Six months ago, parliament rejected military intervention in Syria. It simply made the situation worse, says James Bloodworth
The disinclination of the public to want Britain to intervene militarily in Syria has more to do with the ‘Ukipification’ of British politics than it does with any outbreak of flower power or anti-war sentiment.
We did not stay out of Syria because, as the Stop the War Coalition would have it, the public favours good over bad, socialism over imperialism, or peace over war. We stayed out because, as the American writer Conor Friedersdorf approvingly suggested in the Atlantic magazine (albeit in an American context), ‘Non-intervention would pose no threat to us.’
Or at least that is what many foolishly thought. The refugee crisis in Syria (three million have so far fled the country) has scotched the possibility of ‘keeping out’, and, however much some may wish it was otherwise, for any serious humanitarian (not to say socialist) there is an obligation to help those caught up in the Assad dictatorship’s war on the people of Syria.
There is no significant neoconservative movement in Britain, at least not in the sense that there is in the United States. Those advocating intervention in Syria in the dog days of last summer consisted of a handful of Blairites, a few Atlanticist conservatives and a small number of heterodox liberals and socialists. The further away from the political centre one gravitated the more strident opposition to intervention tended to become. Thus the United Kingdom Independence party’s line on Syria was at times indistinguishable from that of the left, the thrust being that we must stay out no matter what.
There were, of course, those on the left who opposed intervention for good reasons, not the least of which was a healthy fear of the religious extremists present in the ranks of the opposition. More generally, though, the anti-war sentiment which reached its apogee in late August was characterised by a mixture of selfishness, insincerity and cant, regardless of the abstractions and rationalisations evoked to justify the collective turning away from the plight of the Syrians.
Apart from the considered opposition of a certain portion of the liberal left, objections to western military intervention against Bashar al-Assad tended to rest on one of the following three premises.
First, anti-imperialism. This tended to manifest itself less as opposition to war than support for the other side – hence ‘anti-war’ activists managed to see no contradiction in appearing on Russian state television to denounce foreign intervention in Syria. At its worst this ‘anti-imperialism’ was represented by the Stop the War Coalition, which regularly invites fellow travellers of dictatorships to bellow anti-American rhetoric at the assorted cranks that turn up at their annual get-togethers. Irresponsible but significantly more principled are those who took a ‘third camp’ position of opposition to western intervention and condemnation of dictatorship. Overall, though, opposition of this sort was based on an unquestioning faith in fly-blown texts which have long passed their usefulness.
Second, isolationism. Many on both left and right seem at times to want to stop the world and get off, as do a majority of the public. The 9/11 wars have made people understandably recoil from new military adventures in the Middle East, and the global financial crisis has encouraged the solipsistic idea that we in the west have ‘our own problems’ to deal with which are comparable to people having heavy explosives dropped on their heads. In other words, we are all ‘Little Englanders’ now (or at least lots of us are).
Third, ‘ignorers’. ‘Ignorers’ are similar to isolationists but are less willing to say openly that they have no interest in the suffering of people in foreign countries. Usually unconsciously callous, ‘ignorers’ will tell you that they would rather focus on ‘domestic issues’ and ‘the things which really concern voters’ as a roundabout way of saying that the people of Syria can go and hang. Voters do not care about Syria, and therefore neither should I, or so the rationale goes. In contrast to isolationists ‘ignorers’ tend to be political weathercocks rather than signposts.
Considering that the three aforementioned categories make up a much bigger proportion of public opinion than those who supported (and still support) military intervention, it is perhaps unsurprising that Britain has spent the past three years observing the bloodshed in Syria with a cool equanimity. The mistake of the aforementioned ‘types’, however, has been to assume that non-intervention would be the end of it, and that a vote in the House of Commons would ultimately have any bearing on the matter. In so much as the August vote mattered it simply helped to make the situation significantly worse, as well as exacerbated the potential for violent fallout as extremists travel from Britain to Syria to fight jihad (extremists who, unless they are killed, will presumably want to return to Britain at some point).
There is no keeping out of Syria and had we grasped the point earlier on we might now be dealing with a strong or even triumphant Free Syrian Army rather than a murderous gangster state engaged in a war to the finish with an assortment of jihadist fanatics. One reason the situation in Syria has deteriorated to the extent that it has is because the governments of Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have had fewer scruples about backing those in Syria whose interests align with their own. Because the west has provided only tepid support to the relatively democratic FSA the latter now lags behind the Islamist Islamic Front in terms of recruits as well as the arms it has access to. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that this was inevitable. As Michael Weiss, a columnist for the Middle Eastern NOW website, has put it, ‘A salafi super-militia would never have been necessary had … western officials fully backed the more moderate FSA when it was a going concern and not a laughingstock.’
