Syria

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) on her very eloquent, if rather idealistic, speech. I think we all share her ambition that we should make the maximum possible contribution to humanitarian relief in Syria. The issue is what is actually practical and deliverable. On the Conservative Benches, I think we all think the British Government’s record is exemplary compared with that of most other powers.

I also congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this emergency debate, which was a splendid initiative on her part. I was rather bewildered by the whole issue being reduced, in a way I had never seen before, to applications for emergency debates. It is my opinion that we should probably be having a two-day debate on a Government motion, so that everybody could have a reasonable length of time in which to speak. I must keep my contribution very short on this occasion and I will say no more about parliamentary accountability. At least we are having a debate now.

I am in the position of being a strong supporter of the action taken, while holding the view that we should have followed the precedent set when we liberated the Falkland Islands, when the House was recalled on a Saturday to give its approval. Margaret Thatcher did not invoke royal prerogative on that occasion. On the action that has been taken, I strongly support it. I strongly supported the action that should have been taken in 2013, when I was a member of the National Security Council. We resolved that the really serious use of chemical weapons that had taken place on that occasion should have been met with a military response as both a punishment and an attempt to deter any future use of chemical weapons. Despite the fact that I support parliamentary sovereignty on this matter, Parliament got it wrong on that occasion, as it did on Iraq a few years before. Nevertheless, the policy on Syria was, with hindsight, plainly correct. We should have responded to that attack. That we did not is one of the things that has slightly contributed to the temptation, which has been given into by Assad, to see how far he can go in using chemical weapons.

It is extremely reassuring that the British Government and my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister have played such a strong role in supporting this three-nation intervention, which has given a targeted, very precise and proportionate attack on sites associated with chemical weapons. As I said earlier, we should hold ourselves ready to do the same thing again if Assad is in any doubt about whether he might get away with going further.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

[Mr Clarke]

No, with great respect, I should not take too long, so I will not give way. The hon. Member for Wirral South rightly did because it is her debate, but I do not think I should.

The reason I feel so strongly is that unless we respond properly, there is a very serious danger that the use of chemical weapons, nerve agents and so on will rapidly spread. The nature of warfare in Syria and in a lot of other places in the middle east and elsewhere at the moment is essentially urban, guerrilla-type and militia-based. It is not only regimes such as Assad’s who can see that if they wish to take somewhere like Ghouta, it is much quicker, easier and less of a risk to use chlorine gas, Sarin or whatever they have than it is to rely on bombardment and street-to-street fighting, where forces are engaged in long, dragged-out, dangerous activity in which they take heavy casualties. If someone has no regard for the ethics of warfare, it is obvious common sense for them to use a substance that will wipe out every living thing in the area that they propose to occupy, once it has all blown away and been cleared up.

If we look at the world at the moment, we see I think that not just Assad but countless groups will be tempted to do that. If we had not acted last weekend, Assad, who probably intends to go on to conquer Idlib next to recover control of his country, would undoubtedly have used bigger chemical attacks. We wait to see whether he will do so in the face of threats from the United States, France and the United Kingdom. I very much hope he does not, but we should not underestimate the importance now, in the real world, in several political crises, of establishing the principle that the British Government will react and will not tolerate and allow a return to the use of chemical and similar weapons, which the world community has at least managed to ban. We have not done much else to improve warfare in this world, but we have at least managed to ban that for decades, and we should stop it coming back.

As I said, that is the reason why I feel so strongly and, for what it matters, why I was arguing in the interviews I gave last week not only for parliamentary accountability, which got picked up, but for targeted action of the kind we have had. I realise, as I said, that courage is required on the part of those who took the decision. Of course there were risks. The Russians tried to terrify the population with their usual propaganda stuff, but I suspect that we did not have public support when the attack took place, because people had got disturbed about the risks of world war three and what was going to happen, and whether we would get immersed. With hindsight, we see easily that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and the Cabinet showed the right judgment. It has not led to any wider risks and they were rightly not deterred, but it cannot have been an easy decision at the time.

I have already said that I support all that has been said about the maximum humanitarian contribution that the British should make to relieve distress in Syria and elsewhere, in all these war-torn places, but if we take the realistic capacity of Britain, its population, its budget and everything else, I think we are doing pretty well to make a contribution to alleviating the suffering.

