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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: So the Conservatives are gathering in Manchester today for their party conference and the Prime Minister appears to have put defence firmly on the agenda with a promise to double the number of British drones to help tackle Islamic State.  The question of military action in Syria is one that looms large for the Prime Minister with a fresh vote perhaps in the House of Commons, meanwhile Russia is defying international criticism of its air strikes and says it plans to intensify its raids.  The Chair of the Defence Select Committee, the Conservative MP Julian Lewis, joins me now and a very good morning to you Mr Lewis.  One does outweigh the other militarily but does it mean there is not much necessity for more drones in the SAS if the Russians are doing what they’re doing?

JULIAN LEWIS: A lot depends on what the Prime Minister wants to use the extra vehicles for.  The only time in which there has been a drone strike in Syria so far was in response to a specifically identified threat from an individual, we are not going to be killing targeted individuals on a daily basis, this will be something that happens relatively rarely so with this great increase in numbers it may be to increase surveillance capability but if it’s meant to be armed drones killing lots of people then if that’s going to happen in Syria there is going to have to be a vote in parliament about it first.

DM: What about the Russian actions?  It is too early I suspect for the committee to have taken a view on it but the criticism that is being aimed at the by the Prime Minister, is it aimed in the real world in that we’re not going to get a settlement in Syria that gives us a shiny all-inclusive democracy, everyone knows that.  Is this at least an option?  This just might settle things.  

JULIAN LEWIS: Well I’m not sure everyone does know that we’re not going to get a democracy in Syria and this fallacy that we might is what underlays many of the mistaken decisions that have been taken and are being taken.  The Russians at least have got a strategy, they recognise that if you intervene in a civil war in a country as divided as Syria, either one side is going to win or the other side is going to win or some third force possibly from outside, probably from outside, is going to have to come in and suppress both sides and be prepared to stay there indefinitely.  The Russians know that they want their client, the dictator Assad, to win however the West wants both sides to lose and that’s why we find ourselves in the ridiculous situation of having been urged by the Prime Minister in 2013 to bomb Assad and now less than two years, no just over two years later being urged to bomb Assad’s enemies and the reality is that the Russian recognise that from their point of view there can be only one or other outcome between Assad and his enemies and we don’t.  We are still trying to support groups that we imagine are moderate that could win.

DM: We can discuss that in a moment or two, how moderate are the moderates but do you think that the lessons of Libya for instance have not been learned in the UK?  All the talk there was about inclusive democracy and look what’s happened.  

JULIAN LEWIS: Spot on, Dermot, absolutely and I hasten to add you rightly said the Committee, the Defence Committee has not taken a view on these things, we all speak as individuals including me the Chairman and my view is that we were frankly misled into what happened in Libya, there was a vote in parliament and I voted for the very limited proposition that was put to the Members of Parliament which was that we would have a no-fly zone and even then …

DM: To protect Benghazi.

JULIAN LEWIS: To protect Benghazi, exactly and even then I expressed the view that there were no good outcomes in these sorts of situations, only the least worst and I felt that what would happen then would be you’d get a stalemate and there probably would have been a stalemate and that would have been the least worst outcome.  What we actually got the moment we passed the vote to have a no-fly zone was an all-out aerial assault to remove Gaddafi and if that had been put to parliament I don't think it would have got through because many of us, including me,  have learnt the lesson of what happened with Saddam Hussein. We thought that by removing a dictator democracy would emerge, all that re-emerged was the hatred between the Shias and the Sunnis.  

DM: So apply that to Syria and the Janus like policy that Britain has had or does it still has that Assad eventually must go, should we almost put that aside because certainly the Alawite community would need protection one would imagine if Assad went and it were overrun in an unruly fashion.  I mean there are more than two million Alawites there.  

JULIAN LEWIS: On your channel yesterday and I didn’t know this gentleman before I saw him doing an extensive interview, Peter Ford a former British Ambassador to Syria was quite clear and he has the knowledge that someone like me only has the theoretical analytical approach to the question but he actually was able to confirm exactly what I strongly suspect which is that in seeking to bring down Assad we are effectively promoting the Jihadi’s, the extremists. I know that historical parallels are always a bit dangerous and take this one with a pinch of salt because Britain was fighting for its very existence in 1941 which we’re not now, but the difference in approach of governments was that Churchill, the great anti-communist, the moment his deadly enemy Hitler attacked Russia was on the Russian side and said if Hitler invaded hell I’d have at least a good word to say for the devil in the House of Commons.  Now if we were to have our present strategists, so-called, in that situation today they’d be saying something like well, Hitler has attacked the Russians, they’re both bloodthirsty so what we need to do is get a load of moderates in and they’ll see off Hitler first and then they’ll depose Stalin and we’ll have an all-inclusive democracy.  Now that’s absurd in that scenario and it’s ridiculous in the Syrian scenario today.

DM: It does sound ridiculous when you put it like that.  So okay, British policy doesn’t have to explicitly back Assad, you just back the Russians who are backing Assad.   

JULIAN LEWIS: We don’t even need to back the Russians, we just need to recognise as Admiral Lord West, the former Labour security minister has said, you need to recognise which of the crocodiles swimming around in these infested waters is nearest to your boat.  Assad poses no significant threat to British interests, ISIS poses a huge threat to British interests and there is a very important thing about this, it is not just British interests in the Middle East, it’s British interests world-wide including at home and amongst friends that I have who are part of the Muslim community and who are serious analysts, they say that the reason why Al Qaeda has faded while ISIL or Daesh as we ought to call it, has prospered is purely on the perception of success and the fact is that Al Qaeda has not had much in the way of success so people have turned away from it.  This organisation has seized huge chunks of territory but in that lies its weakness because the strength with terrorist movements is normally that they melt away and by seizing large areas of territory this lot have given up their best asset, invisibility.  They are vulnerable to attack.  

DM: But given all we’ve discussed there about the big forces, political and military, at work there, when it comes, if it comes to a vote in the House of Commons about extended the limited British military activities into Syria, doesn’t it all seem like an irrelevance now?

JULIAN LEWIS: It’s a mere gesture because the only way in which air strikes can make a difference is in support of credible ground forces and so the question is, who is going to supply those credible ground forces?  Now if we had a situation where for example the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Turks even if they weren’t too over-occupied with trying to fight the Kurds rather than ISIS, if they all said right, we’re going to assemble a force which is going to remove this cancerous growth, we’re going to go in on the ground and Britain, will you support us with close air support, I would vote for it.  But what we’re doing here is air strikes on their own which are no more than a gesture with three other countries already mounting them.

DM: Mr Lewis, good to talk to you, thank you very much indeed.  Julian Lewis there, the Chair of the Defence Select Committee.