacit but quite active support of the United States. This was before the E3 plus 3 architecture got going. Those negotiations were tough, but they produced a positive result at the time. That is what followed from the October 2003 negotiations. Furthermore, it is my belief that had President Khatami been allowed to stay in place, with all that that would have entailed, we could have made further progress. It was others in the regime who decided to undermine him and the progress that we had made.

[Richard Ottaway]

I do not want to be unduly critical of the right hon. Gentleman. I recognise that he believed that he was doing the right thing at the time, but, as history illustrates, it was not enough to deter the regime.

A second course of action involves sanctions and, as I have said, I wish that they had been imposed much earlier. It is possible that they might work, and one can only hope, genuinely and passionately, that they will. They must be as tough as possible, and I look with dismay at the slow speed with which our European Union partners wish to impose them. I understand that Greece, of all countries, is holding up their full imposition until it can get its own oil contracts in position. Sanctions can be effective. The United States has the ability to jam up the financial markets and the oil trading markets, which would have a significant and profound impact.

The Iranians have threatened to shut the straits of Hormuz; I believe that to be a completely hollow threat. The straits are defendable. When I served in the Royal Navy in the 1960s, I was based in Bahrain. Even in those days, we had a game plan for the region. Now, the Iranians are faced with the full might of the US sixth fleet, which, I have to say, I would not want to take on in these circumstances.

If sanctions fail, there will be no other choice than between a military strike and learning to live with a nuclear Iran. We are having a debate about intervention. Support for non-intervention is a perfectly respectable point of view that is held by Russia and China and a number of South American states. The common factor for all those regimes is that their democracy is either weak, non-existent or new.

I have to confess that I am a reluctant interventionist. I was quite prepared to oppose the intervention in Libya until the United Nations resolution went through. It is hard to oppose a successful campaign in those circumstances. I would hesitate to intervene in Syria without UN backing, although diplomacy is clearly failing. I was not persuaded that the UN resolutions on Iraq gave proper cover for military intervention, and I was against such an intervention until the then Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box and persuaded me that the security of the western world was threatened. This illustrates that the only occasions on which we should intervene in such circumstances are those in which we have the backing of a UN resolution or those in which our interests are threatened.

In these circumstances, our interests are threatened by a nuclear Iran. It has been pointed out that there is a possibility of a nuclear arms race in the middle east. I believe that Saudi Arabia will want a bomb, and that it will be in contact with Pakistan to ask it to supply one. What really worries me about Iran having a nuclear weapon is that I am left with the feeling that it might, in certain circumstances, actually use it. Many countries with nuclear powers hold them exclusively for the purpose of self-defence. The Iranians might not use the weapons themselves. They might use them in a proxy manner, supplying terrorists with radioactive material for a dirty bomb to be used in a western capital. Either way, this is going to be messy.

As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington said, if there were to be a military strike, moderate Arab opinion would not be too upset. The hard-liners are now distracted: Syria, Libya and Egypt are out of action, and Russia and China might huff and puff, but I do not believe that they would make a serious move in the event of a strike. I genuinely believe that we would live to regret Iran getting the bomb, and that an attack might be the least bad option.