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Defence Policy

I have been so impressed by the brevity of some of the speeches I have heard today that it has rendered me almost unable to speak. Members will be relieved to hear, therefore, that I am going to throw away the speech that I had prepared and just made a couple of points. We need to consider having some sort of defence policy, and I would have spoken about this at much greater length if my voice were not in this condition. Before we pat ourselves on the back too much about Iraq, let us remember that the biggest single consequence of the invasion of that country is that, in the minds of hundreds of millions of people in the middle east, a crazed extremist called Osama bin Laden asserted that the Muslim umma was under attack by western countries that wanted to cause problems in the middle east. To my mind, our invasion of that country was completely unnecessary and, for hundreds of millions of people, it has given his words resonance. That is going to be the most lasting consequence of our engagement in Iraq. We need also a defence policy that will stop us having another strategic failure after Iraq in Afghanistan. I went to Afghanistan a couple of weeks ago with my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) and there is a considerable amount of disillusion about the situation there. At the moment, we are certainly not winning—and I could put it another way if the House wanted me to. Furthermore, by focusing almost exclusively on the military effect, we are in danger of losing what has become known as the global war on terror. The consequences of all that are enormously seriously. I shall not bang on, but I should like to read what someone said in 1850 about Britain's engagement in the first Afghan war; it applies equally to the whole global war on terror. John Kaye said:"““Throughout the entire period of British connection with Afghanistan a strange moral blindness clouded the vision of our statesmen: they saw only the natural, inevitable results of their own measures—and forgot that those measures were the dragon's teeth from which sprang-up armed men.””"