ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now this month marked a year since the fall of Iraq’s second city Mosel and with it Islamic State gained international prominence.  Despite 10 months of bombing attacks by a US led coalition, the group has survived and indeed it seems continued to grow.  This week a 17 year old became Britain’s youngest suicide bomber in Iraq.  Crispin Blunt is the new Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and he joins me now from Horley and a very good morning to you, Mr Blunt.  You presumably agree with the Prime Minister when he said on his speech on security last week, that in ISIL we have one of the biggest threats the world has faced.  

CRISPIN BLUNT: I do agree with that and I think it’s about time we worked out a proper political and military strategy to defeat them.  

DM: Well the military strategy at the moment from the point of view of the coalition is dropping bombs on them and hitting them with drones.  

CRISPIN BLUNT: And plainly that’s not going to work and, as you suggest, it is potentially having the effect of making them stronger and I want the Foreign Affairs Committee which I now chair to examine this and to look at the reasons why we haven’t got intelligent co-operation between the regional powers, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran and possibly Egypt, to put together a political strategy underpinned with the necessary military means to defeat this appalling state that has been created in the form of Islamic State.  

DM: Okay, assuming the talks achieve some kind of political progress between the nations you mention, how would that translate into military activities on the ground?   

CRISPIN BLUNT: Well I think there is a key requirement if you are going to employ military force and intervention, you have got to be absolutely certain that that military force is going to achieve your political objective.  I don't think the political objective here can be anything short of the defeat of Islamic State and the occupation and administration of the lands they currently have under control.  You have then got to sort out the issues around what is happening in Syria, what is happening in Iraq, Kurdistan and the rest and those three regional powers all have different interests but we all have an overriding interest in the defeat of Islamic State.  So they have got to sit down with the other P5 powers if you like behind them – Russia, China, the United States, ourselves and the rest of the European Union – who can then give those states the necessarily military capability to win that conflict but first of all we have got to sort out the political objective and the political strategy.  

DM: What do you think about the threat to the United Kingdom from those who may wish to do us harm, who support that kind of ideology?  Again the Prime Minister’s speech, he talked about those in the UK who quietly condone some of Islamic State’s ideology and then Baroness Warsi saying those comments were ill advised and misjudged, where do you stand on that?  

CRISPIN BLUNT: Well I can understand in a sense both sets of comments.  I found myself in some sympathy yesterday with the piece written by Matthew Parris in the Times where he was making the point that we can make too much of this and we do their propaganda work by the rather hysterical way we react to what is happening and in the end we can only switch this off and switch off the threat to our own country coming people having safe havens who wish to do us ill, by ending the safe haven and that means bringing the area of Islamic State in effect defeat it and bring it back under sound administration where our security interests can be protected.

DM: And in terms of the roots of Islamic State, a lot of analysis goes way back to 2003 and before and those failed states where Islamic State has prospered so spectacularly were in part created by Western policy, Iraq first of all, what’s going on in Syria, Libya and other countries as well.  

CRISPIN BLUNT: Well the truth is we don’t understand this region and the forces sweeping across it very well.  Another area I hope my committee will look at is the whole relationship we have had with what are called constitutional political Islam.  We were minded to support this when it was the will of the Egyptian people for example and now we are finding ourselves supporting President Sisi who rather brutally repressed those forces once they had had a democratic mandate.  We have values and interests that sometimes appear to be in conflict here and I think we need a proper examination of what is happening in the region and we need to make sure in the end that what we’re not doing is reinforcing the narrative of these ghastly people in Islamic State with this medieval fundamentalist hate filled ideology, that we are not accidentally reinforcing their case by not living and executing our own values.  

DM: But it’s interesting you mention there President al-Sisi of Egypt who has been invited at some stage to the United Kingdom to Downing Street by Mr Cameron and the sort of muddled attitude that the UK and indeed others have had to countries like that.  Of course we welcomes the toppling of President Mubarak, we welcomed the democratic election of Mohammed Morsi and now presumably we welcome the military putsch by President al-Sisi.

CRISPIN BLUNT: Well you can see that our policy looks rather confused and indeed conflicted and I know that one of the reasons the Prime Minister commissioned the examination of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is because he felt he wasn’t being given very clear advice on exactly what they were and how they operated and you have got this political Islamic movement across the whole of North Africa and through the region and we need to get a better handle and a better understanding of what we’re dealing with there and whether or not they have a relationship with this very extremist ideology that is then also sweeping across the region.  We need to examine whether this particular democratic force could be a bulwark to stop people going to violence or whether in the words I’ve heard it used, they are a gateway drug to Islamic State.  We need to examine these issues and then come to other clearer conclusions so our policy makers can then make policy on the basis of better understanding of the forces that are sweeping the region.  

DM: Perhaps more pertinently, don’t we have to sort out our position toward Bashir al-Assad?  I was asked a question by some A level students the other day and it is out of the mouths of babes, well 17 and 18 year olds anyway, who said I don’t understand this, President Assad is fighting tooth and nail against Islamic State, why is he not our ally?

CRISPIN BLUNT: Well again this is a difficult question.  The regime in 2013, or when it began in 2011 with the protests in Daara, it looked as though it was going to fall over as another outcome of the Arab Spring but what one then saw was the situation in Syria is immensely complex and the regime in Syria which has had pretty ugly policy associated with it, does command the loyalty of a large number of Syrians who see it as defending their interests and the situation in Syria has been described by one academic, Eugene Rogan, it is no longer winner takes all, it’s loser must die.  With that dynamic within the conflict there you can see how difficult it is that anyone is actually going to sit down at a negotiation table and come to a deal but that’s what they must do and the powers behind the various players in this conflict, be they the people we’re supporting in terms of the liberal forces there or Assad’s forces or the non-ISIS Islamist forces, all have their power brokers in the region be it in the form of the Americans and ourselves or the Turks or the Iranians and the Russians, and people need to sit down and actually produce a political strategy to deal with the absolute enemy which is Islamic State.

DM: Okay, Mr Blunt, great talking to you, thank you very much, hope to talk to you again soon. Crispin Blunt there, Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.