Queen’s Speech

Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon Excerpts

Thursday 28th May 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon (LD)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow such an excellent speech. I have to confess that I find myself feeling rather content to be back on this side of the Chamber. The view from here is somehow more congenial for a Liberal—although I am sorry not to be sharing a Bench, if that is the right way to put it, with my old friend and partner in so much in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the noble Baroness, Lady Helic. I look forward very much to hearing her maiden speech.

And so ISIL sweeps on: unstopped and seemingly unstoppable; launching a wave of barbarism, ignorance and medievalism across the Middle East; destroying lives and threatening our common heritage; altering the borders of the Middle East; and humiliating the international community that set its hands to stop it more than a year ago. It gives me no pleasure to say that this is what has happened and that it is what many of us warned would happen if we sought a course of action that depended solely on the use of military force unanchored to any kind of sensible diplomatic strategy. I remember saying—I think in this House—that we will not win this battle by bombing because we cannot bomb ideas, and nor will we win it by using western high explosives to destroy more Muslim lives unless we can put that within a much broader diplomatic strategy. We have failed, and we are now facing the consequences of that failure.

Something else has happened. We have now moved closer to a much more dangerous state of risk: a risk far more dangerous than determined jihadists. It is a risk which is about moving towards a regional religious war between the Sunnis and the Shias. This is the real danger that now confronts us. It is the danger of a regional war which draws in the other great powers, with us on the side of the Sunnis—they are our friends and they provide us with oil and money and all sorts of help—and the Russians on the side of the Shias because that is the only counterbalance to the Sunni jihadism that now threatens the Muslim republics of Dagestan and Chechnya, and which indeed now threatens to divide the Russian Federation.

That is what we are moving to, and we will continue to move in that direction for as long as we believe, in our arrogance, that the underlying cause of all this is an attack on the West. It is not; we are simply one battle in a much wider war. The enemy is not the Satan in the West; it is the great heretic in Tehran. That is what all this is a precursor to, and we plunge ahead, seemingly completely unaware that this is the direction in which we are going. We are failing to stop the scourge of ISIL and we are failing to move away from that consequence. Indeed, we may even be moving closer to it.

What is to be done? Some, including some in this House, say that we should put troops on the ground. To me, this would be to add folly to historical ignorance. The problem is not the wrong military strategy; it is that we have made the fatal mistake of having a military strategy that is not anchored to a diplomatic strategy. It seems that we have wilfully and deliberately forgotten the wisdom of Clausewitz, who said that war is an extension of politics by other means. By the way, Clausewitz uses the German word “Politik”, spelled with a “k” at the end, which is far more about diplomacy than real politics. We have decided that war is the only instrument and that diplomacy can be put to one side. We see a problem in the world and our first instinct is to bomb it. That is exactly what we have done for the past 20 years, and perhaps more.

The last war to be fought within a diplomatic context was the first Gulf War, when George Bush Sr took the trouble to put together a genuine diplomatic coalition of which the instrument of military force was a part. Then we had shock and awe, and our dedication to—our obsession with, even—kinetic force as the only instrument to change things. George Bush Jr deliberately did not put together any diplomatic strategy, and we paid for the consequences of that: we lost.

Then it happened again in Afghanistan, where we deliberately did not put together any kind of diplomatic strategy and ignored the fundamental principle of creating peace after conflict, which is, “Bring in the neighbours”. We learnt that in Northern Ireland when finally we got the chance to do so and we understood that Dublin had a role to play. But we ignored that. We thought that it could all be done by kinetic force, but it could not and we lost. We used all sorts of euphemisms— the same ones that are being used now—to say that actually it was all a success, but it was a humiliating failure.

On the third occasion, in Libya, we did exactly the same thing again—bombs and bombs alone—and we lost. One would imagine that, thrice bitten, we might be a little more shy the fourth time of taking the same action, but such is our appetite for folly that we have done exactly the same again. It is not because there is no diplomatic strategy before us, because there is. We could begin to put together a genuine coalition. Our coalition at present is not for diplomacy but for military action: far too small, far too western-led and far, far too Sunni.

Actually, we could put together a genuine diplomatic coalition which would include Turkey, Iran and Tehran, and which could include—why not?—Russia. If Russia has shown the kind of aggression we deplore in Ukraine, is it not wise of us to reach out by saying to the Russians, “You have a role to play in this”, rather than pushing them into a corner? After all, they suffer just as much as we do, and arguably more, from the threat of Sunni jihadism. For us this is about returning people from the battlefield; their states are the battlefield. If we were to put together such a diplomatic coalition, military force would have a context in which it could be used.

I am not squeamish about military force. How could I be, coming from my background? However, I know that it will not succeed if it is the only instrument. It has to be locked within a broader diplomatic strategy, and this we have utterly failed to do. I accept that there would be difficulties with Turkey that we would have to overcome, including some concerns about human rights. I accept that there are difficulties with Tehran, although the deal on the nuclear thing is now nearly done, with Tehran occupying a sub-nuclear threshold. I accept that there would be difficulties with Russia, but that is the sort of coalition we are going to have to get used to. We no longer live in a monopolar world, so we have to build short-term coalitions with a particular aim with people who do not share our values.

Castlereagh would have understood it; Canning would have understood it; Palmerston, for all his enthusiasm for gunboats, would have understood it. Why do we ignore it? ISIL is the fourth occasion on which we have learnt graphically and at great cost that we think we live in the kinetic age where the only instrument to change things is western high explosives. We do not. We live in the diplomatic age where building broader coalitions as a context for the use of force is the only way to create peace and win conflicts such as this. As long as we go on persisting with the folly that this is the age of western high explosives rather than the age of sensible, intelligent and subtle diplomacy, we will continue to fail, and the cost will be paid in the lives of young men and women.