Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I am of the gas mask generation. I remember the gas mask I had as a little boy in the war. My horror of chemical warfare was brought home when I read for the first time that extraordinary poem by Wilfred Owen, which will be familiar to many of your Lordships, “Dulce et Decorum Est”, which tells in the most graphic language of a gas attack in the First World War. So I completely understand the revulsion and horror of the Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister and others. Of course, they have seen this and they want to do something about it.

However, let us remember that before the 350 who died last week—terrible as that incident was—100,000 had been slain in Syria. Was not each one of those deaths as much a blot upon the escutcheon of those responsible as the others? As I have listened to this remarkable debate, and thought of the inexact prescription of Ministers for what should be done, I could not help but think of “King Lear”:

I will do such things—

What they are yet I know not; but they shall be

The terrors of the earth.

We have to be more exact and prescriptive than that. A theme that has run through this debate is the need for a proper diplomatic offensive.

In a couple of years’ time we shall be marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. The United Nations is far too toothless. We should be using all our best endeavours to bring together Russia and China. China will increasingly dominate the world as this century progresses. As has been pointed out by a number of contributors to this debate, we should also be looking at Iran and opening up dialogue there. In doing these things, we should of course be seeking to put pressure on Syria and other rogue regimes and doing it in a way that can have them tested at the bar of world opinion.

International law has to be internationally enforced. The concept of a shield, that there should be a United Nations force permanently established, would not be realisable in the immediate future. But there is no reason why we should not seek to work towards it. I very much hope that we would. Our own nation is not able to play a full and vibrant part in any military, naval or air bombardment of Syria—nor should it. Someone quoted Bismarck and the Pomeranian soldier and it is right.

It is truly vital that this country’s endeavours should be on the diplomatic front. That does not mean that we should never intervene anywhere. As colleagues who were in the other place with me will know, I was almost alone on the Tory Benches arguing for intervention in Bosnia. I am glad I did and I am glad that eventually we did, although sadly it was after Srebrenica. But that was a very different, European conflict. We do not have specific interests in Syria, save the interest that the Middle East should cease to be a powder cauldron. The noble Lord, Lord Reid, in a remarkable speech, said that we were talking about a regional war. He likened it to the Thirty Years’ War, and it could last for 30 years. Even the Foreign Secretary talked in terms of decades.

In the past two or three weeks while we have been off, I have been reading a very remarkable book about July 1914. What comes across is that nobody in Vienna, London, Petrograd or Berlin wanted a world conflict. However, because of diplomatic bungling and ineptitude, and an unwillingness to acknowledge mistakes, the world moved forward inexorably over a six-week period into a conflict that transformed it for ever.

The noble Baroness, Lady Cohen, talked about Pandora’s box. I will leave your Lordships with a quotation from one of the greatest Foreign Secretaries of the second half of the 20th century, Ernie Bevin, who said, “If you open that there Pandora’s box, you don’t know how many Trojan horses will come out”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

For very obvious reasons, I am not able to say that. I am privy only to some of the discussions that have taken place on this, but I can assure him that the intervention would not be aimed at command structures. Someone suggested that we want to take out the President himself or, indeed, that it would be aimed at chemical weapons stocks. For very obvious reasons—

[Lord Cormack]

How does my noble friend square the statement that we are not bent on regime change when the Government do not recognise the regime?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, in a limited operation you do not attempt to go for regime change. Perhaps I may go on to my next point. We are of course all concerned to learn the lessons of Iraq. Disastrously, our American allies dismantled the entire structure of the state and the armed forces when they went into Iraq. The reason why we are all attempting to achieve transition in Syria is that we maintain as much as we can of the current state and social structure. We are all aware that to allow the Assad regime to collapse altogether would be to risk chaos following. That is why we have been pursuing, through Geneva I and, we hope, the Geneva II conference, proposals for some form of agreed transition in which—with, we hope, the help of Russia and others—some members of the regime would be removed but which some of the officials within the current regime would help to manage. We are not, therefore, attempting to promote that sort of disastrous regime change.