Peter Ford

Peter Ford    (Diplomat, activist)
Born	Peter William Ford 27 June 1947
Alma mater	Queen's College (Oxford)
Interests	• Syria • Middle East
In office 2006 - 2015 Employer UNRWA Working with refugees  British Ambassador to Syria In office 2003 - 2006 Preceded by Henry Hogger Succeeded by John Jenkins  British Ambassador to Bahrain In office 1999 - 2003  HM Diplomatic Service In office 1970 - 2006

Peter Ford (born 27 June 1947) is a retired British diplomat who was Ambassador to Bahrain from 1999–2003 and to Syria from 2003–2006. Since retirement he has been protesting UK foreign policy.

Career

In 1970, Peter Ford joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as a Third Secretary, and the following year was posted to the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) in Beirut, Lebanon. He was Second later First Secretary at the embassy in Cairo, Egypt, from 1974 to 1977 before returning to the FCO. In 1980, Ford was posted to the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) in Paris and became First Secretary at the Paris embassy from 1981 to 1985. He was promoted to Counsellor and posted to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in January 1987.

UNRWA

After retiring from HM Diplomatic Service in 2006, Peter Ford was appointed Representative of the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees in the Near East and the Arab world.

Activism

In recent years, Peter Ford has become known as a vocal supporter of the Assad regime in Syria. He has suggested Al Qaeda opposition forces were responsible for a deadly attack on a UN humanitarian convoy in October 2016, which had been wrongly blamed by US officials on Russia and the Syrian government.

On 11 April 2017, Peter Ford said those calling for intervention in Syria are likes “dogs returning to their own vomit”. He also believes it is “highly unlikely” that Russia and the Assad regime were behind the attack in Idlib province.

US cruise missile attack

On 7 April 2017, following the US cruise missile attack on the al-Shayrat airbase in Homs province, Peter Ford was interviewed by the BBC. His attention was drawn to the opening part of President Trump's statement: "My fellow Americans, on Tuesday Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians." When asked whether he agreed it was "a statement of fact", Ford replied:

"It's a misstatement of non-fact. We don't know. What's needed is an investigation. Because there are two possibilities for what happened: one is the American version that Assad dropped chemical weapons on this locality. The other is that an ordinary bomb was dropped and it hit a munitions dump where the jihadis were storing chemical weapons. We don't know which of the two possibilities is the correct one. Remember the run-up to Iraq. The experts, the intelligence agencies, the politicians were convinced that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. They produced reams of evidence, photographs, diagrams. It was all wrong. It's possible they are wrong in this instance as well, and that they're just looking for a pretext to attack Syria. Let's not deceive ourselves - what has happened makes more use of chemical weapons more likely, not less.

Michael Fallon Defence Secretary is convinced by the evidence, that he backs this action. Why is it that you are a lone voice...?

"I don't leave my brains at the door when I examine a situation analytically. I try to be objective and, based on previous experience including Iraq, we can see that we cannot take at face value what the so-called intelligence experts tell us, not when they have an agenda. But, let's come back to the main point: it's not going to end here, and we, Britain, are likely to be dragged into it. Because Trump has just given the jihadis a thousand reasons to stage fake flag operations seeing how successful and how easy it is with a gullible media to promote the West into intemperate reactions. They will very likely stage an operation similar to what they did and this was documented by the United Nations in August last year. They mounted a chlorine gas attack on civilians and they tried to make it look like it was a regime operation. This - mark my words you're hearing it here first - and it will happen, and it will get all the war-mongers coming to tell us that Assad is defying us and we must go in more heavily into Syria. This will be a fake flag."

What do you think Assad's reaction will be?

"Assad may be cruel, brutal, but he is not mad. It defies belief that he would bring all this on his head. For no military advantage. The site that was hit had no military significance. It made absolutely no sense. It would have angered the Russians for no other reason: it was simply not plausible."

How will Assad's behaviour change now he knows President Trump is prepared to launch cruise missile attacks?

"If he didn't do it in the first place, it can't change his behaviour. But we will all pay the consequences. The oil price will spike. Very likely, there will be more use not less use of CW as a result of this and - this is also important - the Russians and the Syrians will give less co-operation in the fight against ISIS.

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References

This page imported content from wikipedia on 7 April 2007.
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