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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now Thursday’s House of Commons vote on Syria sent shock waves around Westminster but what message does it send to the rest of the world and has President Obama’s decision announced last night to consult Congress changed that perception too? I’m joined now in the studio by the former Foreign Secretary, now Chair of the Intelligence Security Committee, he is Sir Malcolm Rifkind and down the line by the former Head of the Army, Lord Dannatt and the former British Ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Jeremy Greenstock. Well Sir Malcolm first of all, much discussion about the UK’s standing and influence in the world after the vote on Thursday, has that changed slightly by President Obama’s decision to himself consult his elected representatives?

SIR MALCOLM RIFKIND: Well it indicates that the United States has been influenced by the British Prime Minister’s decision and it emphasises the very close identity of values that just in Britain, the Prime Minister feels you need to go to Parliament, so the United States President feels he has to consult the elected Congress. But I think what he’s done has even more substantial implications for the United Kingdom at this particular moment. The last few days have been very difficult for Britain’s international standing and a lot of MPs, including Mr Miliband and his colleagues who voted against last Thursday did so because they said it was premature. Mr Miliband went out of his way to say he and the Labour party were not necessarily against military intervention, even outside the Security Council, if the evidence was compelling. Now at that time he thought, we all thought, that a strike was going to be in 48 hours, it now can’t be before September 9th when Congress looks at these matters. What Mr Miliband – and I assume he was telling the truth when the said he was not against military intervention if evidence became compelling – assuming that was and is his view, what he now has to look at, particularly as an aspirant Prime Minister who will be in charge of our international relations one day if he wins an election, he has to see the additional evidence that John Kerry and President Obama have brought forward, 1400 people killed, a lot of high quality intelligence the Americans have revealed, and he and the Prime Minister, our Prime Minister, ought now really to get together and say look, if we can now agree the evidence is compelling then Parliament ought to have the opportunity to debate the matter again.

DM: To do it again. I want to get some views now from Lord Dannatt and Sir Jeremy on that, Lord Dannatt first of all on the damage to, if any, Britain’s international standing and ability now to intervene in other parts of the world.

LORD DANNATT: Well undoubtedly what’s happened has had an effect on our standing but I think it is very interesting the events of the last 24 hours and President Obama saying he wants to consult Congress. I think this is a mature democracy, the United States is another mature democracy like ours, thinking that we can’t really take action on the world stage unless we’ve got the support of our own people. Of course the difficult thing is, on this particular issue of Syria, chemical weapons we can all agree, their use is a moral outrage and there is a desire to take some demonstrative, punitive action, that again is understandable but against a background of the complexity of the Syrian civil war, this is hugely complicating and trying to separate these two issues is a conundrum that significant brains have got to really strain themselves over the next few days to try and come up with a strategy so they can make that demonstrative statement about don’t use chemical weapons but not make even more complicated the complexity of the Syrian civil war at the present moment and that is Jeremy Greenstock’s field of diplomacy.

DM: Indeed and let’s go to Sir Jeremy Greenstock and talk about diplomacy. Within all this, the United Nations being much mentioned, give those inspectors time to complete their work and give them time then to report but we more or less know, I mean we must know what their conclusions will be and then it will all get stymied at the Security Council once again.

SIR JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Well it does bring back echoes of Iraq, I remember very clearly in 2003 that other leading members of the Security Council said to me privately in the corridor, it will make a tremendous amount of difference to our support for an attack on Iraq if there is clear evidence through the UN that Saddam Hussein has contravened the resolutions, has broken his word, etc. I think it makes an enormous difference to have proper evidence from the UN inspectors and that may change minds in the Security Council. We are now looking at a situation where time is available for a much closer analysis of what actually has happened. It looks extremely likely that it came from within the regime but which part of the regime and why and what were the reasons for that because it was an extraordinary and brutal thing to do. I think we’ve got some time in the Security Council to see whether we can work with the Russians and remember that the other very important aspect of all of this is whether we have the grounds, after this is over, to move forward to a political solution on the future of Syria which needs Russian engagement. So there is time now to do some diplomacy, perhaps to learn some lessons from this which will make a difference to the future of the conflict in Syria.

DM: In that context and others, Sir Jeremy, I mean is Britain’s voice to argue for that kind of thing diminished? You’ll be aware that for some years now there has been some discussion before this about whether Britain should hold on to its permanent membership in the UN Security Council.

SIR JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Our permanent membership is not going to go away. The voice of the government, the credibility of the Prime Minister might be affected for a short period but remember, our reputation was affected when we did intervene in Iraq, that we have intervened in Afghanistan and Libya. I think that the British people, the British parliament taking time to consider the proper facts is not going to diminish our international reputation one bit.

DM: I just want to ask Lord Dannatt about the military aspects of this. On this issue, Lord Dannatt, you and other wise military heads were warning – and you’ve just done it again this morning – about the strategy involved here and what was the end game and all that and you’ve coincided with a generally war weary public but there may be moments in the future when wise heads like yours say we do want to go in, we must go in here but public opinion is still against it.

LORD DANNATT: I completely agree with that and I think the big issue in any of these sets of circumstances either Syria or something in the future, is for the government, our government, in consultation with other allied and friendly governments, is to work out what their strategic objectives are. Once you know what you want to try and achieve, you can then start to put a sensible plan together. Now that plan will have diplomatic elements, it will have military elements, at the end of the day most of these conflicts are political issues and have to be settled within a political context. There might be a rationale for a military phase at some stage but military action has got to be for a particular purpose to help the overall strategy along. So in any of these issues, agree the strategic objective, then make a plan that has got a beginning, a middle, an end and then in military terms, work out the exit strategy so that we can leave the country that we are operating in, in a better condition than we found it.

DM: And Sir Malcolm, I just want to get your view on the balance of power, so to speak. Here we have Mr Cameron and now Mr Obama doing what democratically elected leaders perhaps should do, consulting their people through their representatives about going to war. These niceties don’t necessarily effect the likes of President Putin and others so the balance of power has shifted.

SIR MALCOLM RIFKIND: I don’t think we should be expecting the Duma to split down the middle on whether Russia should be supporting Syria. No, we are a mature democracy and that makes life uncomfortable for governments and that’s what should happen, that’s what democracy is meant to be about but you know, the House of Commons expressed the view by a narrow majority last week and the situation has moved on dramatically now. We thought then there was going to be an American strike within 24 or 48 hours, we now know there will not be American action for at least another ten days so there is time – and the key is Mr Miliband, if he meant it when he said that the Labour party was not against military action if the evidence was compelling. The evidence is becoming more compelling every day.

DM: Well we have heard that again from some of these spokespeople. Sir Malcolm, thank you very much indeed and our thanks to Lord Dannatt and Sir Jeremy Greenstock as well.