protecting the people there and getting in the UN inspectors to make it clear what has happened and how we can help those people who are suffering by civil war?
Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op): I would like to see humanitarian protected areas. That would take troops. Is my hon. Friend suggesting that?
Albert Owen: A UN peacekeeping force could be used. There are many ways to do that, but I would rather see that alleviate people’s suffering than bombing from Cyprus and ships. Yes, we must consider helping people on the ground, but military action should not be our first option—it should be the last—and humanitarian corridors could work if we had the will of the Security Council and the United Nations working together, rather than polarising them, which is what we are doing by threatening military strikes now.
We need a rationale; we need an international solution; and we need to listen to our constituents. Overwhelmingly, the people of Britain are telling us no to immediate action and no to strikes. We should listen to them. The country was divided over Iraq. On this issue, it is united in saying no to military action now. Let us get the humanitarian effort under way.
6.1 pm
Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con): I am extremely reluctant to endorse military action in Syria. My reluctance does not spring from any doubts about the facts of the use of chemical weapons by Assad’s forces. Those who suggest that the atrocity of 21 August was committed by his opponents on their own supporters to provoke intervention by the alliance are allowing their hostility to military action to fuel their imagination in the absence of any concrete evidence. But my right hon. Friends were right to delay any decision until the UN inspectors have reported.
Nor does my reluctance spring from doubts about the legality of action to deter or prevent the further use of chemical weapons, even without a UN resolution, but I am puzzled why the United States, the United Kingdom and France stepped forward with alacrity to take on this unpopular task. France, from which I have just returned, is the country whose willingness to do so can most easily be explained. The decline in President Hollande’s support was checked only by his successful intervention in Mali, with boots on the ground. More importantly, France has always believed that it has a special involvement in Syria. However, President Hollande, and indeed anyone else who is thinking of serious involvement on the ground in Syria, should read a report of the last time that France was involved in Syria, written by President Hollande’s predecessor, de Gaulle, when he was still a commandant in 1931, describing how it took six years and nearly 10,000 French dead to restore peace in Syria after the first world war. We all do well to remember just how difficult that country is to pacify.
The involvement of the United States and the United Kingdom is much more puzzling. Obama voted against Iraq. By no stretch of the imagination is he a interventionist cowboy; nor are my right hon. Friends the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister rabid neo-cons. I can only suspect that one reason is the fear that inaction now that red lines have been crossed would send a message to Iran that it has little to fear if it continued to develop nuclear weapons. That is a legitimate and powerful reason, but it can have difficult consequences.
My main concern is that, although the Government’s intentions as laid out in the motion are limited, military action will unleash pressures to become further involved.
If Assad takes whatever blow we inflict upon him but then goes on and appears to be winning, would we tolerate a war criminal being allowed to win? Would there not be enormous pressures to switch the balance back against him, and would it not be hard to resist pressures to arm the rebels? If we are partly motivated by a concern to send a message to Iran, will it not be seen as difficult to allow Iran’s ally to win?
Let us suppose that Assad desists from the further use of chemical weapons, to go on committing what might be called conventional atrocities, as he has. Will not our commitment and its legal basis that this is not about chemical weapons but about the duty to protect people lead us to be pressed to take action against that type of atrocity? Indeed, if those atrocities are committed by the other side, or sides, in the war, will we not be pressed to take action about them?
What keeps me out of the No Lobby tonight is my confidence in the judgment of the Foreign Secretary, with whom I have worked in many roles, subordinate and inferior, and my confidence that he would not use his good judgment unwisely in this matter—nor would the Prime Minister—but what I need to persuade me to join them in the Yes Lobby is the clearest possible assurance that they will resist the forces to go further if we do get involved and say, “So far, but no further.”
6.6 pm
Mr Roger Godsiff (Birmingham, Hall Green) (Lab): I have been to Syria on two occasions as part of delegations and had audiences with President Assad, and they were certainly illuminating. Syria is ruled by him as a family fiefdom and has a history of brutality. Its political structure—the Ba’athist party—is modelled on the old Russian Communist party. I say that because I do not, however, believe that President Assad is a fool, but I will return to that later.
What has happened to the people of Syria is a crime against humanity, and it is imperative, as the Leader of the Opposition said, to bring the conflict to an end as soon as possible. War crimes have been committed by both sides, and Assad should be held accountable in due course for declaring war on his own people. When it was alleged that chemical weapons had been used in the latest atrocity, I welcomed the fact that UN weapons inspectors were to go to the site. However, I was very concerned when almost immediately the Foreign Secretary appeared on television, dismissively making pre-emptive comments about the fact that the evidence that they might find may already have disappeared or have been contaminated and that they might not find anything. I do not believe that the Foreign Secretary is not an honourable man, but his comments reminded me very much indeed of what was said in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq by the USA and Britain.
