Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
WEDNESDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2007
DR KIM
HOWELLS MP, ANTONY
PHILLIPSON AND
PAUL ARKWRIGHT
Q240 Mr. Illsley: With regard to
leading the initiative, we actually led the E3+3 initiative back
in 2003 and were at the forefront of that.
Dr. Howells: We have been leaders
on that all the way along. With regard to being open to new approaches
and ideas, we are about as open as it is possible to be. However,
we are also determined that something comes of that process, because
the alternatives are too awful to think about.
Q241 Chairman: May I take you back
to the IAEA and the role of Mr. el-Baradei? When we were in Iran
with Mr. Jalili and others, we got a very common line that the
Iranians wanted to engage with el-Baradei and the work plan of
the IAEA. However, they were somehow in denial that that was linked
in any way to the two Security Council resolutions, which were
actually mentioned in Mr. el-Baradei's statement two weeks ago.
Some people in the United States have used that kind of argument
to say that el-Baradei is in some way going soft, or that the
IAEA is trying to do a special deal with the Iranians. What is
your assessment of that issue?
Dr. Howells: If you had asked
me that six months ago, I would have been one those voices saying
to Dr. el-Baradei, "Come on, you've got to be tougher on
them." Now I am very glad that I did not. I think that his
report is very balanced and it pays tribute to the Iranians where
it is due. At the beginning you quoted some sentences about how
it is now more difficult to monitor some of the things that are
going on inside Iran's nuclear programme than it was previously.
That is a dismal conclusion to arrive at. Generally, he is doing
a good job.
The pressures on members of the board of the
IAEA are quite considerable. I remember when I was in a country
in the Middle East that had been a member of the board and had
had to make decisions. They said that they had breathed a sigh
of relief when they came off the board, because life was much
easier diplomatically, and they did not have to make tough decisions
about dealing with Iran. I can imagine that the situation is not
easy for a lot of Iran's neighbours.
Q242 Chairman: We are now at the
point where el-Baradei says that the Iranians must answer a number
of questions over the coming few weeks. The Iranians say that
they will not stop their enrichment programme unless the UN removes
the two Security Council resolutions, and that they will only
deal with the IAEA on that basis—at least, that is my understanding
of the things that were said. Are we therefore in a complete deadlock?
We have to find a way to negotiate out of what could become a
total impasse.
Dr. Howells: I come back to Sir
John's suggestion that there should be an offer that is transparent
and that the world can see. That is what the E3+3 offer is. My
great worry, Mr. Gapes, is that it will be knocked back again.
I heard the delegate of one country recently say, "What is
as wrong with a little bit of enrichment?" That it is a bit
like saying, "What is wrong with a little bit of Czechoslovakia?"
Q243 Chairman: But if the end goal
is to prevent Iran from producing highly enriched uranium for
a nuclear weapons programme, is there not a way of phasing the
negotiation process so that suspension is in parallel to negotiation,
or is phased into a negotiation, rather than being a precondition
of negotiation?
Dr. Howells: You need to have
the terms for that negotiation on the table. It is not as if they
have suddenly been arrived at. It is not like what has been discussed
over the past couple of days at Annapolis. This stuff has been
in the public eye for a very long time, and everybody has had
a chance to chew it over, tear it apart and to say that it would
not work. It is not a secret—there are no preconditioned
terms which nobody knows about. Everybody knows what they are.
Mr. Horam said that we have to give the Iranians
some way of saving face. I am not sure what that would be. I think
that they know exactly where they stand on the issue. We know
where we stand. It is a matter of somebody moving. That, it seems
to me, is very easy; it is to say, "We signed up to the terms
of the safeguard agreement, we are members of the International
Atomic Energy Agency, and we are going to abide by the rules."
Why is that so difficult?
Paul Arkwright: To refer to the
point about the synchronicity between the IAEA and the UN Security
Council, I would draw your attention to Dr. el-Baradei's most
recent report in which he talks about Iran's co-operation being
reactive rather than proactive. Iran is, in effect, spinning out
the outstanding issues, taking them seriatim, taking its time
in answering the questions that remain, being very reluctant to
provide full disclosure, including on some of the issues on which
el-Baradei has been reporting, and, therefore, extending the programme
of the work plan and the time it takes to respond to the outstanding
issues.
