Britain must stop dithering and launch an all-out war on ISIS, former senior Conservative politician Ann Widdecombe has said.
Writing in this week’s Catholic Herald magazine, the ex-prisons minister said that until the Islamist group was defeated “civilisation will not be safe”.
She wrote: “There will be no end to the flood of displaced persons and its concomitant human misery unless there is also an end to the war. That means force, and it is time to face up to that as a previous generation was forced to do.”
She continued: “This is not Britain’s war or America’s war or even the West’s war, but rather that of the entire civilised world. Until ISIS is stopped in its tracks, civilisation will not be safe. A huge coalition of all concerned nations, including those in that area, is what is needed to rout ISIS decisively and restore peace and rebuilding.
“Without that approach, anything we do is mere sticking plaster on a festering wound. We have hesitated too long, and while we have been havering and hovering, millions have suffered horribly.”
She compared the present crisis to the situation in Europe before the Second World War.
She said: “No Christian lightly advocates war, but Britain is now facing much the same challenge as we faced in 1939. We were war-weary, the last huge conflict having ended but 20 years earlier. Millions had died. Husbands, sons, fathers and brothers had not come home, while others returned disfigured, disabled and traumatised. The very last wish in any sane person’s mind was for another major confrontation.
“Yet Churchill knew we had to face up to just that because the evil with which we were confronted was not going to go away, deals with Hitler could not last and the Nazi vision was world domination. He stood out against appeasement and against the reluctance of an entire nation… we are now faced with an evil which is not going to go away.”
She concluded: “Had we done nothing in 1939 genocide itself would have flourished. The scale is different and the enemy is different but the moral challenge is the same. Yet good men do nothing – or at any rate too little.”
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