Debate on the Address
[13 NOVEMBER 1990]
be the upholding of international law, one hopes impartially, for the conflict to be effectively between one state and another is not constructive.
We seem to be very good at handing out advice to everyone but ourselves. Various people who were not members of the Republic of Ireland offered advice to the Irish Government; we heard people who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause offering advice to the Israeli Government and people who are sympathetic to the Israeli Government offering advice to the Palestinians. I shall follow in the footsteps of those before me and offer some advice to the American people. They should place their armed forces under the control of the United Nations. By that I mean that the political control should effectively be surrendered or given to Perez de Cuellar, the Secretary General of the United Nations, subject to the actions, advice and orders, if I can put it that way, of the Security Council and the General Assembly.
That suggestion has already been laughed at. It is reasonable to laugh because it is laughable to think that the President of the United States would place 10 per cent., 15 per cent. or 20 per cent. of the armed forces of the United States under the control of an international body. That is not going to happen.
However, the fact that it is not going to happen demonstrates the partiality of what is going on. What we are seeing is a conflict not between Saddam Hussein and the rest of the world but between Iraq and the United States. When one looks at it from that perspective the situation is very unsatisfactory. That is not what the Government are explaining to us. That is why I entered this debate to demonstrate the partiality of this Government and to suggest that we need a little more impartiality from them.
10.25 p.m.
Lord Mayhew: My Lords, it is hard to wind up a debate consisting of interesting and well-informed speeches on entirely disparate subjects. Today we have had speeches on Latin America, Cambodia, Poland, South Africa, the Sudan, Israel, development aid, Northern Ireland, the Commonwealth, terms of trade and, of course, Europe and the Gulf. We also had a truly memorable speech on Hong Kong. We had a speech on personal relations, social relations, Community relations and international relations; and also on white hats, black hats and blue hats.
There has been little discussion on the defence of Europe. There was a time in such debates when one-third or one-half of the speeches would be on that subject. For obvious reasons that has not been the case today--the most obvious reason being that quite quickly the threat of war in Europe has become extremely remote and the threat of war in the Gulf has become extremely acute. The only speech substantially on defence in Europe was that of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Carver. Once again, I should like to associate my noble friends and myself with a great deal of what he said about the future of NATO. He envisaged a treaty relationship between, on the one hand, the United States and Canada and, on the other, a European defence community. It may be that such
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a European defence community would be different from but parallel to the European Community and might grow out of a reformed Western European
Union.
I do not want to anticipate the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, but so far we have had no partisan attack—indeed no attack of
-on
any kind- the defence policy of the Government, though there are differences and perhaps on some other occasion we may explain them and press them. In general, another reason why in this debate there has been less discussion on European defence is undoubtedly because, by and large and for one reason and another, the big issues between the parties have become much less sharp. The issues of unilateralism, forward defence and flexible response have become much less sharp than hitherto.
Indeed, if we look back at the long perspective of inter-party discussion on defence policy we see that the outstanding feature has been not disagreement between the parties but agreement on the fundamen- tals of support for NATO and containing the Soviet Union. In that sense we can all congratulate ourselves. Broadly speaking, we have all been right and have been proved spectacularly successful,
There has been a great deal of consensus today on the Gulf crisis. Certainly my noble friends and I wish to make clear, like others in all parts of the House, that we view the annexation of Kuwait as an outrage which cannot in any circumstances be allowed to continue. We welcome the dispatch of British troops and pledge our support to them. We join with noble Lords in all parts of the House in calling for a rigorous and, if necessary, a protracted use of sanctions at this time. There may come a time when sanctions begin to impose severe hardship on the Iraqi people and particularly on Iraqi women and children. However, there may also come a time when we have to remind ourselves that sanctions are a merciful alternative to war. That must be borne in mind at all times when trying to get a peaceful solution to this crisis.
My party will also not support military action unless and until the possibilities of sanctions have been tested to the limit. We also require military action to have very wide international support and a new resolution from the Security Council. I speak frankly on this point at the cost of causing some controversy. Doubts and differences must arise. There has been extraordinarily wide and confident interna- tional support for the Security Council resolutions. Everyone has said that. There are many countries which have deployed forces in the Gulf which would no doubt take part in military action to resist further Iraqi aggression. But how many of these countries would be willing to take part in a counter-offensive to liberate Kuwait? We have to ask ourselves that question.
The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, referred to visits made by the United States Secretary of State, Mr. Baker, to the relevant countries. But there is no evidence that he achieved successful results in trying to persuade those countries to undertake to participate in a counter-offensive. I notice that the noble Earl made
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