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Former prime minister Tony Abbott has warned the West’s campaign in Syria will be “long, tough and expensive”, and has named for the “right intervention” to in the end defeat the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group.
In a speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies Asia in Singapore overnight, Mr Abbott acknowledged past interventions in Iraq and Libya had ended badly.
But he argued the choice not to intervene in Syria sooner had been even much more disastrous.
“A quarter of a million dead seven million internally displaced and four million in camps beyond the borders considering of coming to Europe although Islamic State posts, on the internet, for the globe to see, ever far more barbaric approaches to kill individuals,” he told the audience.
Mr Abbott said the “correct intervention” was needed in Syria or the threat to the world’s peace and prosperity would only get worse, but he conceded that discovering a strategy was the challenge.
Because losing the prime minister-ship in September, Mr Abbott has used a series of public lectures to argue for the West to step up its military commitment in Syria, arguing air strikes alone would not defeat IS.
Wednesday evening he emphasised the want for leadership from the outdoors and welcomed the United States’ decision to send a lot more particular forces troops into the country, saying it was a sign the country was “lastly edging towards the action required to win this war”.
Mr Abbott once more raised the prospect of Western troops fighting alongside regional forces in Syria or even the establishment of secure-havens protected by no-fly zones.
“It will be a extended, challenging and costly engagement, quite possibly the task of decades not years,” he stated.
“But ahead of we shrink from such a prospect we ought to don’t forget how a lot the globe has gained from the US and its allies’ sustained, post-war willingness to stand up for universal values as properly as for their own interests.”
The speech was delivered on the very same day the former prime minister called for a “religious revolution” within Islam, declaring “cultures are not all equal”.
“We’ve got to operate closely with reside-and-let-live Muslims simply because there needs to be, as president [Abdel Fattah] Al-Sisi of Egypt has mentioned, a religious revolution inside Islam,” Mr Abbott mentioned.
“All of those factors that Islam has never ever had — a Reformation, an Enlightenment, a nicely-developed idea of the separation of church and state — that wants to take place.”
His comments drew criticism from the Muslim neighborhood in Australia as nicely as the Federal Opposition, which referred to as on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to pull his predecessor into line.
Subjects: terrorism, unrest-conflict-and-war, government-and-politics, planet-politics, abbott-tony, singapore, australia