Syria: UK Military Action

Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the Government on this. Incidentally, I am glad that they are now referring to “Daesh”, which is the proper way of referring to that group. It is a serious absurdity that if an RAF aircraft, manned or unmanned, identifies a Daesh target in Iraq, it can take it out, but if it identifies the same target in Syria, it has to call up an asset from a coalition partner. That may take 10, 20, 40 minutes or however long it may be to get there, and then the target is missed. Thank heaven that at last the Government are taking action to do something about this anomaly.

But I have to say that the Government have unnecessarily made life difficult for themselves this evening. Two years ago they came to Parliament with what I think was the wrong resolution, designed to give them the authority to attack and overthrow the Bashar al-Assad regime. I was amazed at the time—and I said it then—that anyone, after the experience of Iraq and Libya, would once again want to engage in a campaign to enforce regime change on a volatile country in the Middle East, but so it was. Perhaps not surprisingly, Parliament turned that initiative down, and then the Government made a second mistake. They tried to pretend that the Bashar al-Assad regime did not exist, they did not recognise it, and they went around saying that it was about to collapse anyway. It has not collapsed, and that was a serious misjudgment. That statement of course is not a normative opinion of mine; it is now a matter of fact.

That has made life difficult this evening, because quite a number of people in the House of Commons who will vote against military action will do so because they are not satisfied that air support can deal with the problem, and they are right about that. Some degree of ground operations will be necessary at some stage, but the Government have ruled out using British troops. I personally think that it would be very desirable not to use British troops if that can be avoided, but I do not believe that before engaging in military action it is sensible to tell the enemy in advance that one is excluding anything a priori. However, that is where we are now and that is the position the Government have created.

If we are going to have ground troops at some stage, and probably early in order to make any sense of the air bombing campaign, the question arises about where they will come from. There are three possible answers. One is the so-called Free Syrian Army. I very much fear that the Free Syrian Army is a depreciating asset, and I would be grateful if the noble Earl, when he sums up the debate, would tell the House whether there is any truth in the reports I have seen that the Americans have ceased their training programmes for the Free Syrian Army on the grounds that those people were receiving their weapons and tactical training and then slinking off to join Daesh or the al-Nusra Front, which are the same thing. That is a serious matter, so if it is true the House should be told about it.

There are two other possible forces in the Syrian theatre, one of which is the Kurds. They have been doing very well, but they do not operate more than 20 miles from their own territory. The other, of course, is the army of the Government of Syria, which has also been doing well in its own terms. It has recently retaken the centre of Antioch and of Homs, the second and third cities of Syria, and is holding them. As I told the House last week, I spent the weekend before last in Syria—I need hardly say entirely on my initiative and at my own expense. I have absolutely no brief at all for Bashar al-Assad, but I was interested to discover and make my own judgment as to whether it is true that the regime is about to collapse. I am quite certain that it is not. I also wanted to discover whether the regime would be prepared and in a position to provide serious military support, and support of other kinds which I will not go into in public, if we decide to try to open up that opportunity. The answer to that is definitely yes.

I urge the Government to recognise above all that this is an existential war we are fighting; the Paris attack made that absolutely clear. In these circumstances, we have to be completely open-minded and pragmatic about the means we use. We must win this war and we must put together the coalition which is most effective. We should remember that in the Second World War we had to deal with Stalin. That was a fact and I do not think that any of us regrets it now, albeit that at the time we knew all about a lot of his crimes. It is important that the Government should make a great effort not to allow themselves to be influenced by wishful thinking of any kind, and to concentrate on the vital task of winning this battle and war against Daesh.