National Security Situation

Baroness Finn Excerpts

Thursday 19th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, after such an excellent, measured and learned speech. Two issues are circling in this debate and are best considered individually. The first concerns Parliament’s role in military action, in this case in Syria, and our use of military force as a response to the use of prohibited chemical weapons. The second concerns the merits of that action in particular. Obfuscation of the first cannot be allowed to act as a convenient smokescreen to avoid the second.

On the first—the role of Parliament in military action—let us be clear: nobody is saying that Members of either House should not hold the Government to account in decisions that put our Armed Forces in harm’s way. Nobody is saying that we should not have a debate, and nobody is supressing those who hold dissenting views and oppose military action. The only question of significance is whether the Government need prior approval for military action from Parliament, via a vote. The royal prerogative allows that it does not, and there is good reason for that constitutional doctrine. In matters of war, the Executive and the legislature are separate. There are no grey areas to be exploited; there is no handy definition available of what constitutes urgent and non-urgent action. It is a judgment left to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet to act or not, and to account for their actions to Parliament.

The Government necessarily have access to intelligence which Parliament might not have seen and that cannot be made public. It may well be on such evidence that such military decisions must be taken. The Government have therefore acted entirely properly. Parliament’s role is to debate and scrutinise decisions already made. Have we really learned nothing from 2013, when the House of Commons in effect shamefully vetoed the Prime Minister’s call to take military action in Syria? The result of that vote was that President Obama—and therefore the rest of the West—was deterred from intervening, creating a vacuum into which Putin moved as he purported to take responsibility for decommissioning those chemical weapons. That was the last moment when there was a chance that the non-extremist opposition could have defeated Assad. Russia’s intervention on Assad’s side to pummel the opposition forces arguably created the space which Daesh or ISIS swiftly occupied.

On the action, it is important that we ask only the right and relevant questions. Military action should never be the first choice and should be deployed only when necessary. However, it is not relevant, as the leader of the Opposition did on Sunday, to ask whether we should use our “abilities” to save lives, as if this were an either/or scenario and we had callously chosen war over peace. It is not relevant to question only the legality of the action. Of course there will be those who contest the legality, but the legal case of a military response to the use of prohibited chemical weapons is based on alleviating “overwhelming humanitarian suffering” and is well-founded. We might well prefer a UN Security Council resolution to back that up, but we know that this is not available, as Russia, Assad’s partner in tyranny, would veto it.

The responsibility to protect has become part of the West’s legal framework. It underpinned our successful and just intervention in Kosovo to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. In Syria, the US, the UK and France intervened together in a proportionate way to underscore the important point that the international norm prohibiting the use of chemical weapons must not be violated. Do not tell me that the signatories of the UN charter in the dark days of the 1940s would seriously have stood aside, as a dictator used abhorrent weapons against his own people.

It is not relevant to avoid making this difficult decision by claiming that a diplomatic solution is still on the table and is being wilfully ignored, when all but the most naive know that it is not. The leader of the Opposition says that he would like these weapons destroyed, as they were in 2013 and 2015. Does it not strike him as odd that, after each of these events, there are further instances of not only the retention of prohibited chemical weapons by Assad’s forces but their despicable and unconscionable deployment? The end of a genuine diplomatic solution would see Assad stand trial in The Hague for war crimes, but does anyone think that is on the table?

The use of chemical weapons against civilians in Douma which killed more than 40, many of them children, is an atrocity that should stand alone and not go unpunished. The UN has concluded that chemical weapons were used two weeks ago, and now Putin is preposterously claiming that the evidence is being faked. Children are gasping their last breaths so that he can scorch the earth across the Middle East to bolster his own political position. Hiding behind legal nit-picking, wishful thinking and process is not behaviour becoming the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, apparently because, in his view, anyone who opposes the West is deserving of support. It is no surprise that the contentions he advances can also be heard in Tehran and Moscow, not in free parliamentary debate but on state-controlled television. Yet Iranian and Russian motivations are as suspect as their means are wicked. Syria could potentially have been freed from Assad’s brutal regime five or six years ago, if Iran had not been propping him up.

I end by asking the question that matters: will this action deter the future use of chemical weapons? It was not done on the assumption that it will end the war, topple Assad and bring about regime change; it was meant as a direct response to a chemical weapons attack to deter any repeated uses. Will it work? We obviously cannot know for sure, but Assad and his Russian puppet masters must now grasp a new precedent: that every time they choose to deploy chemical weapons, they will suffer direct and significant military set-backs. While we cannot know for sure whether this will work, we can calculate that it is surely worth the risk.

We need to send a signal to the world that norms cannot be crossed with impunity. After Rwanda, we said we would intervene in genocide; after nuclear proliferation to North Korea, the world asked how this could be allowed to happen without someone stopping it. We were right to take action in Kosovo without the backing of the Security Council. In this instance, the Government were right to take action in conjunction with the US and France. If such action reduces the prospect of these despicable weapons being unleashed again on the innocent by even a fraction, then surely it is our duty to take it.