Select Committee on Foreign Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)

MR JACK STRAW MP, MR DAVID RICHMOND CMG AND DR PETER GOODERHAM

24 OCTOBER 2005

  Q60  Mr Purchase: Over centuries we have been used to dealing with people dissatisfied for one reason or another, usually because of some massive inequalities in the society the people inhabit. We have dealt with it because it is rational and we can say that we can create an improvement. Now we seem to be facing not a rational demand for improvements but a demand from a religion which will not be satisfied until its religion is accepted as the only religion throughout the world. Are we getting to a point where we might just expect terrorism to continue? We cannot prove that there is not a God and ask them to pack up their terrorism.

  Mr Straw: I do not think it is a demand from a religion. That is to admit that these evil people speak in the name of Islam, which no decent Muslim I know believes and none of the rest of us believe. There is overwhelming warrant from the Holy Koran to show that is simply not the case. If you are asking is this appetite for terror by some of these individuals ever going to be satiated, not by the key individuals I do not think. I think they are as fanatical—to use a comparison—as some of the Nazi leaders were at the end, they have tasted blood, they have enjoyed it, and get huge power from killing and they want it to go on and on and on. I think that we can succeed against their foot soldiers, both in dealing with it on a security basis but also in making it clear to people that this provides no hope whatever for them. If you go back to where you started, which was Iraq, we knew that there was likely to be an increase in terrorist incidents in Iraq right through the democratic process, the elections earlier in the year, the setting of the constitution, this referendum and then if the referendum leads to a yes, the full constitutional elections on 15 December. The terrorists are desperately trying to stop this democratic process taking place. Why? Because they know that if the democratic process in Iraq embeds itself then their opportunities to rule this country through terror rather than through democracy are much, much more limited. You will then see that some of those who for odd reasons fear or—

  Q61  Mr Purchase: What do they want? What is the demand?

  Mr Straw: For that you would need to go on to the website of al Qaeda related apologist organisations, and there are many of them. Some of them want to establish a caliphate across the Islamic world, they want to exclude all infidel disbelievers. Bear in mind, however, that these people claim not only that everybody around the table—I do not see a member of the Islamic faith around the table—and those of us of other faiths are infidels but also those who do not follow their very extreme brand are also unbelievers. It is fanaticism on fanaticism. It is for that reason that there is increasing rejection by a vast majority of people in the Muslim community of this hijacking of their religion.

  Q62  Mr Keetch: Foreign Secretary, I want to turn to Iraq because obviously we are here to discuss the foreign policy aspects of the war against terrorism. I want to place Iraq in that context. Obviously you and I took a different view in the run-up to Iraq and you won the vote. I do not want to re-rehearse those arguments, nor do I necessarily want to go through the arguments about what is happening in Iraq at the moment. There are some very good signs of political process, there are some less good signs such as the bombings this afternoon, et cetera. I want to put Iraq in the context of that overarching war against terrorism. You were absolutely right when you said that terrorism had occurred before then and certainly after 9/11 President Bush assembled huge world support for that campaign. The front page of Le Monde said "We are all Americans now". My concern at the time, and my continued concern, is that Iraq has been a distraction from that campaign against terrorism that has led us down a path that has taken resources, money and effort that should have been concentrated on that much wider picture. Therefore, I firstly want to ask you, in the run-up to Iraq what was your assessment of that engagement on its effect on the war against terrorism? Did you actually believe that by invading Iraq it would improve the security situation in the United Kingdom and improve the war against terrorism? Or were you warned, or was there a suspicion, that this attack on Iraq by itself might in some way undermine the overall war against terrorism?

