Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Waldegrave of North Hill]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria. I personally accept that legal justification for a proportionate action can be found. If Geoffrey Robertson QC agrees with the Attorney-General, that range of legal advice is enough for me.

I accept what the Prime Minister, the JIC, the Foreign Secretary and their advisers say: that the great likelihood is that last week’s chemical weapons attack is the work of Assad’s forces. However, that is not the end of it. The Government argue that the action which they contemplate is not an intervention in the Syrian civil war but an exercise in deterrence, President Obama issued a deterrent warning against the use of chemical warfare by Assad and was ignored, and action must therefore be taken against Assad or deterrence will have failed.

Two things seem to me to be wrong with that argument. First, deterrent theory works by being clear and understood by both sides. Some of us sat at the feet of the great Michael Quinlan on these matters. Mutually assured destruction at the time of the Cold War worked because two players who understood each other understood the risks and knew what the consequences were. I am sorry to say that President Obama issued unclear threats, and we do not know whether there is in Syria a rational opponent playing the same game by the same rules. Nor do we see a clear read-across to other situations. What would we do if, say—and I hope it is unimaginable—China, used chemical weapons in a local war, or Russia herself? The deterrent argument seems to me to be more like that deployed at Suez: that if one dictator nationalises things, all dictators will nationalise things; or at Vietnam: that if one domino falls, all the other dominos will fall. Those were not good arguments then. You can paint yourself into corners with red lines.

Secondly, if we accept the deterrent theory argument for a moment, action in pursuit of it is inevitably also an intervention in the Syrian civil war, the consequences of which we cannot predict. Here is one—not implausible, it seems to me—scenario. We fire rockets that degrade Assad’s command structure and perhaps damage identified chemical weapons stores. In the ensuing chaos, the toughest anti-Assad fighters, the al-Qaeda affiliates, gain momentum and capture one of the chemical weapons stores. We observe them, from satellites, taking material away. What do we do then?

An action in defence of deterrence that makes things worse on the ground for the people of Syria will not be justified. We had one literary allusion from the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Swynnerton; I beg your Lordships’ indulgence in giving one more. In Conrad’s great story Heart of Darkness, Marlow, the narrator, is sailing around the coast of west Africa on his way to the Belgian Congo. He comes across a French battleship that is firing shells into the continent of Africa. Conrad tells us:

“In the empty immensity of earth, sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent … There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding”.

We are in danger of getting ourselves into a position where young Arabs and Muslims think that our policy in the West towards their part of the world is a little like that of Conrad’s French battleship, firing into a continent—and there is a touch of insanity about it.