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Foreign Affairs and Defence

The hon. Gentleman, who has some knowledge of military strategy, knows that an exit strategy is defined as being either the moment at which one knows that one has done one’s task, or the moment at which one knows that one cannot complete it. My anxiety is that we have an open-ended commitment whereby we will stay for as long as we are required. Just how long will that be? What consequences does it have for overstretch in our armed forces and for our political influence in an area in which that influence has been deeply damaged? There will be a point at which we have to leave Iraq, but there will never be a good time to do so. The right approach is to have an objective. At the moment, the Government do not have an objective. I imagine that somewhere in the depths of the Ministry of Defence, with which the hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) is no doubt familiar, people are planning for how long British forces will be there—for two, three, or four years. That is not a commitment that we have any obligation to maintain. We had a moral obligation created for us by the Government in taking military action—a moral obligation that none of us could shrink from—but we have fulfilled that, and we have a moral obligation to our own forces and to the interests of the people of the United Kingdom.