Page:Hansard (UK) - Vol 566 No. 40 August 29th 2013.pdf/55

1529 used chemical weapons to kill the Kurds in the Anfal campaign in 1988, yet nobody seems to realise the significance of that.

I have reservations about both the Government motion and the Opposition amendment because I believe they are inadequate. They both talk about deterring the future use of chemical weapons, but I do not think one can deter the use of chemical weapons simply by firing missiles symbolically—a “shot across the bow”, or whatever phrase President Obama used. I think the strategy the United States is about to launch is doomed to fail in its objectives.

Lady Hermon (North Down) (Ind): The hon. Gentleman is extremely knowledgeable about Syria and I am extremely concerned about the implications for the wider region if we launch military action—heaven forbid that we agree to do so. Will he outline to the House his assessment of the implications of military action for the wider region?

Mike Gapes: If military action is simply based on the kind of inadequate gesture politics that we seem to have coming from across the Atlantic, it will be a disaster and will inflame the people in the region. I believe, however, that non-involvement and non-intervention also has consequences, the most serious of which is that simply saying we will deter the future use of chemical weapons assumes that only the Assad regime will possess such weapons. What happens when areas of the country where chemical weapons are stored are overrun by elements of the jihadist-linked opposition who get them and pass them to al-Qaeda? What happens when, to try to secure some of those weapons and not let them get into the hands of the opposition, Assad gives them to his ally, Hezbollah, which tries to take them for potential use against Israel or elsewhere?

We must talk not only about deterrence but about the removal and ultimately the destruction of those chemical weapon stockpiles that date back to when the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia provided them to Assad’s father and his regime. I believe that these issues will be with us, however we vote today, next week and next year. In three or four years’ time we will still be confronting the issue of chemical weapons and we must get real about that. I will be supporting the Opposition amendment today, but I think we must go further.

8.54 pm

Sir Richard Shepherd (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con): I want to explain why I cannot support the motion. The House is predicated on procedure and rules—we seek fairness in things—but the very first sentence of the motion states that the House:

We have gone from an assumption to a declaration that we know that Assad did that. I could not support that under any circumstances, because I believe in some form of due process that identifies the perpetrator. We have the opportunity to do so. The Labour party amendment would take out the possibility of doing the thing that most offends most other people around the world—power determining the outcome irrespective of the facts.

I am also a victim—if I can put it that way—of past judgments, dossiers and information. In the Prime Minister’s speech, he used only the words “highly likely”—taken from the JIC’s observations. I can see no other reason, but we normally seek to ask, “Cui bono?” No one has given a plausible explanation of why, with UN investigators in Damascus, the Assad regime would want to let off these weapons there and then. I cannot give an explanation for the actions of the most odious and horrible regime. Two generations of Assad have been prepared to slaughter. We are now faced with an empty land of hope, to which we contribute little if anything, because of our lack of knowledge of lands beyond our understanding. It was a French colony; we are British.

We ought to reject the concept that we have already tried the regime and therefore should push to war. I want my constituents to know why I cannot support a motion predicated on such a thought.

8.56 pm

Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab): The fundamental judgment that we all must make this evening and over the next week or two, as individuals and as a House, is whether military intervention in Syria by foreign countries, including our own, is more likely to end the civil war or to add fuel to the fire, perhaps in the ways my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) has suggested. I do not believe the Prime Minister made the case today that intervention will do more good than harm.

The Prime Minister argues in his motion that

and I agree with that. A humanitarian response is needed to protect civilians, but how can it be a humanitarian response to propose to use UK military might to protect Syrian civilians from one class of weapons—chemical weapons—but not to use it to protect civilians from conventional weapons, which have of course killed far more of the 100,000 dead so far in this civil war? In effect, such a proposal gives the Assad regime impunity to continue to use guns, bombs and missiles as long as they are conventionally armed and not armed with chemical weapons.

Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of politics by other means. He was absolutely wrong, because war is qualitatively different from diplomatic action, from humanitarian relief, and from the kind of action we have taken hitherto on the crisis in Syria. It is qualitatively different because, by taking military action, we become involved in the conflict morally and in international law, and because we require young British servicemen and women to fight and risk their lives. I do not believe that we should shoulder the first burden, and nor should we ask our military personnel to shoulder the second one—to risk their lives—without having a credible plan to bring the Syrian conflict to an end. The Prime Minister did not set out such a plan today.

Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/ Co-op): Would it not have been so much better if the frenetic activity of the past few days to try to build international support for military action had been devoted to trying to build international support for a peace conference?