House of Commons

“ Can any British Government have ever imagined sending their men and women to war with the support of only 11% of the public?
There is no compelling evidence—to use the Leader of the Opposition’s words—that the Assad regime is responsible for this crime, yet. It is not that the regime is not bad enough to do it; everybody knows that it is bad enough to do it. The question is: is it mad enough to do it? Is it mad enough to launch a chemical weapons attack in Damascus on the very day on which a United Nations chemical weapons inspection team arrives there? ”

“ It can fail if we have no vision of the outcome, no definition of success and no route map to the exit; it can fail if we allow our thirst for justice to trump the patience to secure the greatest possible legitimacy for our action; and it can fail if we forget that our first responsibility is not to make matters worse.
Iraq is not a reason to absolve ourselves from our responsibilities in Syria, but it is a reason to exercise caution, invoke clarity and define a conclusion. ”

“ Those haunting images of human suffering will stay with all of us who saw them for a very long time. There is a danger in this debate that we lose sight of the historical gravity of those events. Chemical weapons are uniquely indiscriminate and heinous and we must not forget that. It is right that we proceed with care; openly, consensually and multilaterally. It is right that we restrict our commitment in principle to action that is limited, proportionate and in keeping with international law. It is right that we ask ourselves all the detailed questions that have been voiced here today. ”

“ The question before the House today is how to respond to one of the most abhorrent uses of chemical weapons in a century, which has slaughtered innocent men, women and children in Syria. It is not about taking sides in the Syrian conflict, it is not about invading, it is not about regime change, and it is not even about working more closely with the opposition; it is about the large-scale use of chemical weapons and our response to a war crime—nothing else. ”

“ Dictators have one unifying thing in common: they want to remain in power; they want the spoils of being a dictator and all that goes with it. Why on earth, then, would the Assad regime wish to bring on itself cruise or Tomahawk missiles? Why on earth would it want western countries to get involved in the Syrian civil war? Why on earth would it want to lose power? ”

“ We even have civilian deaths described as “collateral damage”. These are all terms used to convince us that we should vote in favour of a strike, but how do we contain a missile attack on a chemical weapons dump or manufacturing centre? How do we ensure that no civilians die? Would those deaths be acceptable? Would they somehow be laudable for having been created by us, rather than by chemical weapons?
We do not have an end plan, a strategy for what we want to achieve with an incisive strike or an exit strategy. ”

“ I accept the judgment of the Joint Intelligence Committee. It has concluded that
“there are no plausible alternative scenarios to regime responsibility.”
We have known for years—this is by Assad’s own admission—that Syria has chemical weapons. Intelligence leads us to believe that they can be delivered on a variety of platforms. To those who are not persuaded by the need to relieve the humanitarian crisis and who say, “Intervention has nothing to do with us; it will play into the hands of al-Qaeda”, I say that the reverse is true. We can and must intervene. ”

“ I will not vote for war. I would never vote for war against Syria. If there is a second vote, I will definitely vote against, but I do not believe there ever will be a second vote, because I do not believe that the parliamentary arithmetic stacks up. It does not stack up because MPs are doing their job and listening to what the public want, and the voice of the public is completely clear: they do not want war. They are scarred by what went on in Iraq. We were lied to in Parliament and we are not going to go down that route again. I voted against the Iraq war and I will vote against this one. ”

“ The ever-shifting maze of internal politics and external agendas, and the sheer complexity of the situation, demand that we should be modest about what we hope to achieve. My constituents are deeply concerned about the prospect of another open-ended war in the middle east, and I will not vote for any action that would entangle us in regime change. There can be no more nation-building. We simply do not have the capability to do that; indeed, the most powerful country in the world does not have that capability. ”

“ I agree that the Government have made a tactical change from calling the House to debate a motion that would have supported military action, but the fact that we are called here to debate a motion that includes the option of military action surely places us on the first step of a slippery slope that leads to a new mood and a climate in which that becomes acceptable. ”

“ If we allow the ghost of Iraq to influence our decision in this important debate, we risk a double calamity. In not considering what we should, we risk not intervening when we should because we intervened when we should not have. The victims would include not only international humanitarian law, which without force is meaningless and a dead letter, and the Syrian people, who could be attacked with Assad knowing that he would get no response, but our own Parliament, which would have been shown to have lacked resolve and conviction when it knew what was right. ”

“ Democracy and liberalism will one day seem as firmly rooted in the south and east of the Mediterranean as they do to the north, but if spreading democratic values is to be the cornerstone on which we are to build British foreign policy, let us do so consistently. We cannot act in defence of democratic values in Syria two months after we failed to speak out in defence of the democratically elected Government in Egypt. We cannot act when hundreds of civilians are murdered in Damascus, but continue to arm the Egyptian junta that slaughtered a thousand in Cairo. ”

