I accept that point. The Government tell us that we are not going to follow the Americans down the road of bombing ISIL in Syria, because of the complexities that my hon. Friends the Members for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) and for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) have outlined.
That border, however, does not exist. Our Government say we are only going to bomb ISIS in Iraq—a solution that makes no military sense whatsoever. What will this achieve? Most Back Benchers have no idea what the intelligence says. I suspect it is scanty. No journalist is embedded in IS, which would be a suicidal thing to do. How long will this operation last? Will bombing in Iraq alone seriously impede IS? We have only a tiny number of planes and they are based a long way away. We were once told that never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few, but now never have so few been asked by so many to achieve so much with no clear aim in sight.
Of course, however, IS is winning against the Iraqi Government, but it is not winning against them because of superior armour or its command and control, which is easily bombed; it is winning because the Iraqi Government are corrupt and their army, which we armed, ran away. Are we going to bomb 4x4s racing across the desert?
Make no mistake: this is about our amour propre as a nation. There is nothing wrong in that: we are a member, as we have been told time and again in this debate, of the Security Council, but if we want to act with a big stick in the world, we must wield the means. Yet what have we been doing with our armed forces over the past four years and how many planes have we got to bomb ISIL? What serious difference will we make?
Those are the realities, which we all know, but we are where we are. We have caused this mess and we should apologise to the people of the region for it. We have no idea where this will end. We have no idea what our bombing campaign will achieve or how long it will take. But there’s the rub: we caused this mess.
I want to make a personal point before I sit down. I do not think, for personal reasons, that I can walk away on the other side of the road from those desperate women I talked to in the Mosul province. I have stood beside the wrecked tomb of the prophet Nahum in the Christian village of Alqosh, which is directly threatened. I have talked to the monks nearby who live in fear. How strange that, writing in sublime language 2,500 years ago, the prophet Nahum warned us of the fall of the Assyrians and their civilisation—and their descendants are now meeting the same fate. Therefore, although I have severe doubts about what this will achieve, and with a heavy heart and full of foreboding, I will vote for this motion tonight.
2.43 pm