Only when there is a full response to those
outstanding issues can the international community, in the form
of the IAEA, have any kind of confidence in Iran's declared intentions.
At the same time that is happening, Iran continues to enrich uranium,
in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions. So there is a
problem if you say, "Well, allow the IAEA to do its work
and Iran to respond to the questions in its own good time"—which
it has—when Iran's co-operation is being dragged out of
it, according to the report, while all the time the centrifuges
are spinning and they are getting closer to the point about which
we are particularly concerned.
Dr. Howells: If I could just add
to that? The IAEA resolution of February 2006 called for suspension.
It is not just the UN demand from the Security Council; it is
the very organisation of which Iran is a member.
Q244 Mr. Horam: May I follow up the
point made by Sir John and the Chairman about the juncture we
are now at? At a meeting last night of the British-Iranian all-party
parliamentary group, Ali Ansari made the point that Britain still
has a very special status and relationship with Iran, and the
Iranians are waiting to hear from us. So far, the Foreign Secretary
has not made a speech significantly about Iran. Is there not an
opportunity for some imaginative diplomacy to attempt to break
the deadlock that we have talked about?
Dr. Howells: I shall pass on your
suggestions to the Foreign Secretary, Mr. Horam.
Q245 Mr. Horam: In the declining
days of the Labour Government, just as they are the declining
days of the Bush presidency, maybe a gesture would save you.
Dr. Howells: That is wishful thinking.
Chairman: We shall leave that issue to
some other meeting, not this evidence session about Iran.
Q246 Mr. Moss: I should like Dr.
Howells to move on to the possibility of military action. A key
challenge of diplomacy is to develop trust and respect, particularly
in nuclear diplomacy. When you were with us—I think in the
summer—you said that the Iranians did not think that we
respected them enough. Is there not an argument that the more
aggressive the posture from the west, the easier it is for Iran
to say that it must have a deterrent for national defence. What
impact does keeping the military option on the table have on Iran
in trusting our intentions?
Dr. Howells: We have certainly
never threatened Iran with any form of military action and we
have no intention of doing so. I cannot speak for other countries
in the world, and I can only tell you what I find as I go around
the world. I had the honour of meeting the commanders of the Third
Fleet of the Marines at Camp Pendleton recently, near San Diego
in southern California, and I have met many of the leaders of
the American armed forces in the Pentagon. No one has said to
me that they think it would be a good idea to take military action
in Iran. Frankly, there is no requirement for it.
The offer that I have tried to argue for this
afternoon is a good offer, which Iran has signed up to and could
easily enact. The heat would be taken out of the situation immediately.
There is a lot of talk, of course, that you will have heard as
much as I have, of Israel bombing Iran or of some kind of strike
coming from somewhere else. I have a map here of some of the sites
where we know that some of the nuclear developments are going
on. Some people have told me that there may be as many as 18 or
22 sites. We know that there has been a lot of tunnelling work
around Natanz, and hard rock work and reinforcement work is going
on. What would that involve in terms of military action? I do
not think that the Americans look at this in anything less than
a very serious way. Back in 1980, they had a pretty terrible time
there and they are very much aware that this is a huge country,
that it has a great pride in itself and that it would not look
lightly upon a military attack, so I do not see it as an immediate
possibility at all.
Q247 Mr. Moss: There have been reports
that elements in the US Administration are frustrated with our
Prime Minister for not ruling out entirely the fact that Iran
should ever get a nuclear weapon, but the Prime Minister has actually
been reasonably firm in saying that we are not going to rule out
any action. Does that mean that the British Government consider
that keeping that option on the table is likely to bring about
some resolution of the difficulties?
Dr. Howells: No, I do not think
that that will bring about the resolution of difficulties. I forget
whether it was Mr. Horam or Sir John who spoke earlier about the
way in which President Ahmadinejad has used the external threats
to strengthen his own position within the country, and I think
that a military threat would be seen as a very real one. Indeed,
he has being trying to whip up a kind of chimera of threats around
the country—Afghanistan, Iraq, unstable countries to the
north, the great Sunni nations to the south. He plays this game;
his rhetoric is now about traitors and spies. They prosecuted
the former nuclear negotiator and accused him of spying. I do
not think that this is just paranoia on the part of the Tehran
regime; it is a conscious effort to divert attention within Iran
away from their own domestic problems, and those are mostly to
do with poverty and underdevelopment.
