Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-09-11-Speech-3-342-000"
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"en.20130911.47.3-342-000"2
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"Mr President, I represent a group which is against military action in Syria. We are against it not because we are pacifists; we are against it not because we do not care about the awful things going on there. We are against it because we think there is some pretty poor thinking going on. The idea that somehow the rebels are the good guys and Assad’s regime are the bad guys really is an over-simplification of a situation in which we know that al-Qa’ida has significant representation amongst the rebel groups.
Of course, we have seen it all before: an endless series of military adventures over the course of the last 10 to 15 years. One such, in Afghanistan, is still going on and is not achieving any of the original aims. I was worried when I heard the Americans telling us, to begin with, that it was about punishing Assad and then, within a week, that it was about regime change – a position which I know the noble Baroness herself supports.
We think that firing a thousand cruise missiles is likely to make an unstable situation even worse than it is now.
In a sense, Baroness Ashton, you are sitting pretty because, as the highest-paid female politician in the world, luckily you have a non-job because the EU, thank goodness, has not yet got a foreign policy and, as a result of that, what we saw two weeks ago in the UK House of Commons was a nation-state democracy standing up and saying something. As a direct result of that vote in the House of Commons, we have not gone to war in Syria: we have entered a period of negotiations and Assad has a chance to prove to all of us whether he is a good man or a bad man.
I do not know how this will play out but at least, Mr Verhofstadt, there is a chance of peace, and I know that you represent the kind of political class who believe that global influence can be achieved only through bombing. Well, luckily – unlike extreme EU nationalists like yourself – British democracy has proved that nation-state parliaments can actually made people rethink. And, Mr President, I have to say, as somebody who has been here now for 14 years, it is ironic that the view which I used to represent was called extreme, but you can see who are the extreme militarists now."@en1
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