Rory Stewart
Main Page: Rory Stewart (Independent - Penrith and The Border)Department Debates - View all Rory Stewart's debates with the Cabinet Office
(9 years, 7 months ago)
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George Galloway
Now that I have an extra minute, thanks to the hon. Lady, I will be able to tell her.
This will not be solved by bombing; every matter will be made worse. Extremism will spread further and deeper around the world, just as happened as a result of the last Iraq war. The people outside can see it, but the fools in here, who draw a big salary and big expenses, cannot or will not see it, like the hon. Lady with her asinine intervention.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
I thank the hon. Gentleman very much for giving way, but will he please bring us towards his solution to this problem?
George Galloway
In five minutes it is difficult, but we have to strengthen those who are already fighting ISIL. We have to give them all the weapons they need—the Baghdad Government have paid for weapons that have still not been delivered. We have to strengthen the Kurdish fighters, who are doing a good job of fighting ISIL.
The Saudi, Emirati and Qatari armies are all imaginary armies. They have not even told their own people that they are on the masthead. Has anyone here seen a picture of them fighting in Syria? Anyone seen a picture of a Saudi jet bombing in Syria? Saudi Arabia is the nest from which ISIL and these other vipers have come, and by the way, it does a fine line in head chopping itself. Saudi Arabia has 700 warplanes—get them to bomb. Turkey is a NATO member—get Turkey to bomb. The last people who should be returning to the scene of their former crimes are Britain, France and the United States of America.
Sir Edward Leigh
We all want Syria to be a democratic, modern country, and we all want the Syrian free forces to win this battle, but a year ago we were asked in this House of Commons to bomb Assad and now we are being asked to stand on our heads. I have heard of being asked to bomb our opponents and support our friends, but what we are doing now in Syria is extraordinary and makes no sense.
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend is making a very important point. The idea is that somehow we could support the Syrian Government against extremists, but the paradox and the problem is that the only legitimacy the Syrian regime now has is the existence of those terrorists. What possible motive would Bashar al-Assad have to remove them so long as they remain his main reason for international support?
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
Members of the House have laid out, with enormous ingenuity, the complexity of this situation; we have heard about everything from Turkey almost to Turkmenistan. In the end, however, this is a relatively simple motion and we should support the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in the decision that they are making, for two reasons: one is that air strikes, in and of themselves, are a sensible response to the problem that we face; and the second is the caution and the focus that they bring to the issue of defining the wider mission.
Air strikes are sensible because, as I discovered with my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) when we stood on the front line looking at the Islamic State, it is clear that essentially what had happened is that an advance across open desert territory, using Humvees and artillery, had been driven back quite easily with air strikes. Those US air strikes of three or four weeks ago achieved the result of preventing people from taking Irbil, and of ensuring that 450,000 refugees currently located inside Kurdistan were protected from the advance of the Islamic State. If nothing else is achieved, that containment is worth while, and the Royal Air Force’s participation in that process would be not only legal but moderate. It would be a reasonable undertaking, not only to defend our troops but to achieve an important humanitarian objective.
Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend therefore disagree with the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway) who said that this is a force that cannot be contained by air attack because it has no presence on the ground? My hon. Friend’s experience would rather suggest the opposite.
Rory Stewart
That is a very good question. The answer, of course, is that outside the heartland of the Islamic State, which is basically the Sunni areas of eastern Syria and western Iraq, it is very vulnerable. When it moves across open terrain towards Shi’a-controlled areas around Baghdad or into Kurdistan, it is out miles into the desert. It has nobody to move among. This idea that the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway) presented of it swimming among the population makes sense only in the areas around the Sunni triangle—Mosul, Deir ez-Zor, Raqqa—but does not make any sense in the Kurdish and the Shi’a areas. So the notion of containing through air strikes is sensible.
The second issue—because I think almost everybody in the House has agreed to vote for these air strikes—is the much bigger issue of destroying the Islamic State. Here, what has been very impressive in this debate is the caution that has been shown in making promises about our ability to do that. We have been here before. These people whom we are fighting in western Iraq are very, very similar to al-Qaeda in Iraq, whom we fought between 2007 and 2009. We are facing an increased, exaggerated version of the same problem.
Problem No. 1 is that we do not control the borders. That is most obvious in relation to Syria, but we also have a problem with Turkey. Problem No. 2 is that there is no trust currently among the Sunni population in the Government in Baghdad. They will find it very difficult—even more difficult than they did in 2007—to trust us again. The third problem is that there is very limited will among the Iraqi army to get into those areas. The Shi’a elements of the Iraqi army will be reluctant to go into Mosul. Kurds will be reluctant to go into Mosul, and even if they could be convinced to do so, they would find it difficult to hold those areas because they would be perceived as an alien occupying force. That means, therefore, that all the hon. and right hon. Members who have spoken about a political solution and a regional solution must be right, but we cannot underestimate the difficulty of that.