“ We must never under-estimate the fact that we must first win the battle of perception above all else.
Any intervention needs to be demonstrably scrupulous, must involve more than just the usual suspects and must be the last resort of a process that has visibly exhausted all diplomatic means. The recent ratcheting up of rhetoric has come at the expense of reason and has eschewed responsibility. The cacophony of tough words and the insidious indication that attacks could take place as early as this weekend have not facilitated diplomacy or the forging of alliances. ”

“ Whenever my political career ends—I hope it is just Opposition Members who hope that that will happen sooner rather than later—I do not want to wake up one morning and see children similar to those we have seen in Syria lying on the ground as victims of gas and chemical weapon attacks and find myself thinking that there was something I could have done, however small, to make a difference. That is why I support the motion and why I will support a motion for limited action based entirely on the hope that it will deter Assad and other dictators from carrying out chemical attacks. ”

“ Do we now say, “Well, never mind, let’s just sit on our hands and ignore the atrocities taking place”? This is not just any ordinary convention; it is a convention on genocide and the abuse of basic morality. Some say, “What’s the difference between being killed by an artillery shell or by sarin gas?” With everything in life there is a red line—a straw that breaks the camel’s back—and, to me, this is it. In my judgment, faced with the mass murder of innocent civilians, doing nothing is not an option. ”

“ If the lesson that we drew from Iraq was that we must never again intervene, that military action could never again take place where repression was taking place and that it is impossible to act no matter how brutal a dictator is being to his own people, and if our policy was governed by a world-weary resignation that these issues are difficult and complex and therefore there is little that we can do, then I say that would be a dismal conclusion for victims of repression around the world. ”

“ 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? ”

“ That instinct tells us that we cannot be isolationist, and turn a blind eye to mass murder and wash our hands of the responsibility to act. It is impossible not to think back to the difference that British intervention made for the people of Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Libya and wonder how it can be replicated for the people of Damascus, Homs and Aleppo. However, the tempering of those instincts should be a resounding message seared on the memories of many Members: liberal intervention can fail—and it can fail badly. ”

“ On the implications for the Syrian regime, will it make it feel that it is more or less secure in taking such actions again in the future? On regimes in other parts of the world that might decide to use chemical weapons against their domestic populations, what signal would we send them about the international community’s willingness to stop such use in future if we do nothing? Let us also not forget the onlookers in this—Iran—who have their own nuclear intentions and are intent on testing the will of the international community. ”

“ Whatever our disagreements today, Labour Members stand ready to play our part in supporting measures to improve the prospects for peace in Syria and the middle east: it is what the people of Britain and the world have the right to expect. But this is a very grave decision, and it should be treated as such by this House, and it will be treated as such by this country. ”

“ When did the 2.5 billion people of Russia and China cease to be members of the international community? Who are you on the other side to decide what the international community should do, if you are unable to persuade the Security Council to go along with your point of view? Who are you to decide that you will launch a war in any case? ”

“ Already 2 million refugees have fled Syria, 1 million of whom are children. All of us should be proud of the humanitarian aid that the British Government and British non-governmental organisations have provided to help alleviate the suffering of the people of Syria and the wider region. Now, however, as the crisis deepens and the pressures on Syria’s neighbours grow, the international community is right to intensify the diplomatic and humanitarian efforts to help relieve the suffering and prevent further bloodshed. ”

“ Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) , who said that much as one can legitimately worry about escalation of any action being taken, one should equally, if not more so, worry about escalation flowing from inaction. Inaction is not a choice without consequences; it is a conscious choice that says to those who wish to deploy chemical weapons against their own people that they are more likely, and will operate in a more permissive environment, to do so on a larger scale in future. ”

“ We are told that this action might persuade Assad to consider not using chemical weapons in the future, but I have little faith that such a course of action will not make his position better rather than worse. There is a clear risk that even more lives will be lost and even more harm done than we are trying to prevent. I can only see that cruise missile attacks will take lives— hundreds, if not thousands, of lives—of combatants and civilians alike. There is little evidence that any lives would be saved in the long run. ”

“ Excluding Iran from the talks is utter nonsense. We need to go that extra diplomatic mile. This is a cliché, but it is true: you make peace with your enemies, not with your friends. We need to talk to the Iranians if we hope for a diplomatic solution. A political and diplomatic solution, and not a military one, is the only long-term solution to this vicious civil war. The Syrian people have suffered enough. ”