We must not send the message that if you kill 240,000 in Syria, you get away with it, but if you kill 140 in France then you’re in trouble.
“In the period in which the campaign has been operating, recruitment to Daesh has doubled.”
The Labour former minister argues in favour of extending air strikes to Syria.
Hansard’s account of the opening of today’s debate on extending military action against ISIS.
The Prime Minister makes his case in the House of Commons.
We will not be “bombing Syria”, but attacking carefully identified terrorist targets in the worst example of an “ungoverned space” that the modern world has seen.
Which represents no change in their view since the summer. But support for bombing among our readers as a whole is much lower.
Commerce and realpolitik will always have their place in British foreign policy, but we should never be an uncritical friend to regimes like Saudi Arabia or Kazakhstan.
We need to find advocates whose authority and Islamic orthodoxy the extremists respect. Such people exist, but they are not liberal Imams or nominally Christian politicians.
“We shouldn’t be content with outsourcing our security to our allies. If we believe that action can help protect us, then with our allies we should be part of that action.”
The idea that Turkey is somehow backing ISIS has become a popular meme, assiduously spread online by Russian agents provocateurs, and taken up by some in Western Europe,
So much of the present crisis – and of the intervening suffering – can be traced to our failure to move decisively against Assad two years ago.
“I firmly support the action that President Hollande has taken to strike ISIS in Syria and it is my firm conviction that Britain should do so too.”
We cannot know. But however important that question is, it should not be the only one that MPs ask if they vote on bombing ISIS in Syria – or even the main one.
Wednesday’s events in the Commons have laid to rest the ghost of the Iraq War.