Select Committee on Foreign Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-179)

RT HON JACK STRAW MP, MR TIM DOWSE AND MR PETER RICKETTS CMG

MONDAY 28 OCTOBER 2002

  160. Given that over here we had some amber, red, black alerts, goodness knows why, should there not be a continuing grade of advice that the Foreign office give to its nations when they are abroad?
  (Mr Straw) We do it all the time. It is constantly updated. I was looking over the weekend at the updating of advice in other countries within South East Asia on the basis of intelligence assessments and the changes will be made public very shortly. All the time one is looking at this. Life has also to go on. Some of us here, including myself, have had direct experience of Irish terrorist outrages and we had to take precautions, but we also had to ensure that we as a society were not defeated by IRA terrorism which, it will be recalled, led to the assassination of a Conservative Member of Parliament just the other side of Bridge Street; it led to an attempt to assassinate the whole of the British Cabinet on not one but two occasions, and led to many innocent people being killed or injured. Life had to go on because if we simply decided to seize up the economy and life altogether the IRA would have won and we could not allow that to happen. That applies equally to the whole of the international community. I personally was once involved in a terrorist attack so I have some sense of what it feels like, albeit I was not badly injured. Life has to go on.

Mr Maples

  161. Foreign Secretary, of course we completely follow that and I have heard from other people that when the IRA made warnings if you publicised them all life would have ground to a halt. What we are trying to do is to get some idea of where the Foreign Office strikes that balance because we regard perhaps your second most important duty as the protection of British citizens abroad. I wonder if you would deal specifically with one matter which was in The Sunday Telegraph on 20 October, which quoted two US intelligence officers as saying that the CIA had briefed that Bali was a target and had passed that to the British Government two days before the bomb blast but it was not made public, and also that Britain was briefed that Islamic terrorists could be planning to attack night clubs in Bali two days before the blasts. Is that true or false?
  (Mr Straw) I will have to write in to the Committee[3] but my recollection is that we could find no provenance for the first part of what was said, that there was a CIA report sent to us two days before the bombing.

  162. There was no source?
  (Mr Straw) No provenance for that story in The Sunday Telegraph saying that we received a report from the CIA two days before. That is my clear recollection. If I am wrong of course I will write to the Committee. There are two bases for saying that. One is that people have been through the files and had a look, but the second is this, that what is a matter of public record is that at all material times the advice given by the United States State Department in respect of Bali was the same as was given by the United Kingdom Foreign Office.

Chairman

  163. And the second point Mr Maples made?
  (Mr Straw) That meant that US diplomats themselves from Jakarta were on holiday in Bali at the time of the blast, at least six according to the US Ambassador in Jakarta. It is wholly improbable that had such a warning been received, leaving aside whether it had been passed on to us, the United States would not have acted on it in respect of its own diplomats, so that is why.

Mr Maples

  164. You said on the first one that you had looked through the files. The second one was saying that Britain was brief that Islamic terrorists could be planning to attack night clubs in Bali two days before the blasts.
  (Mr Straw) I have no evidence to that at all. You must not always believe what you see in newspapers.

  165. That is why I am asking.
  (Mr Straw) Not even The Sunday Telegraph. I have already told the Committee, as I told the House last week, that the reference to Bali was much more generic information about a threat which we received and it came to us on 27 September and was assessed by 8 October. May I also say that this is exactly the sort of detail which will be examined by the Intelligence and Security Committee.

  166. I just thought that since these two particular matters were in the open it was fair to give you the opportunity to deny them. The second one, according to the newspapers, specifically related to Bali and to night clubs.
  (Mr Straw) I have given the answer to that, which is that there was a generic threat which covered six islands.

Sir John Stanley

  167. Foreign Secretary, going back to the question of Iraq, both you and the Prime Minister have made it very clear that if there is to be the commitment of British military forces in Iraq this will only be done on a clear legally justified basis. It has been reported that the law officers advised the Government that a new UN resolution would be required to provide such a legally justified basis. I am not going to ask you for the law officers' advice because I know what answer I would get, but can I ask you in front of this Committee to say what is the Government's position? Does the Government believe that there is a legally valid basis for the commencement of military operations against Iraq without there being a new UN resolution?
  (Mr Straw) The Government's view is that there might be, is the answer to this.

