Debate:
So this brings me too our first point New Zealand shouldn’t be getting involved with Iraq.
Let us be clear about what we are dealing with. They call themselves Islamic State, but they are not a State. They want to establish a caliphate, a medieval form of social organization and control. They are not within a single border; they run across borders.
They are cultural, they are ethnic, they are religious, and they are driven by a number of different motivations. They are not a nation State in the way that we typically recognize; they are a grouping, an organization, a movement, and they draw their support accordingly. By getting involved in this we are putting our own people and country at stake.
Isis adherents can turn up anywhere in the world. Islamic State is a repository of the dispossessed, the marginalized, the fanatical, the extreme, and, yes, the evil, but it is not a conventional enemy and the circumstances in which we are being asked to fight it or train others to fight it in Iraq are not conventional. We are told we are sending troops to train the Iraqi army. The Prime Minister says they will be behind the wire but we know they will not be. They cannot stick there; they cannot stay there, that is not all they will do. They will not just be behind the wire; they will be exposed to the much wider conflict.
What is it that our troops will do that will succeed where others have failed? After 10 years of training of the Iraqi army by the US army, after $25 billion of assistance to the Iraqi army, what impact will we have, what can we hope to achieve?
The failure of the Iraqi army—an army that is demoralized, that is poorly led, poorly organized, riven with corruption, and it has been like that for 10 years – yet we think that by sending a very modest force as part of a multinational group we are going to achieve what the US army has not been able