In his remarks to the House on Monday, the Prime Minister spoke of the opportunity offered by the new Government in Baghdad. There is a certain tension between that remark and those of the Foreign Secretary when he spoke of taking stronger action on the financing of Islamic State. IS has been in place for three years and is now largely self-financing. It has got money from Mosul, where it had a significant windfall, and it controls areas of Syria. On the issue of its financing, the horse has bolted.
There is urgency with the arrival of the new Government, and I hope that one response will be for the Foreign Secretary to visit them personally in Baghdad. I hope that he will also go to Kurdistan, where, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) correctly identified, the UK Government have leverage, not least because of the record of Sir John Major and the 1991 no-fly zones.
What has come out of contributions from all parts of the House today is a desire for greater clarity about the UK Government’s objectives. On Syria, the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) queried what our objective was in relation to Assad—what do we see replacing him, and how is that consistent with the Iranian view? What will the territory look like once Assad has gone? Likewise, it seems a step beyond a long shot for us to expect a unified Iraq, given the Sunni legacy concerns about Baghdad and the fact that the Kurdish state now has a Prime Minister, a President, its own armed forces, its own legitimate demands and its people dying in the field. I would be keen to see the more realistic objective of a federal structure set.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) said, the resources need to be in place for intelligence and a diplomatic capability, but the political masters also need to listen that intelligence. The sense is often that advice from those at the sharp end is not taken on board.
Finally, we need to be clearer in our expectations. Before we commit UK military resource, we should challenge the Sunni Gulf states that we have supplied arms to and that have deep pockets. It will help us address the issue of radicalisation in the UK if the fight against odious regimes is led by fellow Sunnis rather than western intervention.
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