I offer my humble apologies to the right hon. and learned Gentleman. I think I got carried away by the melody of his words, and I am glad that he has set the record straight for the House.
Leaving the moderates to their fate allowed ISIL to pour into rebel-held areas in north-east Syria and establish a stronger base from which it has been able to spread and grow into the monster that we see today. Perhaps most importantly of all, it sent a message to the extremists that we simply no longer had the will to take a stand. President Obama drew a red line over chemical weapons use, and it was crossed. What happened? Not a great deal.
Let us remind ourselves of what has happened in Syria over the past year. About 10.8 million people now require humanitarian aid and 9 million have been displaced. Also, 3 million refugees have spilled over to the country’s neighbours, overwhelming Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, and winter is coming. The public are understandably weary of perpetual conflict, but they also rightly demand that we do what is necessary to keep Britain safe. That is necessary if we value our way of life, our personal security and our living standards sustained through trade with other nations. If we value those things, we have no choice but to confront this evil, this perversion of the true faith of Islam.
The only choice will not be whether we intervene, but when and how. The longer we delay, the greater the threat will become and the more we will ultimately have to sacrifice to defeat it. The next 9/11—or worse—will come, and it will happen with us knowing that, had we acted sooner, we could in all likelihood have prevented it. That would be the real betrayal of those who have lost their lives fighting for their country. It would also be an abdication of our responsibility to lead.
Britain should therefore be at the forefront of efforts to engage in an international coalition to prevent ISIL from creating a permanent state intent on jihad against the west. We should be planning not only for the military action that is needed to beat back the immediate threat but for a concerted international effort to create the environment that moderate forces in the region need to bring greater stability to the middle east, and we should be helping them to eliminate the social, economic and political conditions that allow the extremists to thrive. ISIL’s twisted ideology is the greatest threat to global security and to our values since Nazi Germany and, as happened at the time of the rise of the Nazis, we will all ultimately be held to account for what we did, or did not do, to confront the threat when we had the chance.
2.54 pm