Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Ben Gummer Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)]

Bashar al-Assad is a very lucky man. Were we having this debate in 2002, following an attack on 21 August and the successful interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, it might have focused a little more on the maintenance of international humanitarian law. It might have focused a little more on our alarm at the use of chemical weapons next to a NATO ally and next to Israel, which we have a unique duty to protect, and it may also have focused a little more on our need to protect innocent civilians in the first use of chemical weapons on a battlefield in the 21st century—weapons not used even by Hitler in the second world war.

Assad is lucky, of course, that we are having this debate not in 2002 but in 2013. The year 2003, which so many have referred to, intervened. We must not beat around the bush—Tony Blair and his Administration were dishonest. The result has been to injure our democracy to a degree that no other single action has done, I believe, in the 85 years since women gained full voting equality. And so we are in a position now where our decision is being influenced by that failure in 2003, and we are asked to draw lessons from that.

[Mr MacNeil]

If the rebels were found to have used chemical weapons, would we feel it was fine for the Russians to bomb them using the same basis as that for our proposed intervention?

[Ben Gummer]

One of the problems of this debate is the number of counter-factuals that people have put before the House; the Prime Minister has answered a variation of the hon. Gentleman’s.

We are dealing with facts, in this instance, where most people agree that the full likelihood is that President Assad has bombed his own people. We are asked to draw lessons, in coming to a conclusion on this matter, from the experience of 2003. One of the principal lessons is that we should expect our leaders to act with transparency, conviction, consistency and principle and to accommodate colleagues who have doubts and be responsive to their concerns. I do not think that, on many of these points, President Obama, President Hollande or our own Prime Minister can be faulted.

But a lesson is not an excuse to prevaricate with questions of increasing sophistry. It is not an excuse to change one’s mind at the first whiff of political opportunity. It is not an excuse to come to the House with a view different from the one that might have been professed in private and in public some days before.

If we allow this ghost of Iraq to influence our decision in this important debate, we risk a double calamity. Because in not considering those things that we should do, we risk not intervening when we should because we intervened when we should not have. The victims in that would not just be international humanitarian law, which without force is meaningless and a dead letter. The victims would not only be the Syrian people, who will then be attacked with Assad knowing that he would get to response. The victim could also be our own Parliament, which was shown to have lacked resolve and conviction when it knows what it is right to do.