  168. There might be a legally valid basis, not a certain one?
  (Mr Straw) It all depends on the circumstances at the time, Sir John, before you get too excited about my answer, and that must be the case. Colleagues will know that there are a number of bases for judgments about whether military action is or is not justified in particular circumstances, one of which is a new Security Council resolution. A second will be existing Security Council resolutions. A third will be rights either under the UN Charter or a customary international statement to use force in certain circumstances, so you have to take them all together. The final judgments will obviously be made on the basis of advice which we will receive from the law officers and which we do not disclose. Both the Prime Minister and I have said that we are obviously committed to ensuring that actions we take are consistent with our obligations in international law. There are so many possible scenarios that I do not think there is a lot of point in speculating about whether force would or would not be justified in this circumstance or that circumstance because we have not got there yet. Would we prefer there to be a resolution or resolutions from the Security Council? Yes. That is why I am devoting so much time and attention to securing exactly that end.

  169. If there is no new UN resolution do you envisage that the legal basis for any commencement of military operations will rest on a pre-emptive right of self-defence or do you think it will rest on the non-compliance by the previous aggressor, namely Iraq, with the previous cease-fire agreement, thereby allowing the members of the previous coalition to recommence hostilities on the basis of non-compliance with the cease-fire?
  (Mr Straw) With respect, Sir John, I am not going to be tempted down that path of speculation. I prefer to rest on my previous answer which is that there is a wide range of circumstances. We are talking here about a range of circumstances which are not fully certain at the moment. It depends on the circumstances at the time. No decisions have been made at this stage for us to be involved in military action and I cannot say exactly what the circumstances would be.

  170. I would like to ask you lastly in the legal area on the general issue of international law in relation to pre-emptive strikes on which the Committee took some extensive evidence last week. The US Government, in its National Security Strategy of the United States of America, which was published last month, has stated quite clearly that the existing legal basis for pre-emptive action is no longer valid against the threats which you have outlined to the Committee this afternoon. On page 15 of that document it says that legal scholars and international juries often condition the legitimacy of pre-emption on the existence of an imminent threat and the US administration makes the case that that is not a basis that is really valid any longer when you do not have threats necessarily posed by identifiable nation states, when the threats may come from unseen terrorist groups and using weapons of mass destruction which may be wholly invisible, like biological weapons, and when the first indication of some terrible tragedy is that people in the target area start contracting terrible fatal diseases. I would like to ask you to say on behalf of the Government whether you accept the general thesis that the existing boundary of international law on pre-emption, based on having to demonstrate imminent threat, now looks as if it has been rendered somewhat obsolete or certainly anachronistic by the way in which the threat is developing on the lines I have indicated and you have indicated this afternoon to the Committee.
  (Mr Straw) The first thing to say about the national security strategy document is that it is a United States document; it is not ours. The second point is this, that international law, like our own common law, is not a fixed quantum. It changes as circumstances change. If what is being said is that international law has to adapt to threats that were not anticipated even ten years ago, the answer to that has to be yes. It is worth bearing in mind, and I do not know when you took evidence on this but having got into the concept of pre-emption in international law, that it arose, amusingly enough, from the British Government in The Caroline in 1837 deciding to take-pre-emptive action against what we would argue was a rather difficult state which we thought was hiding what we regarded as terrorists, and the difficult state was the United States and the terrorists were Canadians. We impounded The Caroline boat and rendered it unsaleable in order to pre-empt action by these marauding bands of Canadians who had been given shelter by the United States, and that led to a protest by the United States and led them to develop the concept of international law. Circumstances have changed since then. I do not speak for a second for the United States Government; they can speak for themselves, but all I can say is that I do not find anything irrational at all about the approach of the US and their desire, which we have to share with the rest of the civilised world, to adjust their mechanisms to deal with the new threats which arose most lucidly on 11 September. Had we known on 10 September, for example, that the planes which had been hijacked in that way were for certain going to be used as explosives against the World Trade Center, then some difficult judgments would have had to be made about bringing those planes down, and if they had been brought down the correct judgment would have been made, horrible though that would have been. Had we known some weeks before about the possibility of this group of terrorists committing such a terrorist threat, then it would have been wise and sensible and appropriate to have taken military action against them. I read what the United States is saying as not much more than that. It is not that they are going to waste their time identifying some remote academic threat and then removing the government in the state concerned because in the real world life is not like that and governments have to prioritise their actions, but should we now be increasing our efforts against international terrorism and should we be pre-empting the sort of thing they did in Bali and the sort of thing they did in Moscow? Yes indeed. I think of the entirely reasonable demands on me in the House of Commons last Monday for information about what we knew in advance and to improve our intelligence base in the future. All of that is directed to one aim, namely, that we should develop our systems so that we are better able to pre-empt both the possibility of terrorist action and its consequences than we are at the moment.

