Iraq: Coalition Against ISIL

Madeleine Moon Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I agree with my hon. Friend. President Obama has been quite open that the alliance we are joining is going to launch attacks on ISIS in both Syria and Iraq, and it is unrealistic to proceed on any other basis.

The real debate, to which I would like to contribute briefly, and which is the only issue for the vast majority of people in this House and for the vast majority of our constituents, is: where are we going; what is the long-term purpose; what is the strategy; and how are our foreign policy, our politics and our diplomacy going to be better on this occasion than they have been for the last 15 years?

The disaster of past occasions is not that we attacked pleasant regimes; we attacked evil men when we attacked Hussein, when we got rid of Gaddafi, when we attacked al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and we would have been doing so if we had attacked Assad’s chemical installations last year. It is no good going back. I supported two of those: Libya and Syria last year. I was dubious about one of the others; and I opposed Iraq. That is not the point. What happened in all those cases was that the military deployment produced a situation at least as bad as it had been before and actually largely worse.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

rose—

[Andrew Bridgen]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

There are things that we agree on: we agree that action is legal; we agree that ISIL is un-Islamic, barbarous and evil, whose violent and horrific behaviour towards captives and opposition forces has horrified the world. We are voting today for six planes to fly missions to weaken ISIL on the ground and to leave it to local forces to undertake ground attacks. It is then that I start to have some major concerns. Who will do that work on the ground? Who will provide the people who will undertake that work? For terrorism to thrive, we need three things—men, money and an ideology that will attract the other two. Sadly, a lot of the money, the men and the ideology have come from those nations that we will now call our allies and on which we will rely to fly missions with us and to take the work on to the ground.

I am concerned that British forces will increasingly be dragged into undertaking that work. I hope that we will hear from the Deputy Prime Minister what guarantees we will have that our Arab allies will take part in this fight, that the NATO forces will not be a smokescreen behind which their inactivity is hidden, and that they will show to their people that they are taking part.

We are told that there is no military solution, only a political solution. For me, a political solution would be a federalist Iraq—a future where there is a Kurdistan, Sunnistan and Shi’astan, working together. Unless we give the Sunni population something to fight for, they will not engage. After all, they have been attacked with barrel bombs and subjected to murder by the regime in Baghdad. They have taken to ISIS because ISIS has been better than the Baghdadi Government.

I want to thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) for her kind words in relation to the British hostages. We must bear in mind that two people are living in fear of their lives while we are having this debate, and all our thoughts must be with them.

Finally, will we also take on the Khorasan group, an al-Qaeda affiliate that is also a major threat in this country, as well as the Ba’athist Naqshbandi organisation, a particularly nasty organisation?