Iraq

Lord Desai Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, in the previous three debates we have had on Middle Eastern issues, I have urged intervention every time. I also said that the question was not whether we should intervene but when, and that the more we delayed the decision the more difficult it would be when we did intervene. Here we are on the fourth go at the debate: we are going to intervene.

As many noble Lords have said, let us also be quite sure that what we are debating today is only the first step of a long process in getting there. There is absolutely no reason to expect a quick solution to such a difficult problem. Again, as we have discussed in the past, the Middle East has been in this crisis since roughly the middle of the 1970s—the past 40 years have been bloody in terms of wars between Iran and Iraq and various other conflicts. We were in Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003, and in the past three years Syria has exploded and all sorts of problems have happened.

Wars last a long time; they may have ebbs and flows. In the 17th century, wars of religion in Europe lasted 30 years. Our Civil War lasted for at least 25 years. Therefore, we should not expect a quick resolution but we should be clear that what we want to do in this particular phase of this war is to save Muslim lives. I very much want to say that there is a deep crisis in Muslim society as it is faced with modernity, and there has been for a long time. Right now, the most killing of Muslims by Muslims is taking place. Our first duty is humanitarian intervention to save those lives. Yes, there are dangers to us, and we are very much aware of them. However, we should convey clearly that we are there to save Muslim lives. Unless we do that, we will be thought once again to be intervening from above and to be going away after our task is done. We should not do that. Let us have some patience this time. As the right reverend Prelate said, the young men and women who go over there from here are idealists. We have to remember that they go there because they feel that the life they have here does not satisfy their deeper urges. After all, young men and women went to fight in the Spanish Civil War; they were doing a similar thing.

We have to understand the dynamics of what these young men and women are doing and not just say immediately, “They are all terrorists and when they come back we will put them all in jail”. Let us understand where they come from and what they are tying to do. If we extend our understanding to both Muslim society at home and Muslim society in the Middle East, we shall be much more successful than we have been in the past.