Chairman

  171. No-one would doubt that the circumstances you have described would come squarely within imminence and we would not need to look at a wider definition of pre-emption. Before calling Mr Hamilton can I try and sweep up what Mr Mackinlay and Sir John have said in respect of self-defence? Have you ever sought to rely in this case on self-defence under customary law or Fifty One and how would you seek to explain to a British citizen that we as the United Kingdom need to defend ourselves against Iraq? One can understand and easily explain to a British citizen that Kuwait or Saudi Arabia might talk about self-defence. How do we apply that to the United Kingdom?
  (Mr Straw) Mr Anderson, apologies for not being tempted down the path of various scenarios. Let me be clear about the position here. We wish to see Saddam Hussein disarmed of his weapons of mass destruction. We wish to see disarmament of those weapons of mass destruction both because of the threat which they pose to his own people, to the region and to the wider international community and also because he is in flagrant defiance of the international community. We have made the world relatively safer over the last 60 years because of the relative success of our international institutions based on the United Nations, and if we want to have a safer world still in the future that system has to be upheld and enforced. That is what I am aiming for. What is the best chance of resolving the Iraqi situation peacefully? It is by preparing to take military action and certainly not speculating publicly about the circumstances in which it would be taken. That is why, I am afraid, I am not willing to be taken down that path. Saddam Hussein should be in no doubt that if he fails to comply with the rule of international law then I believe most people in the international community think that force should then be used.

Mr Hamilton

  172. That brings me quite conveniently, Foreign Secretary, to the questions I want to ask which relate to the consequences of war against Iraq. You will recall in1991 during the then Gulf War when Saddam Hussein's back was against the wall that he fired missiles into Israel. Thirty nine Scud missiles in all were fired and at the time the then Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, refused to retaliate and the world praised Israel for that. The current Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, according to some sources has made it clear that he would not take such a view and that should he be attacked during another war against Iraq he would retaliate. Can I ask you whether the British Government has discussed any of this with the Israeli Government and whether in your view or that of the British Government the Israeli Government would retaliate? I should say that while we were in Washington there were very mixed views about this. Some thought that the Israelis would retaliate and would be right to do so; others thought there was no chance of that happening.
  (Mr Straw) I personally have not discussed this with representatives of the Israeli Government. I have discussed it with others. It is perfectly possible that British diplomats have discussed it in Tel Aviv or it has been discussed at an official level. The decisions that have to be made are ones made by the Government of Israel. If Shimon Peres or the Defence Minister were on the stand here he would give you the same answer as I am about to give you, which is that I am not going to say any more and it would depend on the circumstances at the time. Every country has a right to act in self-defence under Article Fifty One of the United Nations Charter. As I say, decisions which Israel make will be a matter for Israel. Are we looking at possible consequences of military action in the region? Yes, of course.

  173. I would like to move on because I think there is a very important question that we have touched on about regime change. The Prime Minister on 24 September in the special debate we had in the Commons said, "Iraq deserves to be led by someone who can abide by international law, not a murderous dictator . . .", a sentence which I think we would all agree with. "We have no quarrel with the Iraqi people. Indeed, liberated from Saddam, they could make Iraq prosperous and a force for good in the middle east." The question is this: is our Government currently working with exiled Iraqi groups to consider the future of Iraq after Saddam Hussein?
  (Mr Straw) To say we are working with exiled groups would give a wrong impression. There have I think been talks at official level with the Iraqi opposition groups which are based here, which received information about their views, but to suggest that we are working with them would be over-egging the situation.

  174. But we have had contact with them?
  (Mr Straw) Yes.

  175. Can I move on and ask you about the consequences of Saddam being removed from power for the country of Iraq itself? We asked several people in Washington whether they believed that the country would fragment. The general belief was that it would not. What is the British Government's view about this?
  (Mr Straw) I have talked a lot to people in the region about this. It was part of the agenda when I visited four of the countries in the region three weeks ago when I went to Cairo, Oman, Kuwait and Teheran. It was a matter which I discussed this morning when I met the Crown Prince of Bahrain here in London. There is a wide measure of agreement by most of Saddam's neighbours about what needs to be done, including, post-disarmament of Iraq, for Iraq's territorial integrity to be maintained. There are points of view about that and anxiety that no-one should take decisions or actions which would destabilise those borders. The borders, as you all know, were basically British inventions some 80 years ago. They do not follow every natural geographic feature in the region, it is all over the map, but they are the borders which are now internationally accepted so it would be unwise to depart from them. I think that there is such a common interest among the states bordering Iraq that first of all it is improbable that any of Iraq's neighbours would take any action to destabilise and fragment Iraq and, secondly, that it has developed in the last 80 years as a single entity, albeit with these three distinct groups, the Kurds, the Shi-ites and the Sunnis, that with proper support to a successor regime its territorial integrity would be enhanced.