On the broader point about the politics of Syria and other places generally, I hear what everybody says in asking, what is the strategy? What is the next step? Why are the British not taking the lead in making sure that all is calmed down? I wish I felt that those who said that had the first idea about exactly what solution they think they are offering to the Syrian crisis. How will the British initiative bring the Turks, the Russians, the Iranians, the Israelis and many other powers all together to produce a peaceful settlement in the country? I am sure that the British Government’s influence will be among the more useful in the Geneva process and elsewhere—our values have a great deal to offer—but let us not pretend that Britain at the moment can usefully take a political role. I see nothing that could happen that would call for military intervention by the British Government in the Syrian civil war, whether seeking regime change or anything else; indeed, that would be madness. I think that the Government have retained influence by taking part in this tripartite attack. They have acted courageously, sensibly, in the national interest and in the interests of proper humanitarian values and proper international rules of law—even in warfare—in the action they have taken.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I would like to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), as she has done a service to the entire House. I do not agree with all her views, but I was more than happy to support her application. A number of right hon. and hon. Members have referred to what is sometimes called the endgame in Syria, and I think there are four possibilities. Option No. 1 is a negotiated deal with give and take on both sides, which seems to be almost out of the question. Option No. 2 is a de facto stalemate, with the effective partition of territory between opposing forces—that is possible but unlikely. Option No. 3 is a win by the rebels, which is now impossible, unless we enter the war, as we disastrously did in Iraq and in Libya. Option No. 4 is a win by the regime, which is highly probable.

In December 2015, the House voted to bomb Islamist terrorists in Syria, as we had been doing in Iraq for more than a year. For the next 17 months, we mounted more than 800 airstrikes in Iraq but only 95 in Syria. Why the huge disparity? It was because in Iraq we want one side, the Iraqi Government, to win and the other side, the Islamist fighters, to lose, whereas the situation in Syria is totally different. As I have said previously, it is a choice between monsters and maniacs, with the inhuman Assad regime on one side and the jihadist fanatics dominating the other. Right hon. and hon. Members should be in no doubt that the armed opposition in Syria is indeed dominated by vicious Islamist factions. Only the Syrian Democratic Forces, led by the Kurds, are at all acceptable to us, and they are now under attack from the Turks, who are supposedly our allies in NATO but are increasingly cosying up to the Russians.

Airstrikes risk inflicting lethal collateral damage, which is why the Prime Minister was absolutely right when she said to us earlier that this was a “targeted and limited” action. That is as it should be and that is how it must remain. I have been concerned about suggestions in the debate, once again, that we should widen this out into a broader intervention in the Syrian civil war. That will be to repeat the mistakes we made in Libya and in Iraq. I have to disagree with the Father of the House, because if we had gone to war in 2013, although there was talk about bombing to prevent chemical attacks, the reality is that it would not have stopped until we had toppled Assad and the result would have been similar to the one in Libya.

There are three guidelines we should follow in any further military action that we feel we have to take. First, we must remember that, apart from the SDF, neither side in the Syrian civil war deserves our support. Secondly, we must continue to impress on Russia that the action we are taking is solely to punish, degrade and deter the use of poison gas, and is not the thin end of a regime-change wedge. Finally, we must ensure that we have engaged in a one-off punishment that will not be repeated unless further chemical attacks take place.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

May I correct what my right hon. Friend said earlier? In 2013, we had discussions in the National Security Council and in the Cabinet, and we were absolutely clear that we were asking only for targeted, proportionate attacks on sites connected with chemical weapons. The then Government had discussed and agreed that we were not going to get involved in the wider Syrian civil war, and I agree with my right hon. Friend that that is as desirable an objective now as it was then.

[Dr Lewis]

I am glad to have the extra time to say that my right hon. and learned Friend did not mention the conflict in Libya. With Libya, we were told exactly the same thing: that we were voting for a protective measure—a no-fly zone to protect the citizens of Benghazi—but the moment that we retrospectively gave our approval for that, it was all out for a bombing campaign to topple that regime. I do not doubt for one moment what my right hon. and learned Friend has said to the House, but I have it from other sources that I cannot quote that I am not at all far from the truth in saying that had we acted in 2013, the result in Syria would have been the same as the result in Libya. Even if that were wrong, the people who are at fault are the people who misled the House in 2011 about Libya when they did not say that we were going to try to topple Gaddafi. Had they said that, I would have voted against that action. I believe that I and the 29 other Conservatives who voted the way we did on Syria in 2013 were absolutely right to do so.

With that, my time is up, so I simply say that we should spend more money on defence so that we will have more defence options.