Middle East — House of Commons, 2015-11-30
Topic: International Affairs
Robert John Blackman (Conservative, Centre-right): It is an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Seema Kennedy). She made a good speech on Iran and the circumstances from which she originally came. She knows the subject extremely well. I also commend my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) for securing this debate. I well remember when he presented his proposal for it to the Backbench Business Committee. His key point was that we should be looking for a strategy for the middle east, and that we should debate the role of the British Government internationally rather than concentrating only on one area in the region. I believe that many Members share my concern that for far too long we have made interventions in individual countries rather than looking at a broad range of strategic views across the region and deciding what the British role should be We are on the cusp of a decision on whether we should intervene in Syria. I am grateful to the Prime Minister for setting out a clear strategy and explaining what we want to achieve from an intervention against ISIL. However, the question remains: what would happen after ISIL was defeated? Where would the replacement Government come from? Where is the alternative view? For far too long, we have looked at countries right across the middle east simply as lines on a map that were drawn after the great war and the second world war, instead of seeing them as groups of tribes and villages that have come together in some form of amalgam or through being dominated by a dictator and his or her forces who required the people to follow a particular line Let us look at what we did during the 1980s. At that time, Britain had a settled policy. We balanced Iraq and Iran in the region. We should remember that more people died in the war between those two countries than in the entire great war. Under that policy, we armed Iraq in order to combat Iran. Then, however, we intervened in Iraq, took away its Government and unbalanced the region. We are now experiencing the consequences of that intervention, in Iraq, in Iran and across the wider middle east Then we had the Arab spring, which had a great swath of democracy at its heart. Everyone dreamed that it would be the beginning of a great movement for change. Sadly, wherever we got democracy, we have now seen dictatorship, war, civil war and further interventions right across the region, and we need to look at that. We have seen the refugee crisis that has erupted as a result of the civil war in Syria, but that is as nothing to the refugee crisis that will be generated unless we address climate change. The region will become uninhabitable, water will be non-existent and food will be impossible to obtain, and we will then bear enormous consequences as a result. It is therefore appropriate to examine that as a particular issue Other Members have alluded to the ongoing problems between Israel and Palestine, the area that has failed to be addressed. I speak as someone who has been on visits to Israel and the west bank with both the Conservative Friends of Israel and the Palestinian Return Centre to see both sides of the argument. One depressing thing about the Palestinian representation is how badly they have been let down by their leadership and by their legal advisers, and how they have failed to see any progress towards achieving what they all want to achieve, which is an outright country—a state that is independent and secure Israel has to take steps to maintain security. In 2014, Israel, whose territory was subjected to more than 5,000 rockets and bombs sent from Gaza, had to take action against Hamas and the Hamas dictatorship that is misleading Gaza. The reality is that even now Hamas is diverting the international aid that Britain and other countries are putting in to rebuild the terror tunnels it began. Hamas is also utilising the money to fuel hate-filled lessons in ideology in that region, and is preventing the international aid from coming in. It has even prevented the setting up of a water desalination plant that would enable all the people of Gaza to enjoy clean drinking water at first hand. That is extremely regrettable.