Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord West of Spithead]

My Lords, I feel that in the past 24 hours some sanity has returned to our actions. I came back to the United Kingdom from holiday on Tuesday and, like many in this House who been involved in the sorts of events that are happening now, it was clear to me that we were seemingly on an irresistible move towards taking military action as early as this Sunday coming. It seemed that we were doing that in the most extreme and hurried way, and I could not understand why on earth that was happening.

There is no doubt that these things gain a momentum of their own and that the military starts focusing on what it needs to do to achieve this. I am afraid that often Governments get caught up in that rush. But we were moving much too quickly. Thank goodness, now, we have thought about this. We have pulled back from the brink and we are looking at the things that need to be in place.

For example, how on earth could we have done something before the UN inspectors, whom we had made the Russians accept going into Syria, had made their report? What an extraordinary situation to be in. Thank goodness we are now saying that we will accept that report.

I have looked at the JIC paper. Having seen JIC-speak many times, having been deputy chairman of the JIC for three years and Chief of Defence Intelligence, I accept that it looks almost certain that the regime there did carry out these actions, but our public now have no faith in this. We need to prove to them that we have solid evidence. I would like to think that there is more critical evidence. It might mean things being talked about that we do not normally like to release. As a former Chief of Defence Intelligence, I can say that I would never have liked to have given out those pieces of intelligence, but this is really important. Maybe we have to say, actually, that we will extract that one to prove that we know for sure. Our public need to know.

Perhaps with that information we say to the Russians, “Look, this is how we know this. Why are you saying that the opposition are doing it?”. If we can have that open dialogue with the Russians, we can prove that they are doing what they are doing to support a vassal state for geopolitical reasons, as the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, mentioned, rather than for other reasons. If they have to admit that this proves it, there might be an opportunity at the UN Security Council to get Russia to abstain and maybe even get a resolution. I really believe that we at least have to try to get that resolution. I am not saying that there is no justification for taking action without a UN Security Council resolution at times, but we should try to get it on this occasion.

We should also look at the possibility of other resolutions. Is there something else we can do to put pressure on this regime? I know that people say we have now tried everything to stop this conflict, which is dreadful and appalling—things that have been done are loathsome—but I wonder whether there is not more that we can do. We should do anything to avoid taking military action.

There must be some other way to skin a cat. What if what we hear about this sig int about a military commander firing weapons without authority is true? Let us suppose that we have that evidence. That would be exactly the sort of thing that we can say to Assad. We could say, “Look, we know this and this is how we know it. You didn’t like that happening. We expect to leave the level of any release of chemical weapons up to you alone, and we expect you to punish this man”. Something like that would be a good move forward. There must be other ways of doing things.

There is no doubt that Prime Ministers and Presidents think that they can have clinical little military strikes and keep control of things, but you cannot. Once you start doing these things there is the law of unintended consequences. I know that as a military man. It is extremely difficult. Therefore you go down a route that you did not want to go down, and when you get a little beyond that you go to war and have no control over where it is going. That is the horror of war. Sometimes it is in our greatest national interest, but I do not think that this is in our greatest national interest, and I am very worried about it.

If we take any military action at all, we need absolute clarity about what we are trying to achieve. What are we trying to achieve? What exactly do we want to do? There was talk by the Prime Minister of degrading weapons use by attacking their command and control. As a military man, if I attack someone’s command and control and those weapons were allowed to be used at a lower level, they are more likely to be used. We need to be really careful.

What is the ultimate importance for our nation? The noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, mentioned that there are great moral imperatives, and there are, but ultimately in realpolitik there are things that are crucial to our nation. It is horrible to have to face that, but it is true. That is what we need to be clear about when we take any military action, because it does have unintended consequences. Air attacks, we know, do not make people do what you want them to do. We found that with Desert Storm and Saddam Hussein, and we found it with Milosevic. If the people are nasty enough and do not care what happens to their own people, it makes no difference. If we have a man, Assad, who is deranged enough to use loathsome weapons like this on his people, knowing that he will cross a red line, what might he do when we attack? This area is a powder keg. It would take something to go only slightly wrong—let us say he decides to pull in Israel by attacking it or he fires ballistic missiles at Cyprus—that would come under Article 5 and therefore be a declaration of war on us. What happens then? We have to think this through. I am very concerned about it.

The US and Obama were not that keen on actually going forward with this. It seems to me that at one stage we were almost driving it forward with the French. Why? I am not clear why we were doing that. Obama is now in this and I hope that the US does not take action before we do. I do not think that Obama will want to, because I think he is going to Russia next week. That could be an interesting situation.

I am out of time, so all I will say is that August and September have very bad track records for us if we look back to 1914 and 1939. In 1914, who would have believed that the murder of a minor prince would end with a million British dead? We are dealing with a powder keg here and we need to be very careful.