Iraq: Coalition Against ISIL

Dai Havard Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dai Havard (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)]

There is little time, so I will try to deal with just some of the issues. Clearly, we have needs, opportunities and tasks to complete. As I understand it, the plan, which has not been explained terribly well, is that we should just be part of a process to try to find, fix and then, as the Americans would describe it, finish the opposition. Our contribution to the process at the moment is, at best, to help to fix the enemy in the position it is in—and not allow it to advance and do any more harm—and perhaps to do more than that if we can. That is part of a campaign. In many respects, the language is over-ambitious; it always is. It is about wars on terror and eliminating and destroying. That needs to be better calibrated but, as I understand it, our part is in what possibly is not yet a fully formed strategy; it is a developing campaign. We need to make whatever contribution we can to a long-term process. As a number of hon. Members have said, that involves diplomatic activity as much as military activity. We need to do a lot more on that. We also need to do a lot more on the financial activity and the ideology that is peddled. My right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) made an important point, to which I will return. We need to invest in those processes; we have been disinvesting in them. Therefore, we have opportunities.

We need to understand that others have made progress. It is interesting to see a woman jet pilot from the UAE flying an F-16 in combat. Other nations are making progress. One should not deny the success that is being achieved. That does not solve everything but it shows that a different discussion is going on in the region.

Three years ago, in conjunction with the Royal United Services Institute, I set up a defence and diplomacy group in Parliament because it was clear that the strategic focus had moved and we were behind the game. Therefore, we must not make that mistake. There is an opportunity, no more than that, that we must develop and work on.

Some rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia may be possible. Diplomacy is a dirty business; it always is. Sometimes one has to speak to people one does not want to speak to in order to make progress. I did that for 25 years as a trade union official—get over it and get on with it is the answer. One must make progress and recognise success when one sees it.

There are those tasks but we must invest in the ability to do them. We must not only create space by fixing the enemy but enable the countries in the region to be helped to do things for themselves; we must do things for ourselves, too. We have dramatically disinvested. We do not have Jones the spy where we need to have Jones the spy because we have not been paying the money to have intelligence on the ground to understand the position. We have disinvested in our intelligence, at home and internationally. We need to understand that this is a long-term process, and that in doing all these things we need to make a long-term investment.

[Mr MacNeil]

Is the hon. Gentleman in any way perturbed by the open-ended nature of this motion?

[Mr Havard]

It is a reality; I am perturbed by it, but I also recognise the fact that it is the realpolitik. There is no way that we will make this change in the short term, and neither will we make it in a Twitter debate of 140 characters. As I have said to you, Mr Speaker, on a number of occasions, we used to have defence debates in this Parliament on a regular basis—a full day of discussion—and we need to reinstate them. This will be a long-term process, and this debate will not be the only discussion about it; we will be discussing this matter for the next 15 years and we need the structure to do that.

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend knows about these things. Is it not a fact that this whole debate, and all the build-up to it, is in reality about the deployment of about six Tornado aircraft in north Iraq? If we are genuine about being humanitarian, would it not be better to deploy about 60 fully laden cargo aircraft to deliver medical supplies, food and water to the affected areas?

[Mr Havard]

The truth is that to put six jets in the air takes a lot more than six people—I tell the House that for nothing—and we are already contributing with intelligence, humanitarian support and all the rest of it. However, my hon. Friend makes the point that, yes, this will involve long-term investment and a long-term commitment in terms of expenditure on a whole range of places, including perhaps on scrubbing up our bases in Cyprus and other places; we have to invest to do that stuff.

I will just talk about the law for a moment. I led a report for the Defence Committee earlier—in fact, I surprised myself when I discovered that it was 2013 when we produced it—about the legal framework for military personnel in future operations. We have domestic difficulties with all that; the debate about combat immunity has not gone away. The reason I want to raise this issue now is that there seems to be a settled view in some places that there is a legality to going into Syria. That is our next debate; it is not a debate for today, because today we are only talking about operating in Iran—sorry, Iraq; Freudian slip.

If an aeroplane were to go down in Iraq, the search and rescue mission would not be a problem; should an aeroplane go down in Syria, there could well be a problem. There is this “hot pursuit” argument being made, that if Iraq is now defending itself, it is therefore legitimate for it to go over the border into Syria to do so, and to be supported by the Americans and others. However, do we all of a sudden vicariously gain legal legitimacy because we are part of the support activity for that process? Where would that situation leave individual members of the military in terms of their legal certainty? That is a discussion that we will need to have if we get to that point. I understand the arguments that this situation is like Kosovo, that this is collective defence and that it is all these different things, but we need to have a serious discussion about this issue.

The only thing I would say to those who say, “Well, we can make all these decisions today, it is already done and it is all very certain”, is that I do not think it is very certain, including in our own Supreme Court; I think we would find that out if we were to go and ask it. So we should just be careful about what we do. The issue of protection is equally as important for the individual as it is for the collective approach that we are taking.

I will vote for the motion today, despite the fact I think it is being badly sold. I tell Government Members, “You need to get your act together”, because I do not think the general public understand that this motion is a component part of what is a broader developing campaign that will develop into something we might call a strategy. Government Members need to sell their goods a bit better; I think that I understand the motion, but what I also understand is that we have a series of tasks ahead. It is easy to talk to others about what they should do, but I say to Government Members, “You need to address what you need to do.”