Queen’s Speech

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy—I would follow him almost anywhere—but not on this day his logic and his argument.

I wish to say a few words about Syria and the tragedy that is being played out there. More than 80,000 have already been killed and there will be many more to come. It is only right that we want to help and, as my noble friend Lady Northover indicated earlier, we are doing so. Yet, there is always the law of unintended consequences that dogs our every step in the Middle East. Syria is not a country or a crisis in isolation. It comes with the context of so much that has gone before. Let us take Iraq, for instance. It is almost exactly 10 years since we invaded, and yet all those years and all those lives later, Iraq is a country still beset by religious and ethnic division and consumed by corruption. We invaded the country genuinely committed to supporting democracy, human rights and western values. We left that country with the images of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay burnt into our reputation, and into the imaginations of a generation of young Arabs. Those tiny, irritating, unintended consequences have bitten us hard.

Much the same might be said of our involvement in Afghanistan. Earlier, the Minister said that we are “on track”, but we shall see. We have troops on the ground, so I want to be extremely cautious about what I say, and as the president of the Langford and Wylye branch of the Royal British Legion, I want very much to pay tribute to the servicemen of our Armed Forces and the sacrifices that so many of them have made. But there is one question above all others that must be asked when we consider these issues. After all these years and the expenditure of lives and treasure in our war on terror, have we succeeded in making Britain a safer place? Unless we can say that that is clearly the case, that Britain is more secure, we must at least consider the possibility that the policy we have been pursuing has been wrong.

I want to put this into a little more context before I get to Syria by talking about Libya. We overthrew Gaddafi, a man who we had once armed, just as we had once armed Saddam Hussein, and even Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Soviets. The law of unintended consequences had a field day with that one. It is still too early to measure the success in Libya. There is still widespread violence and lawlessness, and despite all the support we have given to the new Libyan Government, we seem to be no closer to discovering the truth behind the Lockerbie bombing or bringing to justice the killer of PC Yvonne Fletcher. It is not just truth or justice that have disappeared into the sands, so has Gaddafi’s enormous arsenal of weapons. Some 20,000 surface-to-air missiles, artillery pieces, mortar rounds and much more have flown away and found new homes. Those weapons are now turning up in new hotspots in north Africa and the Middle East—Algeria, Niger, Mali, Somalia and, of course, Gaza, although that is scarcely a new hotspot. These are more unintended consequences.

Some of those weapons have turned up in Syria as well, contributing to the bloodbath and the inhumanity. As a result, it is being argued with increasing passion in some quarters that we must do something, go further, arm the good guys. I understand the deep humanitarian concern that lies behind such suggestions. The Minister herself as good as said something earlier today about amending the EU arms embargo and facilitating a negotiated solution, but putting more weapons into that area might also facilitate an even greater catastrophe. The war in Syria, as we have heard from many speakers in the debate, is not simply a civil war, it is part of a war of sectarianism that is burning across so much of the Middle East. It is a war of opposing ideologies, tribes, cultures and religions; a kaleidoscope of confusion.

That raises a question: if we intervene, just who are we supporting? Simply being an enemy of Assad does not make any group a friend of this country. The Middle East is not a pick-and-mix sweet shop. It is a cauldron of subtle and shifting loyalties that in the past we have had little success in understanding, let alone exploiting. It is being argued in some quarters, possibly even implied in what the Minister said in her remarks earlier, that because Assad’s arsenal is huge, we must give the rebels more and thus level up the playing field—or level up the killing field. It is suggested, for instance, that we supply items such as body armour, which does not kill. No, it does not, but the weapons in the hands of those wearing the body armour will most certainly kill.

I believe that, so far, the Government have got our policy in Syria right. They have provided humanitarian aid and there must be more—much more—of that. We have supported our great ally Turkey, whose interests and frontiers are so directly threatened. The Prime Minister has emphasised the need for an international solution. He has gone to Russia and talked with others in the Middle East in the attempt to find some common ground and to isolate the conflict. We should also talk to the Iranians, if we can, after their elections in a few weeks.

Talking may not find any easy solution, but there may be no solution of any sort in Syria, not for a few years. We lack the ability to make it otherwise. Sometimes it is braver and far wiser to resist the siren call to arms and to do less rather than to promise more. We should be providing no military equipment of any sort to the conflict in Syria. We should instead remember that there is no tragedy in Syria that cannot be made far worse by misguided western intervention and by allowing ourselves to be caught, yet again, by that unavoidable law of unintended consequence.