Iraq

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, the basic question in my mind is exactly that posed by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby. To summarise it, unless we are to have a war of all against all, as in Hobbes, what is the basis on which there can be a new paradigm between the religions? It is very difficult, but at the moment it could not be more startlingly obvious, with the Saudis playing it both ways as always, with Danegeld being distributed quite widely. I hope that the revolutionary idea of the caliphate, or Boko Haram, or what is going on in parts of Indonesia, and so on, is not one that we simply think can be dealt with in the way that we have, haplessly, to do now.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, said, charity begins at home. I suspect that there is massive support for this in Britain because it involves British citizens and because of the absolutely medieval beheadings that are more or less on our TV sets. We have more urgently to look at why part of our youth feel so radicalised in a revolutionary way that they think that British society has nothing to do with them.

I was interested in the comment made by my noble friend Lord Desai about the comparison with the Spanish Civil War. Only two weeks ago, I had a conversation with two friends, who happen to be in the Labour Party. I said, “We really can’t have people going backwards and forwards to Iraq to carry out these atrocities”. The question came back to me: “Why did you think it was such a good idea that we allowed this in the Spanish Civil War?”. I did not give a very good answer at that time. The answer is to do with the legitimacy of the Spanish Republican Government and so on, but it is more to do with what you might call the tradition of western philosophy and all its offshoots, which meant that the Spanish Civil War was an issue that we could understand in our terms. The caliphate is not like that. It is different from the Spanish Civil War in legitimising people going there.

I have two questions. First, has Qatar, which is part of the alliance, changed its mind about financing ISIL? Otherwise, how on earth is it part of the alliance? Secondly, did I hear the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, who is not now in his place, say that unmanned aerial vehicles in Syria are a different legal category from manned aerial vehicles? Am I the only one who has not heard that doctrine before? Is it accepted by international law?

In conclusion, we have to bear in mind the principle that has been hinted at by many noble Lords: we must not allow this to become a successful provocation. I am quite sure that the strategists, not of al-Qaeda but of ISIL, want this to be a successful provocation, but how do we prevent it from being to them a successful provocation?