  Mr Straw: I never, ever believed that military action was a "distraction" from the war on terrorism, let us be clear about this. Also, bear in mind—you said you were not going to re-rehearse what happened but you have just done so—we only came to the decision about military action very late and very reluctantly. It was after the failure of the Security Council on 7 March 2003 to agree a Second Resolution, albeit the modified one which I put forward, and then the announcement by the French President on the tenth that whatever the circumstances he would vote no, that we were then into a situation when seven days later after the Cabinet's decision and then Parliament's decision the next day to take military action. I believed, and I still believe, that the military action that we took in Iraq was justified on the basis that was set out: non-compliance by Saddam of about a dozen Chapter 7 Resolutions. By all means read the speeches I made in the Security Council and the ones that I made in the House. That was the focus of what I spoke about. I do not happen to think this is an either/or. Also, although self-evidently there are, and remain, security challenges in Iraq, I believe that the only way we are going to get relative peace and security across the Middle East is through democracy. We are seeing the beginnings of this. Some of the things that have happened are quite remarkable, such as what is happening in the Lebanon. Who would have said that the Lebanon, whose nationhood has been and is still denied by Syria, it was run by Syria as a fiefdom, would now be emerging into full independence. Some of those who kept the Lebanon as a fiefdom are now under the most serious spotlight from the international community.

  Q63  Mr Keetch: I am sorry, I asked about our action in Iraq and the effect of that action against terrorism.

  Mr Straw: What I am saying is we are seeing the beginnings of a movement for democracy which I believe is the only sure way of eliminating terror and alongside that the lack of progress in the Arab countries, which is another cause or contributor to the environment in which terrorism can breed, is through democracy. We would not have got to where we have got to in Iraq, a release of Iraq from tyranny, and the most terrible tyranny, state terrorism, to a situation where just two and a half years later we are awaiting the results of a democratic referendum in which, according to the latest reports, nearly 10 million people have voted; up from 8.6 million in January. It is going to be hard going in Iraq, the terrorism will continue for some time, but I also believe that historians are likely to judge that this has led to the establishment of a democratic and stable state. I would also add this: nation building is never easy. There are those who think what happened after the war was what was left of the German Government surrendered and then, hey presto, very quickly after that you had the building of a German state. That is not true. There were no national elections in Germany for four years. The Marshall Plan after two years arose because of the real concern about the chaos of reconstruction. Austria was under Allied rule for 10 years and it did not become a nation for 10 years. There was a similar situation with respect to Japan. In all countries which have emerged from such tyranny you are going to have a period of transition. All are different. I am not saying that Iraq is Germany or Germany is Iraq, but there are lessons from each.

  Q64  Mr Keetch: In terms of my question I assume that the Foreign office did consider what the effect of the war on terrorism would be by invading Iraq. Your assumption was that it would not make the overall war on terrorism worse.

  Mr Straw: In the run-up to as serious a decision as military action you are bound to look at all possible consequences. Did we believe that taking military action would make the overall terrorist situation worse? No, we did not. That was our judgment. Others around the system may have taken a different view but I know that we did not.

  Q65  Mr Keetch: I am grateful for that. We had some very interesting evidence last week from Professor Paul Wilkinson from the University of St Andrews. Let me just quote what he said in his paper to us: "One of the most significant developments in the evolution of al Qaeda since 2003 has been the way the movement has exploited the allied invasion and allied occupation of Iraq. Whatever view one may take on the decision to invade Iraq, it is simply ignoring the reality to deny that the invasion and occupation have been a big boost for al Qaeda and a setback for the coalition against terrorism." What Professor Wilkinson is suggesting is that the images of British and American troops in Iraq are fuelling abroad what he calls a "domestic jihad" and increasing the unhappiness and frustration felt by Muslims in our own country and other countries and that process has increased and has made the overall war on terrorism worse. I presume you would disagree with that?

  Mr Straw: It is self-evidently the truth that al Qaeda et cetera are exploiting what is going on in Iraq. They are also exploiting what is going on in Saudi Arabia, in Indonesia, in Egypt and in Russia.

  Q66  Mr Keetch: But there are not British troops there.