Not only has 36 months of ‘diplomacy’ left more than 100,000 dead and over three million displaced, it has also failed any sort of ‘realpolitik’ test so beloved by the ‘ignorers’ and isolationists; for an outcome amenable to western interests looks significantly less likely today than it did three years ago. Syria is now a damage-limitation exercise, and the impact of western inertia will likely be felt beyond the borders of Syria. Assad crossed Barack Obama’s red line with complete impunity. Iran’s mullahs will presumably now assume that the crossing of such lines is inconsequential – even in the case of nuclear weapons.
One option the Americans have (not including the continued acquiescence in Assad’s genocide) is a wholesale strategy to supply and train well-vetted opposition militias and to back them with air support. Actions, in other words, that would hasten the end of Assad and his odious crime family.
What is clear is that Britain will play no further part in resolving the conflict in Syria. If opinion polls are anything to go by then Labour’s decision to use the Commons vote to squash military intervention was wildly popular, as is the meanness of the government’s policy towards Syrian refugees. The mistake would be to assume that the two developments are unrelated. After all, it is Nigel Farage who is in the ascendant and not the Peace Pledge Union.
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James Bloodworth is a contributing editor to Progress and editor of Left Foot Forward
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Nigel Farage in the ascendant [?] or no the People of the United Kingdom [with or without Scotland makes no difference] shall decide next May 7 2015 whether they want Ukip to have an MP at Westminster – politicians come and go – people power is here to stay.
I vote on the liberal side of the LABOUR party and its core values are inviolate down the ages when Moses was a lad, not invented by any one politician in the 1940s.
Extremism in any form is dangerous to the whole of humankind, not just Syria and Ukraine. Politicians are human and speak on behalf of the electorate, that is the way it is.
You didn’t get your war in Syria. Get over it.
There’s no war in Syria?
Shhhh! .. he thinks as long as the West isn’t involved it doesn’t matter and probably isn’t really a war. Yeah I know – probably something to do with Chomsky!
Yes there was a perfectly valid Socialist, Internationalist case of these poor people are being slaughtered and we have the ability to intervene and stop it and so we should. Similar cases could be made over Congo or Darfur or Somalia etc.
Part of the reason that case was not made was that we on our own simply do not have the ability to intervene and stop it anymore, and realistically have not had it since the 40’s or 50’s.
The united ‘West’ realistically does have that ability but whether it was in August or the year before the West was not united and post Iraq and Afghanistan was not proposing to intervene, overthrow Assad and midwives the development of a democratic Syria respecting the rights of minorities and excluding the wilder extremists. The west or at least those parts that considered intervention at all were proposing a few air strikes in response to some media coverage which suggested ‘something must be done’.
The unpopular but pragmatic position is now that if you want to stop the killing someone has to win and at present that is more likely to be Assad so the quicker he wins and we are back to the position of an unpopular dictatorship rather than a bloody civil war the better.
The other unpopular position which may be right is that of Putin, secular dictatorship is better than populist Islamic extremist so back Assad against Muslim brotherhood and ISIS and AQ. That was exactly the Blair position in 2001-at least 2007.
The west has made the assumption that Assad would easily fall in response to popular demonstrations, once it was clear most of his armed forces were not splitting and defecting to the opposition it is equally clear he has significant local support. The FSA in reality fell apart quickly and it would now be too late short of massive intervention to revive that idea.
The war is now Assad v AQ and ISIS and Assad is winning and in that forced choice we have to back Assad or no one. The middle way, third way FSA will allow us to have a nice democratic Syria is at this point a mirage.
contra Dan smith, Putin is very popular with a large n umber of people inthe former Soviet Union, and I wonder whether the punters in say Panama, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Algeria and Egypt regard this stroke of his with as much distaste as Jim (*** Cobbett is a naughty chap isn’t he for changing Jim’s surname…) Egypt is particular where the demigod Blair has certainly shown he knows the needs of the Egyptian people better than they themselves…like the Palestinians and Iraqis and Afghans….Vive the dictator Sisi…. btw Jim’s ‘?no war in Syria?’ gibe reveals his shallowness – Jim’s wars are safe wars conducted by preferably drones from a very safe distance by people who will never have to live with the consequences of Blairite grandstanding…not street fighting against an uncertain dictatorship or against Islamists whose antics make even Al Qaeda blanch…. The soldier’s covenant seems not to include UK governments eschewing vainglorious imperialism…. The “Third Force” always had as much credibiilty as the “Third Way”… face it, Blairism is dying, and a stake through its heart is the best quietus….
Hilaire Belloc wrote in about 1915:
Pale Ebernezer thought it wrong to fight
But Roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.
Bloodworthiness in a couplet….
The disinclination of the public to want Britain to intervene militarily in the Crimea has more to do with the ‘Ukipification’ of British politics than it does with any outbreak of flower power or anti-war sentiment, if I may apply James Bloodthirsty’s sentiments..
We do not stay out of Crimea because, as the Stop the War Coalition would have it, the public favours good over bad, socialism over imperialism, or peace over war. We stayed out because, as the American writer Conor Friedersdorf approvingly suggested in the Atlantic magazine (albeit in an American context), ‘Non-intervention would pose no threat to us.’
