National Security Situation — House of Lords, 2018-04-19
Topic: International Affairs
Mark Schreiber (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I thank the Library for its most excellent brief for this debate. It is well worth keeping, and I shall add to it the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, which I found absolutely fascinating historically I support, for its clinical efficiency, Saturday’s punitive strike on Syria’s chemical weapons capability. However, the motive that Assad could have had to carry out the Douma attack eludes me. Why, when he was so clearly winning, would he have risked invoking the wrath and retribution of the West? On the other hand, to do so was clearly to the advantage of the Islamist fighters. I hope that the international investigators do find evidence that there was a chlorine attack and that it could have come only from Assad I watched, as many others would have done, the extensive briefing on Saturday afternoon from the Pentagon. It revealed a fundamental contradiction in Western strategy. There were two conflicting statements of aim: the first was the elimination of ISIS in Syria as a priority and the second was not to interfere in the Syrian civil war. These two aims were echoed in the Prime Minister’s Statement to Parliament on 16 April. I was amazed to hear my noble friend the Leader of the House say on Monday: "Our position remains that we do not believe there can be a sustainable peace in Syria with Assad in power" As the noble Lord, Lord Kerr—who knows a thing or two about diplomacy, as well as about political operations—said, "we have parroted that slogan for too long".—[Official Report, 16/4/18; col. 1030.] I will not blame my noble friend the Leader of the House personally—I am sure that she was quoting from some out-of-date FCO brief and at least my noble friend Lord Ahmad did not repeat that today—but I hope she will allow me to explain why she was wrong. The fact is that from shortly after the uprisings started in Syria in March 2011, the civil war in Syria has been a struggle of the secular Assad Government against political Islam. Political Islam is the process of translating, by jihad—or struggle—the fundamentalist Sunni Islamic beliefs of Wahhabism, which originated in the 18th century, into theocratic government in Muslim countries, and eventually throughout the world. This is religious government based on Sharia law. It is by definition the antithesis of democracy as it perpetuates power by denying the right of the people to elect their own Government and to change the law There are many manifestations of political Islam. They all stem from the Salafist movement, which sought to implement Wahhabism. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, was originally just a terrorist organisation. Subsequently, it has become a political front for political Islam in the West, rather as Sinn Féin did for the IRA. Of course, it was used by the CIA initially, at the time of Nasser, to fight communism in the Middle East and later to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. The best-known jihadist groups of Sufi Islam include: Hamas, founded in 1987; al-Qaeda, founded in 1988, Taliban, founded in 1994, Boko Haram, founded in 2002, al-Shabaab, founded in 2006 and al-Nusra, founded in 2012. Then, in 2014, ISIS claimed world leadership when it was formed in Syria from al-Qaeda Sir John Jenkins, the former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, has argued that any attempt to place Islamists, "on some scale of relative extremism or moderation", is "almost worthless". He said that in a lecture in America in November, and he was the person who was set the job of studying the Muslim Brotherhood by David Cameron. The aspiration of ISIS is for world domination, and this rejects the concept, the legitimacy and even the continued existence of the nation state on which international law and international relations, and thus our concept of civilisation, are based The Russians got directly involved in Syria in September 2015, when they bombed anti-Assad rebels who were, so mistakenly, backed by the West. At that time Assad was under considerable pressure. By constantly repeating the refrain, "There is no future for Assad in Syria", the West was always risking the arrival of somebody else to help him, and it was Russia which did so. But we have to face the fact that without the Russian intervention, Syria might now be under Islamist rule. Assad is now well on the way to regaining control of his whole country, and the sooner we recognise this and start talking to him, as other noble Lords have said, the sooner we can hope to influence that part of the Middle East. Iran, Syria’s other great supporter, has its own, ultimately theocratic, Shia government with Hezbollah, founded as a Shiite political movement in 1982, after Israel invaded Lebanon to root out the PLO. Now it is a powerful and very big military force defending Shias against Sunni hegemony in that part of the world. In the Middle East, it is astride both Iran and Lebanon There is a fundamental choice in many Muslim countries between theocracy and secular government, and secular government will more than likely be authoritarian. Authoritarianism is not something we like, but given a choice between authoritarianism and theocracy, I believe that authoritarianism is preferable from a world point of view. That is a fact we have to accept. We have to face what both the Russians and the Chinese fully realise: that while most Muslims are not Islamists, all Islamists present themselves as Muslims, and this gives them a great advantage in winning the hearts and minds of Muslim populations. Western foreign policy has been woeful. It has enabled both Russia, economically bust as it is, and China, under its very strong new leader, to get into the driving seat, thus reducing what I regard as the benign influence of western liberal democracy The National Security Capability Review states: "The border is a vital asset for our national security" The security of our national borders is shared between the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office. In the Ministry of Defence I have considerable confidence, but I believe—and I think that the noble Lord, Lord West, would agree—that we need more small ships to protect the border, because I foresee, perhaps as early as this summer, large numbers of people trying to migrate by sea, as they have in other parts of the world, into Britain. Something has to be done about that and I do not know what plans the Government have As for the Home Office, it is now 12 years since the then Home Secretary, now the noble Lord, Lord Reid of Cardowan, famously declared on 23 May 2006 that the Home Office was "not fit for purpose". It is sad and deeply worrying that this is clearly still the case; and I am not talking just about the deplorable matter of the "Empire Windrush". Many things need to be done for the protection of our borders. My final recommendation is that the Home Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons start to look into that in detail—if I can give them any help, I will be delighted to do so.