  176. You mentioned earlier that you have been to the region and have had discussions in several key capitals. I think one of those, and perhaps one of the most important in the region, is Iran. May I ask you what the Iranians' view was about the possibility of military action against Iraq and whether or not they would intervene?
  (Mr Straw) Again, it is for them to say what their views are rather than for me. However, you will know that Iran suffered more at the hands of Saddam Hussein than any other country. There are still every month one or two people dying from the effects of the gases of what must be 15 years ago in Iran. There is very considerable anxiety across Iran about Saddam Hussein and his continuing to build up weapons of mass destruction, and certainly a deep desire to see measures taken to ensure Iraq's compliance with the United Nations Security Council resolutions.

  177. I would like now to move on to the effect of a war in Iraq and the broader struggle against al-Qaeda. Tony Blair said on Australian television on 22 October, just last week: "The purpose of terrorism is not just the act of destruction itself, the purpose of terrorism is as its name applies—to cause terror, to produce chaos, to produce division . . . that is why the only way of dealing with it is for people to come together." How do you think an attack on Iraq will affect the cohesion of the international coalition against terrorism?
  (Mr Straw) I think it will improve it, is the answer. Military action against Iraq, as military action against anywhere else, has to be justified and would have to be seen to be a last resort. It comes back to the point I made much earlier, that it is fanciful to suggest that any power is going to use military force in a quixotic way and there is no evidence whatever that the United States is intending to. Indeed, President Bush has shown very great patience and caution and is concerned to ensure that there is international legitimacy and support for all the actions he is taking. If military action turns out to be necessary and it is justified, as I say, as a last resort, then I think that it could only indirectly assist the fight against terrorism because it shows the resolve of the international community.

  Mr Hamilton: You do not think that a war against Iraq, even under the circumstances you describe, would fragment and push away Arab Muslim countries?

  Mr Mackinlay: And destabilise it?

Mr Hamilton

  178. And destabilise it.
  (Mr Straw) I personally doubt it. It is something which I discussed in confidence with many of the leaders I met. Of course, there always are, every day, people in the Arab world who wish to stir up violence against the "infidel" West, and we saw that most acutely with Osama Bin Laden. Those people exist. I am afraid they are deeply evil people with a completely perverted idea of humankind and of their own religion. I am afraid to say it has got to a pass where it is only by military action it is going to be possible to defeat them. The idea of dialogue with these people seems to me to be entirely fanciful.

Mr Chidgey

  179. Can I just carry on that line of questioning with you, Foreign Secretary, if I may, because I think it is an extremely serious part of this examination, particularly for the longer term. From the evidence we have taken and the discussions we have had with many people, both with people in Washington and of course here, many experts are deeply concerned about what I would call the "hijacking" of people's religious beliefs to support international terrorism. The facts make quite frightening reading. I am sure you are familiar with the RAND organisation and you possibly know Bruce Hoffman, one of their terrorism experts, who has produced information from his database to show that in 1996, the last time he had data available, the groups driven in whole or in part by salient religious, theological motive committed ten of the 13 most lethal terrorist attacks in that year. My point is, linking with Mr Hamilton, that should we take military action against Iraq, justified as you say, and should, for example, Al Jazeera be putting television pictures around the Arab world of massive Iraqi civilian casualties, is that not by definition going to further encourage evil people like Osama Bin Laden to recruit many thousands more people under the cloak of people's religious beliefs in the provocation and expansion of international terrorism?
  (Mr Straw) Mr Chidgey, if I may, I will just park your "ifs". Of course, it is true that there will be international terrorist organisations, particularly Islamic terrorist organisations who claim Islam to themselves which seek to exploit any situation where military action is taken against an Islamic country. I have to say they sought to exploit, however, military action being taken against the Taliban in Afghanistan in order to free a Muslim country, as they did military action taken to free another Muslim country, Kuwait, in 1991 and to free Muslims in Kosovo in 1998. They will seize on all excuse or none, but the question for us has to be is the military action justified in this case? If it is justified, we will be able to justify it. I have a very, very large Muslim population myself in my own constituency. I remember the anxieties of people over Kosovo and even more so in respect of Afghanistan. Those anxieties are not there now because you can point to the fact that this military action not only was justified at the time but palpably, in retrospect, has been justified because we have freed Muslim people. What I also say to my Muslim friends is look at the record of Saddam Hussein. It happens that his is not a particularly devout regime so one should not think they are all—


3   See Ev 70-71. Back


 
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