Debate on the Address

It gives me no pleasure at all to agree in some part with the contribution of the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind). When my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary gave, as she always does, a most telling performance at the Dispatch Box—she is always in command of the House and her subject—the list of the areas in which there is a supposed British foreign policy was, I regret, a list of almost undiluted failure. That is no criticism of my right hon. Friend or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It is certainly no criticism of our troops, who are the most highly-disciplined and highly-trained, and probably the most effective, fighting force in the world. It causes me no small anger when my Government, in trying to deflect criticism from their failed foreign policy, attempt to use those troops as a kind of human shield by arguing that those who criticise quite deliberately undermine our troops’ morale. Nothing could be further from the truth. The basic flaw with our foreign policy is that it does not exist. It does not exist because the Prime Minister is obsessed with the belief that there should not be a space between our foreign policy and that of President Bush and the neocons in Washington into which it would be possible to slip a cigarette paper. In the Prime Minister’s approach to foreign policy, he is also wrong to perceive the greatest threat to the world as international terrorism. Many years ago, before a single bullet was fired in Iraq, my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson) said that the real weapons of mass destruction were poverty and AIDS. In my view, that list has been added to by environmental decay and destruction, but these do not seem to be areas that figure prominently in the Prime Minister’s thinking about how we approach the rest of the world. I hope that the changes emanating from Washington will bring about marked changes in the disastrous situation that is Iraq. I do not call for the immediate withdrawal of our troops. I do not call for the immediate withdrawal of American troops, but I know, as everyone else in the House and in the country knows, that when it becomes of overriding importance for the Republican party to withdraw US troops—and not doing so would put the Republicans in serious danger of losing the next presidential election—those troops will be withdrawn and, as night follows day, so will ours. Central to what has been leaked about Secretary of State Baker’s Iraq study group is the idea that there should be discussions that will engage Syria and Iran. I entirely agree. It was a very great Israeli Prime Minister—who, regrettably, was assassinated by one of his own citizens—who said that one does not create peace with one’s friends; one creates peace with one’s enemies. That is a lesson that seems to have been pushed drastically to one side, for reasons about which I could hazard an opinion concerning the White House in Washington, but I would not waste the time of the House. To give our Prime Minister credit and to be fair to him, he attempted, in a somewhat half-hearted way, to float that idea way before the Baker commission was formed, and he has touched on it again recently. It is a deep, deep irony that the two great pillars, as they try to present themselves, of the United Kingdom and the United States are still following a policy that assumes that democracy can be imposed. I find that entirely paradoxical. Iraq was never a united country. We, in the shape of Winston Churchill, made it a country with a surrounding border many decades ago. It was never united then; it became united only as a result of a series of brutal dictatorships. That has now gone. Why can we not begin to consider the possibility that our Government’s desire, when they embarked on the war in Iraq—I know they will not admit it, because it would be tantamount to admitting illegality—was regime change? There is no way that they can avoid the fact that it was immoral and remains immoral. Saddam Hussein has gone. Regime change has occurred. We are told that there is a democratic Government in Iraq, and I pay tribute to the millions of Iraqis who went out for the first time in their lives and engaged in an election. But it is a fantasy to think that the Iraqi Government have any power or any control in their own country. I understand that it is impossible for Government Ministers to move outside the green zone. They cannot even move into their own electorates, if they have them. It is an unmitigated disaster. We are training an army. We are also, apparently, training a police force. There is sufficient evidence to prove that that police force is not loyal to the Government. It is not even loyal to the concept of a united Iraq. It is loyal to its tribal links. The most recent kidnapping was apparently conducted by people in uniforms that had been specially created in America so that they could not be taken by insurgents. They were to be given only to members of the supposed Iraqi police force. Hundreds of people were taken out of the highest academic offices in Iraq. Many of them are still missing and some have been found dead. It is therefore clear that there is no innate central security in Iraq. We are seeing the country splitting up into its tribal units. The best brains in Iraq are reported to be fleeing daily. Is it absolutely outside the envelope to consider that perhaps the future of Iraq is as a federal state, made up of three independent but federated states? It is what happened before. I know that there will be terrible arguments about who has the oil and who has the preponderance of power in certain situations. The international community will become engaged only after the removal of the block imposed on Iraq by American foreign policy—““We will stick the course. We will not quit. We are there for as long as it takes””. How long is ““long””?