  Mr Straw: That is my point. There are no British troops there but they are exploiting them. Indonesia was against the Iraq War; it has suffered continuous al Qaeda inspired terrorism. Saudi Arabia was not happy about the Iraq War; it suffered terrorism. Egypt was not happy about the Iraq War; it has suffered very recently serious terrorist outrages within its territory. The Russian Federation was against the Iraq War; it has had to deal with the most appalling terrorism. In each state these people seek to justify their terrorism by anything that they can find. On your point about is this affecting the Muslim population in this country, opinions will differ. I keep in very, very close touch with communities of the Islamic faith in my own constituency; if I did not I would not be here. It is the third largest Muslim population in a constituency proportionately of any in the country. There were several candidates at the last election, six against me. All six said they opposed the Iraq War, including a Conservative, let me say. This will all be in published official documents. All six said they opposed the Iraq War and all six said that the way to emphasise opposition, particularly among the Muslim communities, was to vote against me and vote me out of office. My majority went down from 9,000 to 8,000. I ended up with a very significant level of support amongst the Muslim communities. Why? Yes, if you did an opinion poll amongst the Muslim communities in Blackburn they would disproportionately say they opposed the Iraq War but they are not taken in by all this propaganda from terrorists, apologists for terrorists and others, and they were able to make a mature judgment. They could see what we had been doing in respect of the Middle East, in respect of Kashmir and much else, and came to the conclusion they did.

  Q67  Mr Keetch: I am grateful. The other answer to a question last week from Mr Taylor of the BBC was that Iraq was also providing a training ground for terrorists, that they were able to get involved in terrorism and then come back from there to Europe and, indeed, a senior French judge made a similar point last week. Again, is it your belief that people actively involved in terrorism against coalition forces in Iraq are gaining from that experience in their perception and then returning back to the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe?

  Mr Straw: I have to say—Mr Richmond can correct me if I am wrong—I have seen no evidence at all to suggest that people have been trained within Iraq and are coming back here. The potential areas of training and potential—Have you seen any?

  Mr Richmond: No. I think it is something that we worry about but we have not seen any evidence of it.

  Q68  Mr Maples: The Iraqi constitution has been rejected by the overwhelming majority in two of the Sunni provinces. If it is rejected in a third, which looks highly likely in Nineveh in the next two or three days, what are we going to do?

  Mr Straw: We say this is democracy and if you invite people to vote—

  Q69  Mr Maples: I have asked you what we are going to do if it is rejected.

  Mr Straw: We then allow the constitutional arrangements to go ahead. There will be elections in any event on 15 December. This is factored into the constitution. If a referendum fails it may be something which people regret but this is democracy. What we will also do is point out to Sunnis who may have been reluctant to have been involved in the elections back in January that it is far better for them to make use of democratic arrangements to resolve the conflicts which they have with the Shias and the Kurds than it is to support violence. This is democracy working.

  Q70  Mr Maples: Of course I understand it is democracy working but our collective policy has been to develop the constitution and to get it approved. If it is rejected and there are new elections for an assembly, are you saying that new assembly is more likely to be able to reach a constitutional settlement?

  Mr Straw: Even if the referendum passes and the constitution comes into force, there will have to be quite a number of further amendments made to the constitution almost certainly. I think that there is a provision—I can be corrected on this—that these changes would have to be put to a further referendum within four months. If there is not a yes vote then there will be a further interim government elected on 15 December and the constituted assembly has a year in which to come forward with changes to the constitution which will then go to a further referendum. Those who are busy seeking immediate stability, particularly those in the Shia and Kurdish populations, obviously would have wanted to see a yes vote. It is also the case, and we know this for certain, that there will be a very large majority of Iraqi voters who will have voted yes in the elections but this arrangement by which two-thirds of voters voting no in three provinces could block a constitution was agreed, ironically, for the benefit of the Kurds originally when the Transitional Administrative Law was developed in the summer of last year and there is no reason at all why other groups, particularly the Sunnis, should not be allowed to use it. You were then asking what I think will happen. What I think will happen is that there will be further negotiations between the Sunnis and the Shias to try to arrive at a solution satisfactory to both sides. Interestingly, things were moving in that direction in the run-up to the referendum so that there were further amendments made. They were supposed to be signed off in the middle of August but all through last month and the beginning of this month further amendments were made. We will see that process continuing, I think.