Latvians who fought in the local unit of Nazi Germany’s Waffen SS held their annual parade on Sunday, an event which the government feared could raise tensions with Russia (Reuters 18 March).
I hope James Bloodthirsty is ready with his skillet and his trusty 303 Lee Enfield to sail to Crimea and help liberate the Crimeans from the Russian yoke (like the International Brigade, so often invoked). Latvia is in the EU so we can be proud of our good fellow citizens with their cry of Die Fahne hoch…and the bit about how good it is that Jewish blood spurts from our blades….Or is he, as usual. readier to send British squaddies in harm’s way to indulge his fantasy of world domination… After all, Bashir Assad offered and achieved the end of the one-party monopoly of the Ba’ath, and the dreadful events in Syria are a civil war, not a breach of “international law” a law so well respected by the Angol-US cxlique re Iraq, – found the weapons of mass destruction yet, Jim?N S Khruschev’s annexing a part of the RSFSR to a foreign country (Ukraine had a seat at the United Natins from the very beginning, so was a foreign country). Yes, UKIP are certainly hateful in wanting to leave the stamping ground of the Waffen SS, oh no not the Allgemeine SS no safe genocide for Himmler’s Peace Corps….the NICE SS out in the field, as many Ukrainian families can remember…especially the admirers of Stepan Bandera commemorated by a large statue over the unremembered bodies of 15,000 Jews…How soon until statues are raised to celebrate Petlyura, righteouslly assassinated in Switzerland by Shlomo Schwartzbard, who handed himself to the police to make a speech from the dock…?
So Jim’s war will restore the Crimea to Ukraine, will it? Will the sanctions be imposed on the entire membership of the Russian Duma, as they have demanded in their ‘saintly’ fashion? Why not sanction the entire body of yes voters in the referendum? Btw, the referendum does not seem to have been polluted by the arbitrary enfranchising for this sole purpose a section of the population thought to have a bigger vested interest in the outcome, as is the case in Salmond’s gerrymander: the UK has no right to pronounce on the Crimean referendum in view of this gross scandal – compounded by the discriminatory exclusion of Scots resident elsewhere in the UK, a case currently fast-tracked to the Supreme court. BTW at least one foreign observer has praised the professionalism of the Crimean referendum.Polish MP Mateusz Piskorski told RT.RT: You were an observer at this referendum voting, can you tell us what you have witnessed during the voting session?
Mateusz Piskorski: The referendum has been organized professionally, considering there was very little time for all the institutions to prepare, all the staff for polling stations, for electoral commission.
Everything went like in a professionally prepared country with professionally prepared staff. And this is an interesting point. This indicates that Crimea has already created its own state institutions which are able to work even in such extraordinary conditions, even having such a short time preparing such a huge project – all-national referendum.
So when it comes to the whole evaluation of the referendum, I would like to stress not only that it was very professional but very calm, with all guarantees of safety at polling stations but without too much exposure of police presence at the polling stations, and so on. So very peaceful, calm.
It was organized according not only to the law of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea but also according to most basic, most important international standards.
So what are the war aims (sanctions are a measure of war) of the ‘international community’ – aka the NATO clique plus at time of writing Japan? (China’s abstention is actually a constructive vote against the sanctions measure as the standing orders to the “Security” council require unanimity of the five permanent members, not merely a nem con vote….) the rest of the world may marvel at the gross hypocrisy of Hague, who has reduced Libya to a sordid shambles even worse than Iraq – in the name of humanitarian intervention, just like Jim’s slogan for his world-historical ambitions….and of Kerry who says unprovoked aggression is just SO un-21 Century…!!
The large vote for adhering to Russia may reflect distaste for the cavortings in Kiev, not merely the national sentiment of Russophones in Crimea (and mainland Ukraine also). they have clocked the oppression of Russophones born in the Baltics, whose language has been relegated to a purely private indulgence… Salmond btw has promised to accord official status to a language third or fourth in Scotland (Gaelic ranks below Gujerati and Punjabi and perhaps Urdu in terms of first-language speakers).
Yes nonaggression poses no threat to us, and a good thing too. And no threat even to the Svoboda chauvinists, except in terms of thwarted ambitions to “purify” Ukraine.
So as LLoyd George said of himself “they have caught the little bugger telling the truth for once”, the thug Putin has a democratic case, the current government in Ukraine is based on force, mob rule, swindling re the EU’s pact between the insurgents and Yanukovych and has no legitimacy outside Ukrainophone Ukraine (and perhaps not that much within it). Guarantees of the territorial integrity of Ukraine unless a high proportion of citizens in contiguous areas enjoying high local self-rule (regions, counties, oblasti, guberniyii….) demand a referendum…
As Bruce Kent put it well, why was Serbia subjected to illegal and genocidal attacks for repressing the racist terrorists in the UCK (Kosovo “Liberation” Army – who murdered many Kosovars for supporting peace with local Serbs) while Ukraine is rewarded for trying to hang on to an area it owned only through a dictator’s 1954 whim….