Lord Bilimoria (CB): My Lords, when Parliament was recalled in August 2013, I remember speaking on whether to intervene in Syria. I made the point that in the summer of 2003 my late father, Lieutenant-General Bilimoria, on his last visit to Britain before he passed away, was asked by a senior journalist, “General, do you think we should have intervened in Iraq?”. My father replied, without any hesitation, “No, we should only have intervened with the authority of the United Nations”. Today, as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, has said, we have the authority of the United Nations to take whatever steps are necessary to get rid of the evil that is Daesh, ISIL, ISIS, Islamic State, IS or whatever name these evil monsters are given. Last year, we made the decision to intervene in Iraq but not in Syria. I remember saying categorically at the time that this did not make sense and that it was a half-cocked measure, involving a border that Daesh does not recognise. I said that I feared we would need to revisit that measure in a few months’, or even a few weeks’, time. Here we are now, a year later. Does the Minister agree that with hindsight, we should have gone into Iraq and Syria a year ago?

A key difference between our situation now and the debates we had over the last two years is the recent publication of the 2015 SDSR. The Government have listened and they have committed to the 2% NATO spend. The SDSR of 2015 is a far cry from that of 2010. This review will strengthen our Armed Forces for situations exactly like the one we face today.

One of the primary reasons we need to intervene in Syria now is to support our allies, as we have heard, particularly after the horrific atrocities in Paris. However, as so many noble Lords have said, air attacks alone will not work. I agree with the points about the precision weapons at our disposal made by the noble Lord, Lord King, and also share the views of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about the important role ground troops can play in the conflict. As the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, said, we need to co-ordinate this. We must take note of what the noble Lord, Lord Hague, said in his brilliant maiden speech and accept the case for combining these strikes with Special Forces. Will the Minister confirm that? The local ground forces are not enough: they are too small and too fragmented. We need to build on what the noble Lord, Lord Owen, said. Can the Government clarify who will be leading these local ground forces and who will be co-ordinating them in a manner that renders them a viable force?

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, one of the world’s leading chemical weapons experts, who has extensive dealings with Syria, has said that if allied forces launched a ground offensive, Daesh could be defeated in a matter of weeks. The problem, as we have seen in recent history, is that this would leave a vacuum.

We must be able to use diplomatic methods to rebuild society in a proper manner and not allow the area to descend into the kind of situation we have seen with our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have spent more time there than the First and Second World Wars combined—let alone the billions of pounds spent, the lives lost and the number of wounded. The noble Lord, Lord Hague, said that we must be prepared for the possibility of partitioning the region and that we must accept the enormous political and economic changes required to achieve lasting stability throughout the Middle East. Does the Minister agree that, sadly, partitioning of the area might be necessary?

Last year, we intervened late and without the required force. I said a year ago that we may be required to intervene again. That is now the case. However, we must accept the reality that these air strikes alone will not be enough. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee has said that they will have little more than “marginal effect” and are, “unlikely to be effective without reliable allies on the ground … and these would not be easy to find”.

We must go ahead with these air strikes, but let us not think that this is all that is required, or we will be back here once again in a few months’ time debating the next round of measures. Now that we are intervening in Iraq and Syria, we must do this in a fully committed way, with our eyes wide open.

In his speech, Lord Bilimoria noted the slow pace at which the government proposed the military intervention, as well as critiquing the present state of the UK Armed Forces.

The debate ran co-currently with a debate in the House of Commons, which endorsed the principle of military intervention via airstrikes by 524 votes to 43.

My Lords, a year ago we were recalled and virtually every one of us who spoke in the debate said that we should not intervene in Syria. Today it is exactly the opposite way around, in that just about everybody is saying that we should intervene this time, and we have had the legal justification.

The question that I ask is: why are we doing this so late? Why are we doing this half-cocked? Sixty nations are already there, including 10 Arab nations. Five Arab nations have already taken part in the air attacks, and we are late to the party. We have had one of our citizens—as have the Americans—brutally murdered by ISIL. The whole world has watched while the innocent Yazidis were terrorised and fleeing for their lives. Why have we taken so long? As we have heard time and again, why are we restricting this to Iraq? The polls from the public have overwhelmingly supported intervention in Iraq, but they also show that the public would support us if we intervened in Syria right now, as the Americans are doing. After all, ISIL has completely erased the Sykes-Picot line. Will the Minister assure us that as soon as is required—not, as one noble Lord said, in three years’ time; I fear that it will be in a few months’ time, or even a few weeks’ time—we will consider intervening in Syria? We will probably need to.

Will the Government clarify that action will involve not just six Tornados from Cyprus but also the use of drones, ship-launched attacks, submarine-launched attacks and our best-of-the-best Special Forces? On the other hand, as I said last year, we have a Government who, in the 2010 SDSR, cut our defence capabilities. We still do not have aircraft carriers. We have a British Army that will not even fill Wembley Stadium. We are relying on reserves. Here we are, as we have been so many times since 2010, once again in a situation in which we need our brilliant Armed Forces—and we have been cutting them. Will the Minister confirm that the Government will stick to their commitment of a 2% of GDP spend on defence and nothing less, because we desperately need it?

The noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, and others spoke of the necessity to win this battle on the ground. Is it not sad that at the Battle of Mosul in June an Iraqi army of 20,000 was forced to flee by an ISIL force of 3,000? It was left to the Kurdish Peshmerga to hold the line. But we were there for so many years, supposedly training the Iraqi army. What went wrong? Did we not train it properly? My father was in the Indian army. I remember that when he was serving, the Indian army had a training team in Iraq for years, headed by a lieutenant-general. If we want to train, let us put our might behind training the Iraqis and the Peshmerga as well.

We need to invest in that capability because the ideology is dangerous. As the most reverend Primate said, it is deep. As His Holiness Pope Francis has said, we might be in the midst of a World War III. This is not going to go away. This is very serious. If we are going to do this, we need to be with our allies. We need to be completely effective; we need to push forward, because we cannot rely on the UN. Once again, the UN has shown itself to be completely ineffective. Will the Government use this as another reason for a desperately needed reform of the UN?

In conclusion, we may have been late to the party but after today we will be at the table and we must go out there with full force, with a mission and very clear strategy to liberate the ISIL-controlled areas of Iraq and Syria from the evil of ISIL. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, that ISIL is not Islamic; it is not a state. It is a group of medieval, barbaric monsters.

The Joint Intelligence Committee report says that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons 14 times since 2012, and yet the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, in a brilliant speech, said that with 100,000 lives lost and 2 million refugees, we have not intervened, but now we want to do so. The noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, in another brilliant speech, said that we have held back all these years from intervening in Syria but now, this week, the drums of war have been banging. So what has happened? This awful chemical attack is the straw that has broken the camel’s back.

We have not intervened so far but there is a point to consider which nobody has raised yet. Although we are expected to intervene, in 2010 the Government, in the SDSR, cut our Armed Forces. They got rid of our aircraft carriers. I was in India just recently. India has aircraft carriers. It might be getting new ones, but it has kept its old ones until it gets the new ones. We have cut our Harriers. We have cut our Nimrods. We have cut our troops. We are reliant on reserves, and yet now we are expected to intervene. I said in 2010, three years ago, that we did not know what was going to happen next. What happened next? Libya. What happened after that? The Arab spring continued. What happened after that? Mali. What happened after that? Oh, the Olympics. We needed our troops in the Olympics.

We do not learn. We feel that we can just call on our troops. As the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, said, we expect our troops just to perform—“Switch, go, fight: give up your lives. Make the ultimate sacrifice”. But what about the nation; is it behind us? We know that the country is completely not behind intervention in Syria.

We are caught between a rock and a hard place. We feel that we have to do something. We have our allies, the Americans, who for a century have stood by us and saved this country. We feel that we have to support them. However, in Iraq the biggest mistake in 2003 was that we had not thought through what would happen afterwards. We imagined that everything would be fine. We had not thought of the aftermath, we had not planned it. As the noble Lord, Lord King, asked, did we plan on the retaliations that would take place? I was an ambassador for the London Olympics and we were celebrating on the steps of Trafalgar Square on 6 July 2005. We all know what happened the next day, on 7/7.

We know that if there is a clear strategy, it is very effective. In the first Gulf War, in Kuwait, we were in there and then out of there, mission accomplished. My father fought in the liberation of Bangladesh, when there was an East Pakistan and a West Pakistan. India waited and planned for over a year. The Prime Minister was putting pressure on the army chief but he said, “No. When I’m ready we’ll go in”. They went in and the job was done in two weeks. Here, however, we go and intervene. We say that we will do it in a proportionate manner. As we have heard, however, what about Russia, what about China, what about Iran, what about Lebanon? What about all the domino effects? We will take proportionate measures but will we get a proportionate reaction? Just yesterday the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said:

“The Middle East region is like a gunpowder store and the future cannot be predicted. If President Obamagets stuck in this trap, he will certainly leave behind bad memories of his presidency. The intervention of America will be a disaster for the region”.

Those are threatening words. President Obama says that a red line has been crossed. But I question the Government’s judgment. They have cut our budgets, cut the Armed Forces and then want to rush in and intervene without even waiting for the UN inspectors’ reports. I do not understand it. Yet we have this wonderful House, with the brilliant speeches that we have heard, one after the other, and we are not even to have a vote today. The other place will have a vote but we will not. The expertise of this House is 100 times that of the other place and we do not even get a vote.

Every day we delay action, we feel guilty. A humanitarian crisis is getting worse every single day. It is only natural that we want to intervene, but we should only do that when we have exhausted all other opportunities and have a proper strategy that we have thought through. Then we can do it. In conclusion, I have always been taught that a fool makes a mistake, makes a mistake again and does not learn. A sensible person makes a mistake, learns from it and does not make it again. A wise person learns from other people’s mistakes and does not make a mistake in the first place. It is too late for us to be wise, but let us at least be sensible. Otherwise we will be foolish and the consequences will be disastrous.