  Q71  Mr Maples: It seemed to me that it was entirely foreseeable that this was going to happen, the Sunnis not participating fully in the constitutional process, and that the result of this will be the deferral of a solution for at least a year, if not longer, and during that time the stability will get worse, which will encourage the terrorists into thinking that they have succeeded in one of their objectives, and the likelihood of the country breaking up into these three or perhaps more constituent parts will be far greater.

  Mr Straw: I do not accept that.

  Q72  Mr Maples: You do not think any part of it will break up?

  Mr Straw: First of all, we do not know what the result is going to be. It is clear that in Ambar 97% of voters have voted no, we are told, and in Salahuddin it is 82%. There is an issue at the moment about what has happened in Nineveh which is the area around Mosul, which is a mixed area, and we do not know whether or not there is going to be a yes or a no vote and, if it is a no vote, whether it is a no vote by two-thirds. I spoke to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan—

  Q73  Mr Maples: We are working on the basis of if it is a no vote, what will happen?

  Mr Straw: I spoke to Secretary General Kofi Annan yesterday and on Saturday about this because it is in everybody's interests that the process of checking should come to a close as quickly as possible. I do not accept your rather apocalyptic view about what is then going to happen. I just say this: you have to trust the people to come up with the result that they want.

  Q74  Mr Maples: The result they may want is three separate constituent states.

  Mr Straw: One of the things they are all agreed on is that there has to be a single Iraq. It is also fundamental to the international community. The Kurds are not campaigning for a separate Kurdistan. They know in any event the consequences of that in relation to Turkey and Iraq would be very, very severe. If you talk to Mr Barzani, President Talabani and the other leaders of the state KDP, they know that whatever historical aspiration they may have had. The Shias also know that once a full democratic system of government is established, because they are 60% of the population, where the politics turns on people being Shia rather than Sunni or Kurd, it is going to hold sway, so what on earth is in it for them to break up this country which anyway has been a single unity since the break up of the Ottoman Empire. My point back to you, Mr Maples, is this: from the point of view of the international community there is plainly a hope that the electoral and constitutional processes can proceed smoothly if there is a yes vote but if you give people a vote you have to accept the answer that they come up with. It is not the end of the world at all if the answer is no. It is anticipated in the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law and in the constitution. Also, when I talk to our people in Baghdad what they say to me is in practice the difference between having a yes vote in terms of time and tidying up the constitution then and having a no vote and having to make some amendments to agree to a further consensus would not be quite as long as people anticipate.

  Q75  Mr Maples: They would be radically different outcomes. Can we turn briefly to Basra because we were congratulating ourselves until quite recently that we had done rather well in the southern part of Iraq and it was much more stable and we seem to have done that by working very closely with the main Shi'ite group. However, now we seem to have a situation in which the various Shi'ite groups and militias have fallen out among themselves stirred up by Iran which was not happening until a few months ago and the same animosity towards British troops is now being demonstrated there as it has been for two and a half years in the other parts of Iraq against the Americans. It seems to me that we have got almost as bad a situation there as the United States has got in the Sunni triangle.

  Mr Straw: I think it is very important not to generalise and that also applies to the areas under the direct control, as it were, of the American troops. American troops have got a relatively good level of consent in some provinces and some parts of some provinces and obviously poor consent in other parts. My understanding so far as Basra is concerned is, yes, there was a particular problem with this section of the Iraqi security forces and some dominant individuals, but it is by no means universal. I would also just say to you, Mr Maples, although I think all of us are very proud indeed of the way in which our troops have operated seeking to build consent, they have always made it clear that if necessary they will be very firm and very tough, and that was why they took the action that they did about three weeks ago.

  Q76  Mr Maples: Obviously we hope that will be the outcome. We now have a situation in which the insurgency seems to be worse in most Sunni parts than it has been before, the constitution is almost certainly, I would suggest to you, going to get rejected, and we now have chaos and fighting in Basra with Iran stirring up trouble there in a way that I do not think any of us had foreseen. Is it not really time that we admitted we went to war here for all the right motives but, nevertheless, there were not any weapons of mass destruction. We have fundamentally miscalculated and misunderstood the nature of Iraqi society and the potential for divisions within it and the potential for insurgency. Would it not help us to get from here to a satisfactory exit if we admitted that we had made those mistakes?

