Note from Harry - Today's blog post is written by my good friend Ben Knight. Ben is a young Conservative currently studying for his A-levels in Economics, History and English Literature, hoping to stand as a candidate for the party some day in the future.
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As a person of the ginger-haired variety and a young Conservative, I am
not unused to finding myself in the minority. It was therefore no great
surprise to me when, two years ago, I found little support in speaking
in favour of British airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad. The received
wisdom of the trundling pacifists and the flower power warriors
prevailed: war is always wrong, bombs are always bad and there is always
another way.
Those voices now are somewhat quieter, for the agenda has changed. Few
people are impassioned by the thought of a bland, besuited dictator
using chemical weapons and gas bombs against people thousands of miles
away, about whom we know very little. The western world is far more
readily summoned to the cusp of war by the thought of straggly-haired,
bearded Jihadists roaming the streets of Paris, shooting people who look
like us and upon whose roads we have ourselves driven.
My attitude has never been that British foreign policy should be
motivated purely by self-interest, nor that self defence should be the
compelling argument today in favour of intervening in Syria. Why, ISIL
certainly poses a serious threat to our country - one that we cannot
simply bow down to, and one which should absolutely be confronted. But
it is not merely the colours of the Union Jack that draw me to the
prospect of an armed intervention in the Levant region. Neither, despite
what some on the left might prefer to claim, is it some Churchillian
lust for war and conquest. No; I believe in war that is just. I believe
in war against an enemy with whom no negotiation can be contemplated. I
believe in war for the sake of the millions of people who find
themselves under the steel fist of ISIL's savage ideology. People who
cannot send their girls to school, who cannot pray except as they are
told to, who cannot speak for fear of being heard and who cannot live
without the looming shadow of torture or death. The eradication of ISIL
by force is not an argument about whether British shores are left better
or worse, and it is not an argument about whether we are right to take
or responsible for taking action in this way. It is an argument simply
about humanity, a question of whether we can bear to live in a world
populated by terrorists and ideologues of the kind that ISIL represents.
For as Hitler did not propose or have the means to invade Britain in
1939, ISIL does not propose or have the means to subjugate our people in
2015. They do, however, as the Nazis did, propose to subjugate fellow
human beings. They make speak a foreign language, eat foods we find
peculiar and adopt customs which we might never comprehend - but they
are people. Any person who makes himself a friend of liberty, who
believes in democracy and in freedom of thought, religion, speech: any
such person is a friend of me. Britain, a free and safe country, has a
responsibility to assist others who do not possess such freedoms.
Our goal must be to eradicate the threat posed by ISIL and to secure the
Iraq/Syria region. In the long term, though his contribution in
pressing forwards with a new and democratic Syria may be necessary,
Bashar al-Assad too must go. The Syrian people must be given a state
which is democratic, secular and safe. That achievement will represent
an enormous benefit to our fellow humankind, and indeed to ourselves.
For our security depends increasingly upon the security of the
globalised world. Will airstrikes achieve this aim? Realistically, not
alone. The argument about boots on the ground is perhaps one for another
day. But to suggest that the best thing is to do nothing? To believe
that war is always wrong? To state that ISIL is not worth fighting? No,
no, no. War that is just can be right. War that is necessary can be
good. And as the air above our heads would today be bloated with the
stench of Jewish corpses had Britain stood aside at the opening of the
Second World War, I fear that the Middle East and the world may descend
into a living hell if Britain stands aside today.
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