Future historians studying Britain’s decline and retreat from global responsibility and relevance may view Miliband as a pivotal figure.
We live in small-minded, mean-spirited times. More than two years into the Syrian civil war, with 100,000 dead and Iran, Russia and Hezbollah openly supporting Assad’s murderous campaign, Britain’s parliament has narrowly voted to reject Cameron’s watered-down parliamentary motion for intervention.
This motion would not have authorized military action; merely noted that a ‘strong humanitarian response is required from the international community and that this may, if necessary, require military action that is legal, proportionate and focused on saving lives by preventing and deterring further use of Syria’s chemical weapons.’
Cameron would still have needed a second parliamentary vote before he could have authorised the use of force.
Parliament’s rejection of even this feeble step sends a clear message to Assad that he can go on killing without fear of British reaction.
The strength of isolationist, Little Englander feeling in Britain has been demonstrated. Cameron was defeated by the same uncontrollable ‘swivel-eyed loons’ of the Tory backbenches and grassroots who tried to sabotage gay marriage and want to drag Britain out the EU. It was perhaps too much to expect a parliament that is so savagely assaulting the livelihoods of poorer and more vulnerable Britons to care much about foreigners, particularly Muslim foreigners.
Following the Woolwich murder, many opponents of intervention in Syria seemed to think the Free Syrian Army was equivalent to Lee Rigby’s jihadist killers. Now, however, anti-interventionists are focusing less on essentialising Muslims and more on the supposed precedent of Iraq. Iraq is the new Vietnam – the tired exemplar of a wrong-headed war wheeled out every time by the anti-interventionists. They ignore the relatively successful campaigns of the past three decades – Kuwait, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Libya – focusing instead on the one where we were apparently tricked into going to war with bogus claims about ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’.
The phoney parallel between Syria and Iraq was strengthened by Obama’s and Cameron’s unfortunate focus on Assad’s chemical-weapons use as the ‘red line’ whose crossing would trigger intervention, recalling Iraq’s alleged WMD.
Yet it is unclear why Assad’s chemical-weapons massacre was different from his prior massacres with conventional arms. After all, Rwanda’s Hutu extremists murdered many more people much more quickly using machetes. Cameron has paid for the weak US president’s choice of a ‘red line’ that he thought he could safely draw to avoid intervening without appearing a total surrender-monkey. If Obama has to fight without Britain, it will be his own fault.
Intervention is opposed by the usual suspects from the fringes. The BNP’s Nick Griffin is apparently visiting Syria; a BNP spokesman says ‘Once again Nick Griffin is putting his life on the line to stop the Cameron regime from committing war crimes in the name of the British people.’
According to George Galloway, ‘If there has been a use of chemical weapons it was al-Qaeda that used the chemical weapons – who gave al-Qaeda the chemical weapons? Here’s my theory, Israel gave them the chemical weapons.’
In the Daily Express, Ukip’s Nigel Farage begins with a reference to Iraq and WMD before stating ‘Ukip has been consistent in its opposition to military intervention in foreign wars over the last decade and this latest debate on Syria is no different.’
And Labour’s Diane Abbott says: ‘I voted against the Iraq War. At the moment, I can’t see anything that would make me vote for intervention in Syria.’
Yet the distinction between the fringes and the mainstream is blurring. In the Daily Telegraph, Peter Oborne writes of a ‘haunting’ parallel with Iraq, before claiming that ‘the Stop the War Coalition… has consistently shown far more mature judgment on these great issues of war and peace than Downing Street, the White House or the CIA.’ This praise from one of the more intelligent Conservative columnists for the bone-headed dinosaurs of the anti-democratic left is a sign of the times.
Yet Syria is not Iraq. Bush wanted not merely to attack but to occupy Iraq and overthrow its regime, despite bitter opposition from many of the US’s allies. The contrast with Obama’s foot-dragging over Syria could not be greater. A US occupation of Syria is not in the cards; merely limited strikes against selected targets. International support for action is not exactly overwhelming, but there is nothing like the opposition that Bush faced. Muslims themselves are divided over the question.
Should it occur, US intervention in Syria is, at most, likely to follow the pattern of Kosovo and Libya. In neither conflict was a single Western soldier killed in combat, and both ended more successfully than the sceptics predicted.
