Iraq: Coalition Against ISIL

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend therefore disagree with the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway) who said that this is a force that cannot be contained by air attack because it has no presence on the ground? My hon. Friend’s experience would rather suggest the opposite.

[Rory Stewart]

That is a very good question. The answer, of course, is that outside the heartland of the Islamic State, which is basically the Sunni areas of eastern Syria and western Iraq, it is very vulnerable. When it moves across open terrain towards Shi’a-controlled areas around Baghdad or into Kurdistan, it is out miles into the desert. It has nobody to move among. This idea that the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway) presented of it swimming among the population makes sense only in the areas around the Sunni triangle—Mosul, Deir ez-Zor, Raqqa—but does not make any sense in the Kurdish and the Shi’a areas. So the notion of containing through air strikes is sensible.

The second issue—because I think almost everybody in the House has agreed to vote for these air strikes—is the much bigger issue of destroying the Islamic State. Here, what has been very impressive in this debate is the caution that has been shown in making promises about our ability to do that. We have been here before. These people whom we are fighting in western Iraq are very, very similar to al-Qaeda in Iraq, whom we fought between 2007 and 2009. We are facing an increased, exaggerated version of the same problem.

Problem No. 1 is that we do not control the borders. That is most obvious in relation to Syria, but we also have a problem with Turkey. Problem No. 2 is that there is no trust currently among the Sunni population in the Government in Baghdad. They will find it very difficult—even more difficult than they did in 2007—to trust us again. The third problem is that there is very limited will among the Iraqi army to get into those areas. The Shi’a elements of the Iraqi army will be reluctant to go into Mosul. Kurds will be reluctant to go into Mosul, and even if they could be convinced to do so, they would find it difficult to hold those areas because they would be perceived as an alien occupying force. That means, therefore, that all the hon. and right hon. Members who have spoken about a political solution and a regional solution must be right, but we cannot underestimate the difficulty of that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

If I understood the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) correctly, he suggested that many Members were perhaps taking this decision lightly. If that is what he said, may I say how wrong he is? I do not believe that we have had a better debate and more thoughtful interventions from both sides of the House. I for one believe that for my generation of Members of this House the well of military intervention has been well and truly poisoned by previous interventions. Our default position is not blindly to go by what Front Benchers might say on such matters. I am going to support the Government on this, for the very good reasons stated by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, who put forward an eloquent case.

We should be mindful of the people of Kobane. My hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) has just told me about that town, which is in Syria. It should be in our minds tonight because it is surrounded, genocide is taking place and there is an existential threat to the community there. It is not an exception in that region. We are taking a very important decision tonight.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) put the clearest, most powerful case for a coherent plan. Tonight we are talking about a short-term plan. This will resolve a short-term issue. The medium-term plan must be to see the Sunni tribes and the Iraqi and Kurdish forces prevail against ISIS and some level of normality return to those communities, but the long-term plan must see an outcome that perhaps we can only dream of: the good governance that Ban Ki-moon has talked about, and the ejection of ISIL to the fringes of our minds and people’s lives in the region. To achieve that, however, we have to be absolutely resolute; we have to see the kind of work happening in Whitehall that is currently happening in places such as Washington.

In a previous debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) raised concerns about the decimation of the thinking in organisations such as the Foreign Office during the past 25 years. We want to see that process reversed.

In the few seconds I have left today, I will just say that I am pleased that the motion refers to the threat to ourselves—to this country. We must not forget that ISIL leaders have exhorted their members to go back and cause terrorism incidents here. I represent a constituency in which many thousands of people travel to London every day, and they get on the tube, as they did on 7 July 2005. We have a duty to them, and to all the British subjects who trade around the world and who are at risk from the kind of kidnapping and extortion that this evil force is carrying out around the world, to support this motion tonight.