Q248 Mr. Moss: So what you are saying
is slightly contrary to what has emanated from the Prime Minister—that
he is not ruling anything out, implying military action. You are
actually saying from a Foreign Office point of view that this
country will not support military action on Iran, on the nuclear
capabilities issue.
Dr. Howells: I do not know; I
cannot answer that because, of course, Iran also has a will of
its own. We have troops in Afghanistan and in Iraq, but there
are certainly elements—I am not saying that it is President
Ahmadinejad or the supreme ruler—within the Iranian regime
that have been supplying bombs, training, detonators and passive
infrared detonators that have been killing our soldiers in both
countries. That seems to me to be very aggressive military action
from a country that is complaining that it is the victim of military
pressure from elsewhere. I do not think that we can say that we
would not take any action if that kind of situation got any worse,
and they are doing it now—they are helping to kill our soldiers
now.
Q249 Mr. Moss: On a slightly different
issue, the Prime Minister has told the House that he wants to
end the power of the Executive to go to war. If there was to be
any military action on Iran, such as the bombing of nuclear facilities,
do you believe that the Prime Minister would put that to the House
of Commons before action was taken or support was given?
Dr. Howells: That is a bit above
my pay grade, Mr. Moss. I would assume that, given recent history,
at the very least there would be very extensive debate before
such a decision was made.
Q250 Richard Younger-Ross: Mr. Phillipson
implied that Iran had a more liberal approach. I accept that most
of us who visited it did find that it was slightly more open than
we had anticipated—women do drive, women do have jobs—but
in case anyone should get a wrong impression about Iran, we are
fairly certain that they were jamming CNN and BBC TV programmes
on nights when they might have contained something embarrassing.
We are also fairly certain that our rooms were searched while
we were there. The impression that most of us got was that it
was more like an eastern bloc country post-1945 than some of the
other impressions that people have had.
In the past when there has been military deployment,
America has said to us that it wants to refuel, to use the bases
in the UK or to use our overseas territories. It of course has
a base in the Indian ocean. Would you make sure that you were
aware of any weapons that the Americans decided to deploy prior
to military action?
Dr. Howells: The Americans always
inform us before any action is taken, when they know that it will
impact on British law. That includes bases overseas, where we
could be implicated in some action that some other country, including
the United States, would take. We expect them to act like that,
as good allies.
Q251 Richard Younger-Ross: If the
Americans were deploying busting bombs to the Middle East, we
would know that that was happening via the bases.
Dr. Howells: Yes, we would certainly
expect to know that.
Q252 Sir John Stanley: Following
your exchange with Malcolm Moss, does it remain the British Government's
position that all options, including the military option, are
open as far as Iran is concerned?
Dr. Howells: Hedged by the qualifications
that I made to Mr. Moss in my answer to his question, we have
no intention of taking military action against Iran, but I have
said that Iran is already taking military action against our soldiers
in both Iraq and Afghanistan. That means that we have to be very
vigilant about watching for arms convoys—for example, coming
through Herat or via Baluchistan—that Iran may be sending
to arm the Taliban. I cannot give you a guarantee that we would
not take action against such convoys once they were in Afghan
territory.
Q253 Mr. Keetch: I want to be specific.
You are slightly raising the game on the issue of whether or not
Iranian influence is specifically killing British soldiers. We
were certainly told when we visited the United States that some
of the revolutionary guard Quds forces have been directly implicated
in the killing of US troops. Are you telling us this afternoon
that we know that Iranian-produced weaponry or technology has
been involved specifically in the killing of British soldiers
in either Iraq or Afghanistan?
Dr. Howells: You will have to
ask the Secretary of State for Defence for that precise answer.
Having visited Basra many times and other parts of Iraq, and Helmand
even before our troops got down there, I believe that they have
been used to attack our troops, yes.
Q254 Ms Stuart: Can I press you a
little further on that? Feel free to write back to us, but I learned
from some of the conversations that I had recently that we have
direct evidence that Iranian-produced weapons killed our soldiers.
However, when we trace back to the kind of equipment that has
been coming across, it would seem that that has not been the case
during the past three months.
