Iraq: Coalition Against ISIL

Jeffrey M Donaldson Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jeffrey M. Donaldson (Lagan Valley) (DUP)]

As my party leader, my right hon. Friend the Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds), has indicated, we will support the motion. We wish our armed forces well in the actions they will be required to take. Like many right hon. and hon. Members, this is not the first time I have been called on to vote on whether we should go to war. If we look at past experiences, we will see that we would be challenged to fault the actions of our armed forces in carrying out the demands we have made of them. The problem we will see as we look back at some of the conflicts we have been involved in is how we have handled the politics afterwards and how we have gone about preventing further conflict in the future.

[Jim Shannon]

Theodore Roosevelt said:

“Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

The west spoke softly when ISIS crossed into Iraq and when 100,000 Christians were expelled from Mosul with a “convert or die” ultimatum. Does my right hon. Friend feel there is only one option now, and that is to carry the big stick and wield it through military intervention?

[Mr Donaldson]

On this occasion I think that military intervention in Iraq in support of the Iraqi army and the peshmerga is justified, but how often are we going to be in this situation? I believe that another strategic defence and security review is scheduled for next year, but should we not begin that review now, in the light of all that is happening in the world today, the downsizing of our armed forces and our capacity to respond to the situations we now constantly face? What if another front opens up? What is our capacity to deal with such a situation? As others have said, mission creep is also a concern when entering a conflict without any degree of certainty regarding an end date or a time scale. We need to look at the strategic defence and security review urgently and address whether we are on the right trajectory with regard to the strength and capacity of our armed forces to deal with the situations that confront us.

On the politics, there are clearly huge problems in Iraq and just appointing a new Prime Minister will not fix them in and of themselves. The sectarian issues—which are familiar to us in Northern Ireland—run deep in Iraq and we also need to take account of the Kurdish situation. The Northern Ireland Executive has a relationship with the Kurdish Regional Government through a memorandum of understanding and we have been working closely with them. We could do more to help not only the Kurds improve their governance arrangements in Iraq, but the Iraqi Government themselves. Too often, when our armed forces leave the battlefield we do not do enough to invest in the new politics required to enable the post-conflict transformation. We need to put more emphasis on the politics in the future.

The right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) was absolutely right to say that we need to look at how we can counter this violent extremism. That means countering the narrative, and not just here in the United Kingdom. We need to look at strategies such as Prevent. Are we doing enough in the UK to counter radicalism? Arresting those who we believe or suspect to be involved in preparing for acts of terrorism is one thing, but getting to the root cause and source of that radicalism is something else, and we need to consider that. We also need to help the Arab nations to counter extremism. There is an opportunity, given our involvement in this conflict, to get alongside some of our Arab partners and to work with them to counter extremism and to create a more effective narrative than that which exists at present.