Debate on the Address

I have spoken to many Kurdish politicians about that issue and they believe that the best security for the Kurdish people of Iraq is a federal, democratic Iraq. If that fails, I suspect that the Kurdish people would want a separate state, and there would be a danger that Iraq’s neighbours—Turkey, Syria and Iran, each of which has a minority Kurdish population—would intervene. The Scottish Nationalist party propose simplistic solutions to problems in this country, and they have simplistic solutions, too, for the much more complex problems in Iraq. It is possible that there will be a significant reduction in the British military presence in Iraq, but we must sustain democratic, humanitarian and other commitments to the Iraqi Government, the Iraqi people and their democratic institutions for a long time to come. There should be an international commitment under the UN—we have authority under UN resolutions even now—but we must recognise, too, the nature of the British contribution in the long term. President Bush will visit Jordan in the next few days. I understand that he will meet the Iraqi Prime Minister, and I hope that he will listen to what he says. I hope that he will listen, too, to the views of King Abdullah and other Jordanians on the importance of engaging countries in the region. I raised that subject in my intervention on the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague). The American Government must rethink their role towards countries in the region, including Syria and, more importantly, Iran, where it has not had a diplomatic presence since Jimmy Carter was President, when diplomatic relations ended. The US does not have an ambassador in Syria, but it has an embassy and a chargé d’affaires. In Iran, however, it does not have anything. The Americans fail to understand how the Iranians, who are a very proud people, feel about their 3,000-year-old Persian history. The issue is complex because we are dealing not just with the problem of perceptions on the Arab street, but with the Sunni-Shi’a conflict and the fact that Iran is not an Arab country. If developments in Iran go badly, the country’s Arab neighbours in the region may wish to acquire nuclear weapons in a short time. That is destabilising and it could be disastrous for the peace and security of the whole world. The more countries that have nuclear weapons—particularly countries that lack democratic traditions and have a history of hosting jihadist and Wahhabist groups—the more danger there is that a terrorist group will gain access to weapons of mass destruction and will be prepared to use them. The debate about nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction must therefore be raised to a much more sophisticated level, so I hope that when the Government publish their White Paper on Trident they will address those complex issues. When debating them we should consider not just the costs of particular weapons systems, but the international context. The world we live in today is, sadly, very dangerous and very different to how we had hoped it would be at the end of the cold war. Reference was made briefly to the situation in North Korea. I went to Korea for the first time in September, and the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) was with me. We were in the demilitarised zone and, frankly, it was bizarre. It was like being in a 50-year-old time warp, with giant towers and North Korean and South Korean soldiers in poses standing off against each other. We have to understand that there is serious potential for a resumption of conflict in that area. We need to give more attention to assisting the six-party talks process and what is being done by the neighbours of North Korea to bring about stability. Finally, I want to make brief reference to the fact that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office budget is under pressure. We continue to close posts in a number of Pacific islands and in southern Africa, and the level of diplomatic representation in several European countries is being run down. Could we not have a more sophisticated approach to some of these issues? I met the Kyrgyz ambassador to the UK yesterday. We do not have diplomatic representation in Bishkek—although the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs has been calling for it for a long time—but I discovered yesterday that there is a Department for International Development operation there. Is it not absurd that one arm of the British Government is there? Could the person who runs the DFID operation perhaps provide visas for four hours or two mornings a week so that people do not have to go all the way to Kazakhstan to get a visa to come to Britain? That seems to be common sense, but we have not yet considered it. I raise that as a suggestion to the FCO and DFID to see whether there are ways in which we can improve our representation internationally.