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Defence in the World

Since the previous defence in the world debate, 95 British service members have made the ultimate sacrifice and have not come home from Iraq or Afghanistan. They died, as many of their predecessors did, making Britain safer and giving a better life to citizens of countries that enjoy far fewer benefits than us. This House should never forget that. I wish quickly to recognise an important day in our nation's history. Some 63 years ago today, Winston Churchill announced to the House that the sacrifices of millions had finally led to the end of hostilities in Europe, saying:"““The German war, Mr. Speaker, is therefore at an end.””—[Official Report, 8 May 1945; Vol. 410, c. 1868.]" The declaration of Victory in Europe day brought to a close six years of total war in Europe. Of course, that in turn led to the bipolar cold war, the rise of NATO, the creation of what we know today as the European Union and, 63 years later, the interdependent. globalised world that we face today. Since the proclamation of VE day on 8 May 1945, the world's strategic environment has greatly changed. We now live in a truly global economy—a world where Britain's economic and security interests are so interlinked into a larger global interdependent network that we have an unavoidable shared set of interests with a multitude of actors in all parts of the globe. We also face the unavoidable importation of strategic risk. As recent events have shown, instability in one corner of the globe will quickly affect everyone. In the current instance, the root of the instability lies in the American credit market, but it could just as easily lie in an energy security crisis in Japan or China, or in some, as yet, undefined problem. That interdependence has major implications for how we think about and organise our national security structures. The luxury—although that is perhaps not how we saw it then—of the bipolar world of the cold war allowed us to set a clear direction for our national security. The unpredictability that we currently face forces us simultaneously to be both reactive and proactive, and to adapt to ever changing challenges. Conservatives welcome this debate, and I wish to raise a number of issues: the situation in Iraq, and Iran's involvement there; the threats that we continue to face in Afghanistan; energy security, the new scramble for the Arctic and the potential threats posed by a resurgent Russia; the need to deal with asymmetric threats; and the need to maintain the primacy of NATO and to ensure its political and military flexibility to deal with changing threats. Let me begin with the situation in Iraq, where there are grounds for optimism on a number of fronts. First, the American surge under General Petraeus seems to be delivering tangible improvements in security. Like the Secretary of State, I was fortunate enough last week to spend some time with both General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, both of whom I found to be impressive and sincere. There is also cause for optimism now that Prime Minister al-Maliki has taken on the militias in Basra. There is a tendency in this country to see the whole conflict in Iraq through a religious prism of a Sunni-Shi'a conflict, but there is also a strong nationalist tradition in Iraq, and the willingness of its Government to tackle the often Iranian-supported militias seems to have had the effect, at least in part, of uniting the Kurds and Sunnis behind the Prime Minister and of convincing the population in the south that they have not been abandoned. The Prime Minister's campaign against the militias seems to have been genuine and sustained, even if perhaps it was, in parts, inadequately planned and required British and American support. Thankfully, it seems to have had some success, but in the future the Iraqi Government will need fully to involve coalition planners, and to do so in a more timely fashion.