Syria

Iain Duncan Smith Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I am going to keep my remarks brief, Mr Speaker, as previous speakers have done justice to a huge range of subjects. I shall try to stick narrowly to the subject of the Government’s role. First, I should like to compliment the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) on securing the debate. I listened with great interest to her speech and will make a couple of comments about some of the things she said, but I will not follow her down that road, if she will forgive me. I want to deal specifically with what took place in the past few days and the reasons for it.

It is important to get the background absolutely straight and to consider what led to the Prime Minister having to take this decision. Sometimes it is easy to skate over some of these things. I was looking at the House of Commons Library paper on this, which is well worth reading. It lays out in considerable detail the number of times that the Syrians have broken all the accords they made on chemical weapons. It goes on to point out, as the Prime Minister did, that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons does not apportion blame, even when it inspects. It was supposed to be going in fairly shortly, but it is now blocked from going in and we have deep suspicions about the reasons for that. There is a major effort to clear up what is in there and to get rid of people who might be able to show that they have been attacked by these weapons.

Russia has vetoed every single resolution in the Security Council. Something else that is quite interesting, and that has not come out so far, is that in December 2017 an attempt was made to get an extension of the OPCW-United Nations joint investigative mechanism’s mandate. That would have enabled the JIM to look at what was going on and would have given it the power to apportion blame. The Russians vetoed the extension of that mandate without a single question, and it was clear that they did so because they did not want that investigation to take place.

It is worth reminding ourselves that, back in 2013—when I was a member of the Government—the Government came to the House to ask for a mandate to attack areas of command and control or of chemical stockpiles. I was sad to see, when the House voted against that motion, that there were some party politics involved. However, I am not going to revisit the past, other than to say that I think that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has given due regard to the lesson from that. We had to take action then, and serious consequences flowed from our not doing so. Back in 2013, Assad was on the back foot. There were some quite reasonable groups—I do not say that lightly—opposing him, including the Free Syrian Army. Yes, some of the more extreme groups were there, including the jihadis, but there was perhaps an opportunity to influence the direction of what might happen in Syria.

The rejection of the motion in 2013 was probably the single most devastating blow to Syria, and it has led to serious consequences. It emboldened President Assad to believe that he could go on doing what he wanted. The Russians then persuaded President Obama not to pursue the matter by guaranteeing that President Assad would produce no more chemical weapons, and that he would never use such weapons even if he had them. Of course, they have failed completely on that. So perhaps they are complicit in the use of chemical weapons; I begin to wonder whether they are, as they have used them so liberally elsewhere, particularly here on our own home soil in Salisbury.

The vote also gave the Russians the green light to pursue their own agenda aggressively in Syria, and to make the war even worse than it might otherwise have been. The right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) mentioned the appalling attacks on hospitals, and he was absolutely right to do so, but the question is how closely Russia has been involved in the deliberate targeting and bombing of hospitals and other civilian areas. We are beginning to see all of that in this.

The final bit about the vote in 2013—I hope the House really considers this—is that it opened the door to the takeover of most of the opposition to Assad by jihadi groups, who were untrammelled and un-resisted. With America stepping back, the reality was that the rest was left to the influence of Russia. We then ended up dealing with the worst of all worlds, with Daesh attacks both in Syria and subsequently in Iraq. That shut down many of the options that might well have been available to us.

I am in favour of the House being consulted, but the House also has to give a little leeway to the Executive when it comes to moments such as last week, when it was quite clear that urgent action needed to be taken. Urgent action is based on deep intelligence and if it is not taken quickly, there could well be further consequences later. Such circumstances are difficult, and it behoves a Government to ensure that the action they take is narrowly targeted and therefore effective in its limited regard.

Had the Government been proposing a wider operation, such as the one conducted against Daesh in Iraq or in northern Syria, they would certainly have had to come to the House to explain the nature of that. Last week was an exception; an Executive do need the ability to take such action and then come to the House to explain it and, as the Prime Minister rightly said today, take the consequences of the House’s view about that action, including whether it was justified both legally and in moral terms.

The really important point here, which we do not talk about enough, is the reality that Russia sits like a great beast behind all of what is happening. Without Russia’s involvement in Syria, much of what is going on would not be happening today. Russia’s direct and selfish involvement, which is only about its procurement of a decent-weather port in the Mediterranean and its ability to position its aircraft in Syria and to involve itself in the region, has led it to get involved in some of the worst activities that it is possible to imagine, and with complete indifference to the world order.

If we look back over what Russia has done, we see not just its invasions of Ukraine, Crimea, Georgia and so on, but its involvement in chemical warfare. In 2013, the Russians guaranteed that Syria would not use chemical weapons again. What kind of a guarantee is that, coming from a nation that poisoned the President of Ukraine, killed Mr Litvinenko by radiation, and went on to use a nerve agent to attack Mr Skripal and his daughter on British soil? That is the kind of guarantee given by a criminal to another criminal, and yet we should somehow allow it to be the protector it has not been. It suits Russia’s purposes to have Syria able to do as it pleases; that does not matter to Russia at all.

I say to the hon. Member for Wirral South that her speech was full of fine principle, which I of course absolutely sign up to and back her on, but even that fine principle prompts some serious questions. The most serious relates to what she said about keeping open the corridors of aid and about ensuring that the air is protected from attacks, because she immediately encounters the question: what do we do about the Russians? It is the Russians who have failed to allow—

[Stella Creasy]

rose—

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am not going give way. The hon. Lady is my constituency neighbour, but—

[Stella Creasy]

I was just going to ask a question.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am going to answer it myself, if the hon. Lady does not mind. I always find that they are the best answers.

I simply say to the hon. Member for Wirral South—this is exactly the point—that we come back to realpolitik. The Russians are sitting right at the heart of the problem and, while they are still able to control it, the Prime Minister is left with having to make this kind of decision: to say that we will not tolerate the use of such weapons, even if the Russians are behind it. That is the important point.

We have to pursue an aggressive position towards Russia. As the right hon. Member for Leeds Central said, Russia is not just producing disinformation but is lying outright about what has been going on. We need to pursue the money, and we need to put it to our European colleagues that they have to think carefully about the use of energy from Russia. It is the energy Russia sells to Europe and others that sustains this tiny economy to build its weapons and to produce its chemical warfare. If we can cut the money to Russia, we begin to cut its ability to interfere in nations such as Syria, Ukraine, Crimea, Georgia and others. The world will be a better place if Russia is restricted on that basis, and I urge my right hon. Friends to do so.

I fully accept the reasons why my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister took her decision, and she was right to do so. She was right in that sense to take the decision without coming to Parliament, and she is right to come to consult Parliament today. I hope we back her fully.

[Several hon. Members rose—]