  Mr Straw: If we thought that, and evidently you do, yes, but I do not happen to think it.

  Q77  Mr Maples: You do not think we have made any mistakes?

  Mr Straw: That is a separate issue. If you are asking me whether I think we made any fundamental mistakes in the overall strategy, no, I do not. If you are asking me day-by-day whether there are things we could have done better with the benefit of hindsight, of course that is the case, it would be arrogant to say otherwise. You could come up with a catalogue of bad news but what you omitting in all of this is the most important message of all this year, 2005, which is this: the Iraqis have embraced democracy. People said we did not understand the nature of Iraqi society, meaning that we did not understand that they did not really want to be democrats; that they did not have any interest and they just wanted to be dominated by tyrants. Well, eight and a half million Iraqis proved those people wrong on 30 January, and 10 million proved them wrong again on 15 October. The Iraqis want what we take for granted, which is the right to run their own affairs; and it is called democracy. We are seeking to support that process, a process that is also backed by the United Nations. Although you are right to say that there were big divisions in the international community and nationally over the rightness or wrongness of military action, post-war we have been there on the basis of United Nations Security Council resolutions. The key resolution now, Resolution 1546, was passed in June last year unanimously, and it is that which provides the mandate for the multinational force and the electoral timetable and institutions.

  Q78  Richard Younger-Ross: Pursuing the point on Basra, I had the privilege to visit there just after the fighting finished and saw what an excellent task our Forces were doing. I have to say that they were clearly not fully prepared for the task in front of them, because the Government had clearly not thought about the fact that it needed extra DFID help and advisors in relation to police and other areas. However, the Forces did a magnificent job in dealing with the local tribal issues and working with the local community. There has clearly been a deterioration in the relationships between our Forces there and the local authorities. What is being done to build those bridges?

  Mr Straw: A great deal, and I can let the Committee have a detailed note about that, if you wish, Mr Chairman.[1] Our people, both in the military and in the Consul General in Basra, as well as in associated government agencies like DFID, are alive to the need to have the best possible relationships with local leaders. As Mr Maples has indicated, part of what happened is that, in his phrase, some local leaders "fell out", and there is going to be a lot of vying for power because people see that power is shifting from the rather tyrannical arrangements that people knew about under Saddam and what has been there subsequently to democratic processes, which are far better but slightly less certain. There will therefore be a lot of vying for power going on, and that is what we have had to cope with. For reasons I have already explained to Mr Maples, I do not take an overly pessimistic view about the longer-term prognosis there.


  Q79 Richard Younger-Ross: Are we not in a position where the clerics and the extreme clerics will say, "They came here; they promised us water and electricity; they have failed to do those on time and they are still not working properly; they promised us this and that, and they have not delivered"? Are we not, particularly in terms of security, actually giving extra credit to the clerics to put us in a bad light?

  Mr Straw: There are two things: to the extent that the reconstruction process has lagged behind is all down to security. The other thing that has happened for the good—and this has been, again, a very big change in the last year—is that approximately 170,000 more Iraqi security forces have been trained up. Their ability to operate independently of the US, UK and other coalition forces varies considerably. There are two battalions that can operate entirely independently, but a great many can operate effectively with backing from the coalition. That has been a big change. The progress with the defence forces has been better than progress with the police in some areas where problems remain. On the point about the clerics, it is quite important to appreciate that some of those whom you describe as clerics are a very powerful, moderating force within Iraqi society, in this case amongst the Shia. Without Ayatollah Sistani's great wisdom and judgment, I think that we would be in a rather more difficult position. It is the nature of that society that a lot of the leaders are clerics. Let me say that it certainly was the case in my party, and in yours, for a very long time, that the protestants and non-conformist churches played a leading part in our—well, this is true! People used to say of the Church of England that it was a Conservative Party of prayer. It does not lie in our mouth to pretend that we are a wholly secular society where organised religion plays no part in politics, because it does play a very important part.


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