As the architect of Cameron’s parliamentary defeat, Miliband must know that Syria is not Iraq. He has again shown himself to be a narrowly calculating career politician rather than a statesman concerned with the national interest. He has distanced Labour from the legacy of Iraq by sabotaging a completely different intervention, thereby simultaneously appeasing his own left-wing and appealing to the conservative Little Englander constituency.
But it will make him responsible for the resulting damage to the special relationship with the US and to Britain’s global credibility, as well as for Assad’s ongoing extermination of Syria’s people, should Washington now follow Britain and pull back. Tory eurosceptics may want Britain to become an inward-looking geopolitical irrelevance like Norway or Switzerland, but we are still a permanent UN Security Council member and nuclear power, signed up to R2P.
Future historians studying Britain’s decline and retreat from global responsibility and relevance may view Miliband as a pivotal figure.
73 Responses to “Parliament has sent a clear message to Assad: he can go on killing without fear of British reaction”
henrytinsley
I wonder why our political elites claim to be moved and angered by deaths caused by chemical weapons, as if being killed by shrapnel is somehow nice. Of course there’s a legal issue, but governments that slaughter thousands of their citizens break any number of international laws and conventions. And why is it these same elites seem curiously uninterested in the millions who have died in places like Sudan and Congo, to say nothing of North Korea?
NickD
No need to be condescending – perhaps you didn’t intend the analogy, but it seemed reasonable to infer that you were making one from context. As it does from the latter part of your last comment – you obviously seem to think there is a relevant connection between volunteers going off to fight in defense of an imperiled democracy and states launching strikes against the Assad regime, or why bring up the former? Anyway, analogy or not, the way you frame the apparent contradiction between positions creates it, i.m.o. – I would argue that many IB-supporting leftists recoil at the thought of bombing Assad (and whoever else happens to be in the way), given the recent & historical record of the states involved (not to mention the character of the particular governments in power) but care very much about confronting the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria (and certainly don’t subscribe to a “not my problem” sort of conservatism) through multilateral instruments, supporting the creation of a viable alternative to the regime, channeling arms to (selected) factions among the rebel groups (which should have happened before) and providing logistical support. Those who wish to rehabilitate a humanitarian intervention argument that has been almost totally discredited by Iraq, in the eyes of the public – for quite understandable reasons, as the author of the above post superciliously discounts – have their work cut out. Blunt, rhetorical and dismissive positing of either / or choices doesn’t seem helpful.
F. Lopez
I think that the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo show that the concept of R2P is flawed and has unintended consequences.
In Kosovo, the only war crime that the Serbian regime was ever accused of by the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague that pre-dated the 1999 NATO bombing campaign was a massacre in the village of Racak. Every other war crime that the Tribunal charged the Serbs with in Kosovo happened after the NATO bombing was underway.
The tribunal attempted to prosecute Slobodan Milosevic for the Racak massacre, but he died before a verdict could be reached. However, it is important to note that he brought forward a lot of evidence indicating that the supposed massacre was a hoax. The victims were shown to have gun powder residue on their hands from firing weapons, and the wounds that they sustained were not consistent with what you would expect in a mass execution. What had happened was that the Kosovo Liberation Army had taken it’s troops that had been killed in action and staged their corpses to make it look like there had been a massacre in order to place blame on the Serbs and trigger Western intervention in Kosovo — and the trick worked.
War crimes weren’t a problem in Kosovo until NATO started bombing. NATO was bombing the Serbs on behalf of the Albanians in Kosovo, and that provoked a Serbian backlash against the Albanians, which then provoked an Albanian backlash against Serbs who remained in Kosovo after Serbian troops were expelled from the territory. Kosovo is hardly a shining example of success. It’s a good example of why we should stay out of this kind of thing. We took a bad situation and we made it worse.
Although Milosevic’s death deprived us of a final verdict on what happened in Racak, it is telling that the Prosecutors dropped the charges for Racak against other Serbian defendants, which suggests to me that the Prosecution realized that it couldn’t prove that the Serbs were responsible.
Not only does R2P give belligerents an incentive to fabricate evidence and stage-manage fake war crimes like Racak, it also causes them to behave in ways that place their own civilian population in greater danger.
In Sarajevo, the Bosnian Army would open fire at the Bosnian-Serbs from civilian areas like the Kosevo Hospital so that when the Serbs returned fire they would hit the hospital and the World would condemn the Serbs for shelling the biggest civilian medical facility in all of Bosnia.
There were also instances in Sarajevo where the Bosnian Army would shell its own territory in order to make it look like they were being shelled by the Serbs — this was especially true in the vicinity of the Bosnian Presidency building when international officials were present.
