Global Challenges

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)]

My Lords, in the limited time that I have today I shall concentrate on Syria. Before I do so, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Ashdown on the magisterial tour d’horizon that he gave us of the changing world that we face in the 21st century.

Syria is now in its fifth year of war. In Parliament we have had two serious occasions to reflect on what the United Kingdom Government should do about it. We had our first debate on 30 August 2013. At that point, several people in this House and in the other place felt that taking action against Syria was the right thing to do. I note that the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Weardale, suggested that we probably would not have had a legal basis and that it probably would not have gone right. I respectfully suggest to him that that is a counterfactual. We cannot know because we decided not to do it. From my perspective, we had a clear legal position. The Chemical Weapons Convention had been breached and, as I had warned in many months leading up to that point, we were in a position where, if we did nothing, we would see the rise of jihadi movements. I did not predict that it would be called the Islamic state but that is what many of us in this Chamber had talked about at that time.

We had the other debate on 26 September 2014, where the House overall took the view that this was not something in which we should get engaged any longer. That was after we had seen the rise of ISIL. At that point, the impression given by both President Obama and our own Prime Minister was that air strikes would be sufficient and that we could crush ISIL and then get back to the problem of dealing with Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

It has become evident that air strikes are no longer sufficient, and we have the Defence Secretary priming Members in the other place to the expectation that we will have yet another vote on whether we should expand the air strikes into Syria from Iraq. The legal basis in Iraq, of course, was that the Iraqi Government had invited us to come and assist them.

I asked the Minister at Question Time today what he imagined the legal basis would be for going into Syria, because that would be a clear distinction. As far as I can tell, the position of the Government is still that Bashar al-Assad has to go—in other words, that they are not prepared to talk to Bashar al-Assad. If Bashar al-Assad is the enemy, along with ISIL, how can the United Kingdom, without United Nations authorisation, come up with a legal base for intervention and carry out belligerent air strikes in a country where we have not been invited and where, coincidentally—and, I would say, rather seriously—another UNSC member, Russia, has significant interests?

Many talk about the end of the Cold War. I fear that we are seeing a new kind of cold war as we start going back to the 1970s and those kind of adventures. I would argue that when the Prime Minister talks of a full spectrum response, he needs to be mindful of how full and complete this country’s capabilities are in terms of a full spectrum response. More than that, leaving aside this country, the impact of a full spectrum response against a grouping that mobilises on the basis of theology and religion, would in effect be seen in the Muslim world as a full spectrum response against Muslims, particularly as ISIL has moved into Afghanistan—we know that as it beheaded 11 Taliban only recently—as it has moved into Pakistan and is moving further east still. It is already in Africa. Boko Haram has already pledged allegiance to it. Therefore, I would caution the Government against again responding disproportionately. We are back, I fear, to the Blair/Bush era of disproportionate responses. I do not for a second want to diminish the pain and suffering felt by the people who have lost family and friends in the ghastly attack in Tunisia, but there has to be a sense of proportionality.

In closing, I say to the Minister that there is another way. That other way was taken by France, which is a United Nations Security Council member. France chose to sit aside from that first post-9/11 war in Iraq. It has not suffered significant losses. I accept that it has a terrorism problem but it has not suffered losses in any other sense by having stood aside. We could do the same. We could be the honest broker. We need Russia on side for Iran and Syria and many other things. We could be the honest broker in trying to be the only United Nations Security Council member that pushes for a peace settlement—a peace accord—because that is what we need to do. We need to move back to resolving disputes through peaceful measures rather than resorting to bombs every time something goes wrong.