Arms to Syria

Mike Gapes Excerpts

Thursday 11th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Baron]

I hear what my right hon. and learned Friend says. That is why I think it is important that we focus on the practical and moral implications of such a policy.

In answer to colleagues’ points about doing nothing, I think that history provides a guide to what we should do. The last decade would suggest that trying to promote democracy and human rights, which is the Government’s stated objective, by force of arms can often be counter-productive. If we look at north Africa and parts of the middle east, we see the seeds of democracy stuttering into life where we have committed relatively few resources. If we look at Iraq and Afghanistan, however, it is not such a rosy picture, despite the huge cost in lives and treasure.

If we wanted to go back further, we could look at our interventions since the second world war. They have had a tendency to have an embedding effect—to reinforce the existing regimes. It is no coincidence, I put it to the House, that communism has survived longest in those countries where the west actually intervened—Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, even China. We have to be careful about our interventions.

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Gentleman mentioned North Korea. Could we for the record confirm as a matter of fact that it was not the west that intervened in North Korea? It was actually the United Nations that was involved in defending the Koreans against aggression from the north and from China.

[Mr Baron]

To a certain extent, but the hon. Gentleman well knows that both sides put in forces up to the 38th parallel. Yes, the northern forces attacked, but the bottom line is that both sides—including the UN—put in forces initially. Putting that to one side, I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would not detract from the point that interventions have tended to have an embedding effect, particularly in the other examples I provided. We have to be very careful about intervention.

As an aside, I certainly believe that we need to make greater use of soft power—the ability to coerce and persuade by non-violent means—which can often be more effective and cost-effective than conventional hard power. It saddens me to say this, although I will do so while the Minister is in his place, that we are making cuts to our soft power capability, including the BBC World Service, the British Council and, indeed, the Foreign Office itself. We need to ensure that our military are up to the mark—one is not saying anything else—but the emphasis in the past was too much on hard power. We should better nuance our approach to foreign policy, particularly in this information age.

In conclusion, I am conscious that the debate has been over-subscribed and I look forward to hearing the contributions from hon. Members. It is terribly important that we put a marker in the sand, saying that Parliament must be consulted and that no lethal interventions can take place

“without the explicit prior consent of Parliament”.

That is not to prejudge the decision itself, but the principle is there. I welcome the fact that the Government have in recent months been on a little bit of a journey on this, particularly given the indications they gave at the start, which contained no conclusive confirmation that a vote would take place before any arming of the rebels. I welcome the development and I welcome the efforts of colleagues of all parties—and indeed this debate—in helping to crystallise that fact. I very much look forward to hearing the debate that follows.

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[Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct, because it has been part of Assad’s tactics from the very beginning to try to force his own people and the wider international community to believe that there is a stark choice between the Assad regime and jihadi extremists such as Jabhat al-Nusra and to ignore the fact that the Free Syrian Army, the Syrian secular forces and moderate Islamic forces, represent between them the overwhelming majority of the Syrian public, and to suggest that they are somehow irrelevant to this debate.

Let me share with the House why I changed my view over the past year. I did so for two reasons, the first of which is the humanitarian situation. More than 100,000 people have died so far. We are not talking about soldiers, militia or rebels; the vast majority of them were innocent men, women and children. All the analysis by human rights organisations—by Amnesty International and others—says not that every one of them was killed by the Assad regime, but that the vast majority were killed and slaughtered because of indiscriminate bombing by the Assad regime throughout Syria, particularly in the urban areas, where the opposition was active.

[Mike Gapes]

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman confirm that it would be much more effective and better to provide a no-fly zone and humanitarian corridor to help the humanitarian situation than to give weaponry to people who might pass it on to other elements of the opposition that we might not wish to have it?

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point, but I do not think that a no-fly zone is practical. It could not be legitimised by the Security Council and would involve massive attacks on Syrian air defences, which would essentially mean Britain, America and other countries going to war. That would not be appropriate or justified.

On a humanitarian basis, quite apart from any other argument, the Syrian opposition deserve weapons to protect their own communities. This time next year, 200,000 men, women and children will have been slaughtered in Homs, Aleppo and the various other centres that the Assad regime is trying to recontrol. From that point of view, such an approach is a consideration.

My second point goes straight to the comments made by the hon. Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick). I hope that we are all agreed that a political solution will ultimately end the conflict, but to have a political solution requires getting people to Geneva who are willing to make the compromises required. On what possible basis should Assad contemplate such an approach when he has refused all along to contemplate not just his own demise but any transitional Government or any new Government involving the Syrian opposition? He has ruled that out entirely. At this moment, he is even less likely to be interested in that argument.

The hon. Gentleman talked about escalating new arms supplies from Russia or Iran, but the one thing the Syrian Government and Assad regime do not need is more arms. They are satiated with arms and they have been supplied with them for the past two years. Assad knows that supply from Russia and Iran will continue for as long as he needs them, but on top of that he has Hezbollah militia fighting with his forces. That is foreign intervention and, incidentally, it shows the weakness of the Assad regime that it could not recapture the small town of Qusair by itself a few weeks ago but had to get several thousand Lebanese Hezbollah militia—

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[Paul Flynn]

The reason we need Parliament to be supreme, and not the Government acting under royal prerogative, is the bitter experience we have had. In 2003, this House was bribed, bullied and bamboozled into voting for the war in Iraq.

