Iraq: Coalition Against ISIL

Lord Austin of Dudley Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[George Galloway (Bradford West) (Respect)]

Mr Speaker, time does not permit me to tell you how many millions of times “I told you so” is currently being said in the country—or will be once people read of this debate. Millions of ordinary people knew what the expensive talent governing our country did not know, namely that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq and that there was no Islamist fundamentalism in Iraq before Mr Blair—and his mouthpieces who are still here—and Mr Bush invaded and occupied the country. What a tangled web we have woven is abundantly clear to everyone watching this debate. The mission creep has not even waited for the end of the debate. The words on the motion are about bombing Iraq, but there is a consensus in here that we will soon be bombing Syria. The words do not mention boots on the ground, but there is a consensus here that there will be boots on the ground, the only question being whose boots they will be.

The debate has been characterised by Members of Parliament moving around imaginary armies. The Free Syrian Army is a fiction that has been in the receipt of hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of tonnes of weapons, virtually all of which were taken from them by al-Qaeda, which has now mutated into ISIL. The Iraqi army is the most expensively trained and most modernly equipped army in history. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on the Iraqi army, which ran away leaving its equipment behind. ISIL itself is an imaginary army. A former Defence Secretary no less said that we must bomb its bases. It does not have any bases. The territory that its personnel control is the size of Britain and yet there are only between 10,000 and 20,000 of them. Do the maths. They do not concentrate as an army. They do not live in bases. The only way that a force of that size could successfully hold the territory that it holds is if the population acts as the water in which it swims. The population is quiescent because of western policies and western invasion and occupation. That is the truth of the matter. ISIL could not survive for five minutes if the tribes in the west of Iraq rose up against it.

[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman understand how appalled people will be to hear him say that women who have been buried alive or enslaved have been quiescent in their persecution by these people? What a total disgrace.

[George Galloway]

They don’t like it up them, Mr Speaker. They would rather have an imaginary debate, moving around imaginary armies. ISIL is a death cult. It is a gang of terrorist murderers. It is not an army and is certainly not an army that will be destroyed by aerial bombardment. ISIL is able to rule the parts of Iraq that it does because nobody in those parts has any confidence in the Government in Baghdad, a sectarian Government helped into power by Bremer and the deliberate sectarianisation of Iraqi politics by the occupation authorities. The Government know that. That was why they pushed al-Maliki out—even though he won the election, by the way, if we are talking about democracy. They pushed him out because they knew that far too many people in ISIL-occupied Iraq had no confidence in the Baghdad Government. Nobody has any confidence in the army emanating out of Baghdad.

This will not be solved by bombing. We have been bombing Iraqis for 100 years. We dropped the world’s first chemical bombs on them in the 1920s. We attacked them and helped to kill their King in the 1930s. We helped in the murder of their President in 1963, helping the Ba’ath party into power. We bombed them again through the 1990s.

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[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) is completely right to warn us about the gravity of this decision. The question of sending British troops to take military action is the most serious we will ever be asked to answer. However, we are faced with a brutal and murderous organisation that has kidnapped and beheaded victims, including a British aid worker; that has carried out genocide, enslaved women, buried others alive and crucified, executed and butchered Christians, Yazidis and Muslims—in fact, anybody who does not share its warped and perverted view of Islam; and that presents a huge threat to the rest of the region. Given that, and with an international coalition having been built in the region, it is right to confront ISIL.

I would like to ask, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden), why we are being asked to approve air strikes in Iraq but not in Syria; why we welcomed and supported the American bombardment of ISIL targets in Syria this week but said that British action should be limited to Iraq; and why, if we think that the American action was legal, action by Britain would not be. What is the difference between taking action against ISIL on one side of the border and taking it on the other—even though, as we have heard, the border does not actually exist? Are we saying that we would take action against terrorists responsible for beheading a British citizen on one side of the border but would not target them if they scuttled a few yards across into Syria?

As I understand it, we are prepared to take action in Iraq because the Government there have asked us to do so. Does that mean that we would be prepared to take action against ISIL terrorists in Syria if the murderous dictator Assad asked us to do it there? We must avoid giving anybody the impression that he has a veto over any action that we might take. It is also important that we avoid giving any impression that Putin, who has annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine, and who incarcerates his critics at home and murders them abroad, has a veto over any sort of western action.

I believe that we should have acted sooner to support those among the rebels who want democracy and human rights—that is, when the revolution against Assad started. The tragedy is that the democrats who looked to us for support have been slaughtered. They were starved of the resources, weapons and support they needed. They were killed on one side by Assad, supported by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, and by extremists on the other, supported by Qatar and Saudi Arabia. As a result, the only people not involved in Syria have been those of the western democracies.

Of course, as we have heard, there are consequences to taking action, but there are also grave consequences to not taking action. In Syria, the west’s failure has created the vacuum in which the ISIL terrorists have been allowed to become so strong. Both Assad and ISIS are stronger now than they were a year ago. The west should not just support and arm the Iraqi army and the Kurdish forces—we should be doing much more to help the pro-western, pluralist democrats among the Syrian opposition and support them in their efforts.