The Bosnian Government also did its best to exacerbate the suffering of their own civilian population. They deliberately sabotaged the repair of water lines and the electrical grid in Sarajevo to make the situation in the city harder on the civilian population.
In Srebrenica the Bosnian Government blocked humanitarian aid from reaching the refugees that had been expelled from the enclave. You can find leaked cables on Wikileaks where the IOM and the UN are reporting this to the State Dept.
The Bosnian Government also stood by and allowed atrocities to happen when it had the means to prevent or greatly reduce their severity. They could have carried out diversionary attacks on the Drina Corps of the Bosnian-Serb Army that could have prevented the fall of Srebrenica, or at least greatly reduced the Serbs’ ability to capture Bosnian-Muslims trying to escape from the enclave. They could have saved thousands of lives, but instead they abandoned those people and left them to be slaughtered.
If it wasn’t for the idea of R2P, then the Bosnian Government wouldn’t have behaved this way. They deliberately placed their civilian population in harms way in order to provoke Western military intervention against the Bosnian-Serbs.
I’m not excusing what the Serbs did, but it didn’t help that their opposition was goading them into doing it — and failing that fabricating evidence against them.
If you set a “red line” and you tell faction “A” that you will bomb them if they cross that red line, then you give the opposing faction “B” an incentive to either provoke faction “A” into crossing that line, or to fabricate an incident to make it look like faction “A” crossed the line.
I’m convinced that R2P made the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo worse than they otherwise would have been, and there’s no reason to think that it won’t exacerbate the situation in Syria too.
R2P gives people a strong incentive to lie about war crimes, because if they are thought to be a victim then their warring faction can enjoy the benefit of a Western military strike against their opponent. The danger is similar to the little boy who cried wolf. Thanks to R2P, you can’t just trust people when they say that they’ve been victimized anymore.
Brownie
“you obviously seem to think there is a relevant connection between
volunteers going off to fight in defense of an imperiled democracy and
states launching strikes against the Assad regime”. I think many of the arguments presented by sections of the left today against intervention abroad could be used to intellectually preclude the possibility of support for the IBs in 1936. Yes, I do.
“I would argue that many IB-supporting leftists recoil at the thought of
bombing Assad…given the
recent & historical record of the states involved (not to mention the character of the particular governments in power)” To paraphrase Orwell, something can be right even if the US says it is right. And France – stalwart opponent of intervention in Iraq – has been in the vanguard of those calling for action on Syria. The “government in power” in the UK is a coalition that includes the only major party to oppose the Iraq war. This argument doesn’t stack up intellectually: intervening in Syria is right or it is wrong and a self-respecting progressive should care more about being on the right side of that debate rather than simply being determined to be on the opposite side to Washington.
I don’t need convincing that there are those opposed to any form of military action in Syria who are genuinely trouble by events there, but I’m afraid there are just too many sections of the left these days for whom I think this simply isn’t true; parts of the left epitomised by the likes of StWC who are more concerned about ‘not in my name’ than ‘do the right thing’.
” Those who wish to rehabilitate a humanitarian intervention argument
that has been almost totally discredited by Iraq, in the eyes of the
public – for quite understandable reasons, as the author of the above
post superciliously discounts – have their work cut out.”
I think this argument is overplayed; insofar as the British public has war fatigue, I’d argue Afghanistan has played the primary role there. Iraq isn’t yet Sweden, but ‘our boys’ haven’t been getting killed there in any numbers for years now. And to the extent that there are sections of the UK population who believe a lot of the prejudiced reporting over Iraq, that didn’t result in widespread opposition to the recent strikes against Libya, for example. We have a ‘this fight now’ issue as regards Syria and there is nothing particularly new about the prospect of conflict dividing the nation or indeed attracting majority opposition. It happened before Iraq and it will happen again in its aftermath.
Maybe if the next humanitarian intervention were to be led by a coalition that didn’t include the US or UK, the rehabilitation of humanitarian intervention would be easier to achieve? Good luck with that.
swatnan
The fact is you can’t trust anyone these days, not even your so called ‘friends’ and allies. We have to be ever more cautious about allegations and evidence of attrocities. War, any War is a nasty business, and propoganda machines on either side will be working to maximum. In hindsight the Bosnian Wars were a mistake, and only went on to undermine the stability of Europe, both economically and politically.