Extract

The most difficult decision that any Member of Parliament has to make is whether to go to war. When you vote for military action you know that soldiers from your country will die. If your armed forces are well trained, well equipped and supported by equally well-prepared allies, say members of NATO, you know that many more enemy personnel will lose their lives. However carefully your military leaders select targets, innocent civilians—women and children—will die too, and many more will suffer life changing injuries.

If, on the other hand, you hold back, people may die too; from terrorist attacks, which could be in your own country; from ‘ethnic cleansing’, as in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and Darfur; from civil war—conflict to seize political power or natural resources, as in Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Congo or currently Syria; or from your own actions short of military intervention—tens of thousands died in Iraq before the second Iraq war as a result of UN sanctions and the failure of the Baath regime to use the UN's oil for food programme to buy food and medicine for the Iraqi people.

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