[Mike Gapes]

I am very sorry, but some of us voted the way we did because we believed that it was right to protect the Kurds in Iraq and for the Iraqi people to be liberated from fascism. I do not feel that I was bamboozled or bribed and I hope that my hon. Friend is not impugning my integrity.

[Paul Flynn]

My hon. Friend is referring to Parliament and the majority here: 139 Labour Members voted against. Nearly 50 Labour Members who had already signed motions against the war and who were already opposed, were pressurised into changing their minds and abstaining or voting for the war. That is the truth of what happened then. It was on the basis of what was probably a lie or a misunderstanding. It was certainly untrue. We went there to defend our country against non-existent weapons of mass destruction allegedly held by Saddam Hussein. We proceeded to the second greatest error that we have made in recent times. That was in 2006 when we went into Helmand province, as has been said. The hope was that not a shot would be fired and we would be out in three years, having cleared up the drug trade. We now know what happened. At that time only two British soldiers had been killed in combat. The number is now 444. What were they doing in Helmand province? Defending the country against a non-existent Taliban terrorist threat to this country.

Around 52 terrorists have been convicted for actions within the United Kingdom. Not one of them is from Afghanistan. They are mostly people who were born and brought up in this country. So we have had two wars on which we embarked on a false premise, and it is right that we should ensure that the decisions are taken by the House on the best information that is available. While people are rehearsing what the argument should be in the future, we have to escape from the influences on this House. There are many influences, including the influences on politicians.

We know what happens to those in Government of all parties when the prospect of war is heard—with the drumbeats banging away, they adopt a Napoleonic posture, dig out the Churchillian language and try to write their page in history. We know the pressure from people in the arms industry. Frederick and Kimberly Kagan were at the side of General Petraeus in Afghanistan. They were at every secret meeting. They wrote part of his report to the Secretary of State in America and they constantly put pressure on to keep the war going and to discourage any peace initiatives. The Kagans were not employed by Petraeus. They were not employed by the American Government or the military. They were employed by the arms contractors in America.

There is a pressure for perpetual war. We know that millions were made in Iraq by the firms there after the Iraq war. We know that they will have contracts in the Syrian conflict. After those two great errors, pressure is on us now to prepare ourselves for war in Iran to protect ourselves from non-existent long-range Iranian missiles carrying non-existent Iranian nuclear bombs. We have to look to all these pressures, which have sent 623 of our brave soldiers to their deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those decisions are made here. We take them, we should be responsible, and there certainly should not be any Government pressure that settles those decisions. We should do it in future in free debate.

There should be alterations to our constitution. We have conventions now—the one going back to 2003. That should be our model for the way we face every armed conflict in which our troops might be employed.

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[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), because I recall that he and I went to Sierra Leone together when we were both members of the Defence Committee when our Government had, rightly, intervened to defend democracy against people who were practising a form of terrorism against the population.

I am, by instinct and nature, a humanitarian interventionist. I support the responsibility to protect. I believe—I still say it, and it will get me criticised in some quarters—that voting for the intervention in Iraq in 2003 was the right thing to do, and I will not apologise for it. I believe that there are sometimes circumstances where it is right to take action without a United Nations Security Council resolution. For example, when John Major’s Government introduced a no-fly zone they did so without a UN resolution.

[Mr Winnick]

And there was Kosovo.

[Mike Gapes]

I will come to Kosovo, but I do not want to get diverted into the Balkans at the moment.

I also believe, though, that we have to look to the consequences of our actions and make judgments. I am not persuaded about suggestions that we provide sophisticated weaponry to opposition groups in Syria; in fact, I am very concerned about them. I am a member of the Committees on Arms Export Controls. We have accountability through the House and its Select Committees, and we monitor the transfer and sale of arms to states. However, the Government seem to be preparing to adopt a position that is not about transferring weaponry to states, but about providing weaponry to factions within a state. We might say that the National Coalition is the sole legitimate representative, although I do not hear that phrase being used quite so forcefully now, but it is certainly not the Government. Our Government would therefore be taking a decision to supply weaponry to a faction within a wider faction, within a state that still has a Government who control part of the territory, while other areas are controlled by warlords and tribal clans—the Kurdish people have almost total autonomy in one part of the country, as was the case for the Iraqi Kurds. Fundamental questions are being raised, so there would need to be an explicit vote in the House if such an action were taken, because it would set a lot of precedents. We all remember things such as arms to the Contras in the United States.

I will support the motion not simply because it is time to assert parliamentary sovereignty once more, but because there would be wider implications of such a decision by the Government. I am also worried that arms would be given to neighbouring states and then passed on, which raises additional problems. We need to explore issues such as end-use agreements, but any proposal will require an explicit vote of support.