With over 99 Members wishing to speak in today's debate, by the time I was called backbench contributions were reduced to just 3 minutes. However the text below is the full speech I intended to make rather than the condensed version I gave: Mr Speaker, the choice between ‘head in the sand’ or ‘boots on the ground’ has always been, in my mind, a false one. In recent days we’ve heard much about the limits to our influence on events in Syria. But we must not allow ourselves to believe that we can do nothing for the Syrian people. I recently returned from a refugee camp, near the Syrian border in the Kurdish region of Iraq. I could feel proud that through the UNHCR, as well as NGOs like the International Rescue Committee, British money was providing food, shelter and medical treatment for a desperate people. Yet it was a harrowing reminder, of the brutality of this war, and its complexity. For the Kurdish refugees I visited were not fleeing Assad, but his sworn opponents – jihadists undertaking a fatwa to cleanse the area of Christians and Kurds. In demographic terms Syria is like a photographic negative of Iraq: both have large minority populations of Christians and Kurds, but in Syria it is the Sunnis who form the historically oppressed majority. In Iraq we’ve seen what happens when a ruling minority is violently deposed. After the fall of Saddam, the Maliki Government failed to bring the Sunnis into the political process in any meaningful way. The result was a sectarian civil war which tore the country apart. Today large swathes of Sunni Iraq have all the characteristics of a failed state. My fear is that the post-Assad Syria envisioned by Saudi Arabia and Turkey will be equally unsustainable. Both countries favour a Sunni-dominated unitary state, since any federal structure would raise awkward questions about the status of their own religious and ethnic minorities. Yet a Sunni-dominated Syria would show no mercy to the defeated Alawites and as such would be completely unacceptable to the minorities, whether Alawite, Christian or Kurd – who would undoubtedly rebel with the support of regional powers. Mr Speaker, the ever shifting maze of internal politics and external agendas, the sheer complexity of the situation, demands that we be modest about what we hope to achieve. My constituents are deeply concerned about another open-ended war in the Middle East, and I will not vote for any action which entangles us in regime change. There can be no more nation-building. We simply don’t have the capability. Indeed, the most powerful country in the world doesn’t have that capability. Any intervention by Britain must have a clear objective and defined limits. Our objective is to protect civilians and preserve the international taboo against the use of terror weapons. The Joint Intelligence Committee are unambiguous. They say "there is no plausible alternative to regime responsibility for this atrocity." In the age of total war, Mr Speaker, there are virtually no moral limits on what a state might do in the pursuit of its military objectives. Where such limits do exist they must be upheld by responsible members of the international community. The Kurds of Iraq know this only too well. When Saddam bombed Halabja with mustard gas and nerve agent in 1988 the world looked on in horror - and did nothing. But our inertia didn’t prevent further conflict, it made it more likely. With Saddam emboldened, the gassing of Halabja was followed by the invasion of Kuwait. From Munich to Srebrinca, the lesson of history is that one violation of international law leads to another. Assad’s father took note of Iraq in ‘88 and made the decision to manufacture and hoard nerve agent. So what message would inaction now send to Assad, let alone Iran and North Korea? On the question of limits, our model for intervention should not be Iraq in 2003, but the No Fly Zone established over northern Iraq by the Major Government, after the first Gulf War. In ‘91, our objective was clear: to prevent Saddam’s final attempt to massacre the Kurds and the Shias. But crucially, the terms of the mission strictly limited our involvement. We weren’t trying to fix Iraq’s fractured politics, and nor did we. With Saddam at bay the various Kurdish factions turned on each other and fought a bloody civil war. We didn’t get involved because picking winners and losers wasn’t part of our mission, and we must take a similar attitude to any intervention in Syria. If Assad falls, these people may well turn their guns on each other. All we can do is offer our support to those Syrians who do share our values. The Syrian people have to find their own vision of self-government, as the Kurds eventually did in Iraq. Political consensus is vital for any action we take. It only helps to weaken the United Kingdom if we are divided on foreign policy, which is why I am so disappointed that the Leader of the Opposition has flip-flopped on this issue. Mr Speaker, we may not be able to stop the killing in Syria, but we may be able to render it a little less terrible. If we want to live in a civilised world, some things must be beyond the pale. I will be supporting the motion tonight.