Mr Richard Bacon (South Norfolk) (Con)
What does my hon. Friend say to our hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr Holloway) who is quoted in The Guardian this morning as saying that if we start bombing we are bombing
“exactly the people you are going to need to get rid of Isis”?
He was referring to the Iraqi Sunni tribesmen.
Rory Stewart
It is a good challenge. The answer is that air strikes need to be focused primarily on containing the advance of the Islamic State territories, and secondly, attacks need to be targeted against terrorist locations. But they cannot be the platform or the foundation of a counter-insurgency strategy. That needs to come from the region.
Just to move towards an end, the fundamental problem is that the Sunni states in the region believe that the Islamic State is an opponent of Iran. This is, in the end, to do with suspicions between the Sunni states and Iran. As we have heard today, it does not matter how many planes we see flying around, the reality remains that Turkey has not yet committed to engaging in this. This is vital. We still see financial flows coming out of the Gulf directly into the Islamic State. Unless we can find a way of beginning to get the structures in place—structures which involve, first, trust between Iran and those other actors; secondly, some trust from the Sunni people on the ground on the future of their states—we have no future there. That is not a military problem but a diplomatic and political problem. Therefore, the challenge for the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister is to put those planks in place. If we are serious about these things—and we have the Arabists—we could get the money. People are worried about the budget for this; the Gulf states would write a £50 million or £100 million cheque to finance the teams to do that. It is slow, patient work. We must get out of the black and white mentality of engagement or isolation, surge and withdrawal, and instead show, through a light, long-term diplomatic and political footprint, the seriousness that should define this nation.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Among the many important comments made by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) was her statement that ISIL likes to place itself at the head of the Sunni Muslim community. That is why it is so absolutely essential that the Sunni Muslim regional partners of this Government must be at the forefront of any military action against what can be interpreted as the Sunni Muslim states. A great deal of what organisations such as al-Qaeda and ISIL do is deliberately provocative. They wish to provoke actions that will enable them to represent the ensuing conflict as one of infidel crusaders invading Muslim lands, which is a trap that we must at all costs try to avoid.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) observed in her excellent speech, some of us are now about to vote for the fourth time on intervention in the middle east. The first time that I voted was in favour of war in Iraq, primarily because I believed what I was told about weapons of mass destruction. I must admit, however, that at the back of my mind was the thought that somewhere in Iraq were a great many moderate, democratic forces just waiting to be liberated from the oppressive rule of Saddam Hussein. I am afraid that experience taught me better, because, following the downfall of Saddam Hussein, the age-old enmity between Shi’a and Sunni Muslims came to the fore and we found ourselves in a strange triangular relationship with two forces, which in their most fundamentalist forms are highly unattractive and certainly no friends of democracy.
Indeed, the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr Hain) made the point well when he compared the situation to what happened in 1941, when the choice was made for us that the menace of Soviet communism, which frightened the west during the inter-war years, ended up being our ally because of the Nazis’ invasion of Russia. The trouble with a triangular relationship with two types of force, neither of which is friendly to democracy, is that there are no good outcomes. One can only try to arrange for the least worst outcome. We know what happened with the second world war and that it was the least worst outcome, but it still meant that half of Europe was enslaved under communism for decades.
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. The hon. Gentleman took seven minutes in speaking. If he wants to intervene, he should remember that other Members have not yet spoken.
Dr Julian Lewis
I shall proceed.
Where are we with the current situation? When I was asked before this debate whether I would support the motion, I said that I would do so provided that the Government came forward with an integrated strategy in support of credible forces on the ground. I intervened on the Prime Minister earlier and I am glad that he is here to hear me make a point now. I asked him which Sunni forces would be on the ground for us to support. At the moment, he has only been able to come back to us with Iraqi and Kurdish forces. I must say to him that if our strategy is to get anywhere in the long term, the Arab League and the regional powers must step up and make their contribution. We cannot do it, because that would play into the hands of the Islamists.
I will be supporting the motion, with reluctance and a heavy heart, because I know that there are no good outcomes. It is a mistake to think that we can get rid of this organisation from places such as Syria and cosy up to Iran while thinking that we can pull down Assad. Those things are not compatible with each other. It is a bit of a George Orwell situation with three powers constantly shifting. The only answer to dealing with such things is the practical answer of the balance of power. We have to ensure that Sunnis cannot dominate Shi’as and that Shi’as cannot dominate Sunnis to excess.