Dr. Howells: This is in Basra?
Ms Stuart: Yes, in both Basra and Iran.
There is no doubt that the kind of weapons that we can trace back,
due to their origin, had been coming out of Iran, but not recently.
Q255 Dr. Howells: I will ask the
Ministry of Defence for some information about that. You are probably
better off writing to it directly. I do not know about the past
three months.
Chairman: No doubt you will write to
us if you can get more information—as well as us writing
to the MOD. It might be helpful if the Foreign Office requested
the information, too. We might get better information that way.
Q256 Andrew Mackinlay: On that shopping
list, there is evidence, is there not, that the end-user certificates
of the European weapons being exported to Iran are not being honoured?
If you are writing to the MOD, I understand that some Austrian
Steyr infantry weapons were used against coalition forces in Iraq.
Because of the numbers on them, it was transparent that, relatively
recently, they had been exported from Austria—an EU country—to
Iran. That was on the end-user certificate. That specific example
or any other can be checked out because I understand that these
things have transparency, to some extent, because of the codes
and so on. However, Austrian Steyr infantry weapons were apparently
used, which had gone from their producers in Austria to Iran.
That raises the question: why is the EU still exporting arms?
Dr. Howells: Mr. Mackinlay, it
is a bit of a surprise to me, because one of the EU measures taken
was to impose an arms embargo on Iran. That included technical
assistance for goods covered by the arms embargo. We will certainly
try to find out about that for you, but it is the first that I
have heard about it. Paul, have you heard anything about this?
Paul Arkwright: We will find out
about it.
Chairman: We will move on to some questions
about the regions.
Dr. Howells: Sorry, Mr. Gapes.
Antony tells me that those exports predated the arms embargo.
Q257 Andrew Mackinlay: When was the
arms embargo? Approximately what sort of time scale are we talking
about? It is still very worrying that we were giving them weapons.
You obviously know a bit about it. What was the time scale of
their dispatch from Austria to Iran and their appearance in Iraq?
Antony Phillipson: I think that
we will have to write to you with the details. The arms embargo
came in as part of the common position adopted at the end of April
this year. The story to which I think you are referring—if
it is the one that I remember reading about in the papers at the
time—predated that. However, I also believe that we made
our concerns known at the time.
Chairman: Perhaps if we could have a
note, that would help us.
Q258 Mr. Pope: President Ahmadinejad
is on the record as saying, in about 2005, that Israel should
be wiped off the face of the earth. How seriously do the Government
take that threat? One reason I ask is that when the Committee
was in Iran, we were told by the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs
that this was not a comment of aggressive intent; the President
was merely referring to his preferred one-state solution for the
Middle East.
Dr. Howells: I have heard lots
of explanations of that statement of intent. The one that is used
mostly is the parallel with the former Soviet Union. It has been
pointed out to me that the Soviet Union does not appear on any
contemporary maps any more and yet the country is still there.
That is an interesting argument.
Q259 Mr. Pope: How much of a threat
do you think a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to the region? There
are some people—probably some on this Committee—who
think that there are no circumstances in which we should contemplate
action against Iran. I think that that is a complacent view. I
am interested to know what sort of threat you think a nuclear-armed
Iran would pose to the region and whether we should keep all options
on the table. I think that it was John Bolton who said: "The
only thing worse than bombing Iran is allowing Iran to get the
bomb." What is your view on that?
Dr. Howells: What sort of threat
would they be? First, it would depend on when they got the bomb
and what kind of Government were in power in Iran. Everyone was
pretty terrified in 2002 when India and Pakistan were squaring
up to each other. It was probably the most dangerous situation
on the face of the earth. We do not know how many bombs Pakistan
has, but it certainly has delivery systems and pretty powerful
nuclear weapons. That situation is looking very unstable at the
moment. This issue is one of the reasons why we worry a great
deal about Pakistan.
Another country with a bomb in an area that
is already unstable is bound to ratchet up the evident risks in
that area. Would the Iranians want to use that bomb? I do not
know. It is very difficult to say. One would hope that they would
never want to use such a bomb, but that is a hell of a gamble
to take. In the meantime, we have to persuade the Iranians that
the better option is to not develop a nuclear bomb.
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