Iraq

Marquess of Lothian Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Marquess of Lothian (Con)]

My Lords, I have reservations about what is being proposed today. Of course, ISIS is the epitome of total evil and barbarity but the question today is whether the timing and nature of what is being proposed is right. The Prime Minister rightly tells us not to be “frozen with fear” by previous experiences in Iraq but there is a vast gulf between being frozen with fear and learning the “lessons of the past”. The main lesson is that this time the relevant questions must be answered before and not after action has commenced, and my reservations arise because I believe, with great respect to the Leader of the House, that many of the crucial questions have not yet adequately been answered.

The Prime Minister stressed the importance of a clear plan: a strategy to degrade and ultimately to destroy ISIS. Will bombing achieve this and will our involvement in that bombing enhance that strategy? Both past experience and senior military voices today suggest not. What, then, is our real objective? Is it containment? Possibly it is, but the lesson of past conflicts is that containment works only as long as the pressure is applied and, when that pressure is removed, the containment ends.

Can, in fact, ISIS be degraded and destroyed? Its armed capability probably can, but the Wahhabist philosophy behind it and from which it draws its inspiration and indeed much of its finance will persist. If bombing does not achieve that main strategic objective, what then? Will we admit failure and walk away? I doubt it. Or will we more likely apply more and more military pressure—the classic mission creep—ending up with British boots on the ground? How long will our involvement continue? The answer that we will be given is, “Until the job is done”. That is the same answer that was given in Afghanistan, in Iraq previously and in Libya, on each occasion with a studied failure to define what the job was.

Have we actually considered what we will leave behind? In the past, it has tended to be chaos and violence. Today, even if ISIS were successfully degraded, the fundamentalism would continue, as would the underlying conflict between Sunni and Shia. How would our intervention have affected these broader and potentially even more dangerous geopolitical issues and the very real terrorist threat that ISIS poses to us here in the United Kingdom through returning jihadis? What will be the effect of our involvement in bombing ISIS on potential jihadists here? We know already that so-called lone-wolf terrorists operate and pose a real and present threat in this country at this time. How much greater might that threat be if we are perceived as bombing fellow jihadis from a great height, and would the military degradation of ISIS in Iraq diminish the threat here? Again, I have to say that I doubt that. These are some of the questions to which the lessons of the past effectively demand satisfactory answers before we embark on another military intervention in the Arab world. Until they are answered, we should at least hold our fire.