Libya
Debate between Alex Chalk and Charlotte Leslie(7 years, 6 months ago)
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Charlotte Leslie
My hon. Friend refers to a nursery rhyme; I was going to say that we have a slightly short attention span and in many ways a fairytale view of foreign policy—“It’s all going to be fine and everyone will live happily ever after once we’ve done the nice thing that the Twitterati will approve of.” We are where we are.
We in the west in general—I do not intend to label any one person as responsible—make two mistakes. First, we tend to see situations in a binary way. We are quick to call the good guys the good guys and the bad guys the bad guys. That has led us to be allies with questionable people just because we want to defeat Daesh. Does that really mean that we should align ourselves with Islamists who perhaps have ideas not that different from Daesh? The reason that they are anti-Daesh may be that they see it as a competitor in the region, not that they share our values.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
I remember that those who advocated attacking Iraq back in 2003 pointed to an atrocity that Saddam Hussein had undoubtedly perpetrated against the Kurds in Halabja some 15 years or so before as a pretext for launching strikes. Do we not have to be clear that there is an ever-present opportunity in the middle east to make a horrendous situation full of human rights abuses even worse?
Charlotte Leslie
Absolutely. A theme that has arisen again and again in this Chamber is the tension between stability and freedoms, and the extent to which we match our concern with alleviating human rights abuses with a concern with maintaining stability. Once stability goes in a country, there are an awful lot more human rights abuses, however many there were beforehand.