Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Brennan Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brennan]

My Lords, the Parliament that we sit in, when it considers military intervention in another country, is undertaking one of its highest duties and one of its most anxious tasks. That we should be asked to consider intervention in a civil war in the Middle East with a religious background that has gone on for years and is likely to end only with the defeat of one side or through exhaustion beggars belief. I am sorry to be so blunt. It is fraught with difficulty and danger, particularly in terms of the law. We in this country and the world at large will not accept the intelligence assessments of this event to justify action. That will no longer be the way to persuade people. They will want evidence.

On 23 August, CBS ran a news item suggesting that the US had been tracking chemical weapons movements in the days prior to 21 August. Whether that was right or wrong does not matter. It shows the kind of evidence that people will want to see. At the weekend, as other noble Lords may have heard, a retired Mossad officer proclaimed his confidence that recordings would exist of conversations illustrating the movements of these weapons and the associated decision-making. That will have to come out if we want to persuade not only this country but the world of the legality of action.

Humanitarian intervention depends on a substantial number of countries supporting it, not just we in the West who know best. The substantial number is bound to include countries in the Arab world. Are they in favour of what will happen if we have military intervention? I very much doubt it.

There is a greater difficulty. Why do we talk about punishment? Punishment should be reserved for the people who have committed these war crimes, not for states. What the law expects at this stage is not punishment but the elimination of chemical weapons if it can be achieved, and, if not, deterrence. I have seen nothing that indicates that this action will achieve either. We will bomb Syria and the chemical weapons will continue to exist there. These are serious difficulties. When we talk about “we”, it should refer to a substantial part of the world, not just the West.

There is danger. Let us be frank about it. When we consider Hezbollah, Iranian-backed jihadists and al-Qaeda’s terrorist networks around the world, do we seriously think that they will lie dormant if we bomb one side in Syria? That is a most dangerous judgment to make when our people will be at risk. As the most reverend Primate said about Christians, do we seriously think that if this action is taken, there will not be reprisals and advantage taken of the weakest people who will be associated with the West? These are terrible consequences that will be as great if not greater in their volume than the recent use of chemical weapons in Syria.

This is a terrible state of affairs. Going into Syria with bombs will make it worse. We should not do it—and we should certainly not do it until we have taken every step along the route map that my party set out in the amendment tabled in the other place. Lastly, we certainly should not take this step unless it expresses the majority view of our nation.