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”
SebJohn
“I’m convinced that R2P made the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo worse than they otherwise would have been”
Well it couldn’t of, since R2P didn’t become a UN norm until 2005. The idea of creating a R2P norm didn’t even come up until the latter half of the 90’s, as a result of the wars in Bosnia and Rwanda.
Furthermore, most of the various conspiracy theories that the Bosnian army shelled themselves (like the Markale massacres) has been roundly debunked in the ICTY trials against the VRS commanders in Sarajevo, Stanislav Galic and Dragomir Milosevic. Those who say otherwise haven’t been keeping up with the material, or have a idealogical motivation not to.
Brownie
In hindsight the Bosnian Wars were a mistake
For whom? Not the Bosnians.
F. Lopez
Although R2P may not have been a formal UN doctrine during the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts, the concept of R2P certainly did exist. During those conflicts there was significant opinion that Western democracies had a responsibility to protect and to intervene in order to prevent and punish war crimes.
It is interesting that you mention the ICTY Galic judgment because it confirms exactly the point I’m making. I would direct your attention to paragraps 211 and 589 of that judgment.
According to the Galic trial chamber, “Evidence to the effect that ABiH forces attacked their own civilians was adduced at trial. UN representatives stationed in Sarajevo testified that, during the conflict, information had been gathered indicating that elements sympathetic or belonging to the ABiH may have shelled on occasions the Muslim population of Sarajevo. More generally, such elements would have engaged in behaviour objectively putting civilians in ABiH-controlled territory at risk in order to draw international sympathy.”
I would also point out that the question of whether Srebrenica was deliberately sacrificed is not a question that the ICTY trial chambers have dealt with. The OTP has never issued an indictment for that and so the judges are precluded from adjudicating the issue.
I am aware that the ICTY’s Outreach office has made some statements attacking the documentary “Srebrenica A Town Betrayed,” but that’s not the same thing as a formal judgment. The ICTY outreach office has no legal authority at all. There is no ICTY judgment that deals with this issue.
Although there is no judgment, I can point to is the testimony of Gen. Sefer Halilovic (former commanding officer of the ABiH) at the ICTY Krstic trial. He said, “the command of the 2nd Corps and the General Staff knew when the operation on Srebrenica started, but from a series of testimonies, the people who were in Srebrenica, both from military and political structures, we can clearly see that they asked for help, both of the command of the 2nd Corps and the command of the General Staff and President Izetbegovic, but that they did not receive that assistance. To answer your question whether they had the power and materiel to help, to come to the help of Srebrenica, I think that they did. First of all, what was needed was, before the Sarajevo operation, to ensure Srebrenica and Zepa, to protect it, and they had enough manpower and enough materiel to do so – that is my opinion – and not to unleash the Sarajevo operation and to leave Srebrenica and Zepa to fend for themselves.”
I could also point to the UN Secretary General’s 1999 report on the fall of Srebrenica which says on page 31 that “Representatives of the Bosniac community gathered in Sarajevo on 28 and 29 September [1993] to vote on the [Invincible] peace package. A delegation of Bosniacs from Srebrenica was transported to Sarajevoby UNPROFOR helicopter to participate in the debate. Prior to the meeting, the delegation met in private with President Izetbegovic, who told them that there were Serb proposals to exchange Srebrenica and Zepa for territories around Sarajevo. The delegation opposed the idea, and the subject was not discussed further. Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that President Izetbegovic also told them he had learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could only occur if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people. President Izetbegovic has flatly denied making such a statement.”
On the one hand you have officials from Srebrenica who survived the massacre who say that Izetbegovic suggested sacrificing the enclave in order to bring about a NATO intervention, and then you have the former commander of the Bosnian Army who says Srebrenica’s pleas for help fell on deaf ears in Sarajevo even though they had the manpower and the material to help.
Contrary to what you say, this issue has never been “thoroughly investigated and disproven” by the ICTY. There has been no indictment from the OTP, and so there have been no findings of fact by the chambers.
The fact that the ICTY doesn’t investigate something doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. There is clearly evidence that it did.
F. Lopez
The war was a mistake for the Bosniaks too. If they had just stuck with the Lisbon Agreement that they agreed to before the war, then they would have gotten almost exactly what they got in Dayton, but there wouldn’t have been a war and thousands of lives could have been saved. They fought a war to get what they could have gotten at a negotiating table the whole time.
SebJohn
Ideas about humanitarian intervention and genocide prevention existed, but as of 1994-95, what would later become the UN-norm R2P had not been thought of. Nor was there “significant opinion that Western democracies had a responsibility to protect and to intervene in order to prevent and punish war crimes”, at least if one is to trust contemporary opinion polls.
The paragraph from the Galic judgment seem to be out of context, and exaggerated. The judgment goes on to say that “only a minimal fraction of attacks on civilians could be reasonably attributed to such conduct, which would be, in any case, difficult to carry out or keep secret for long.” Thereby disproving your points, which implied a policy of the Bosnian government to target or endanger it’s own populace, rather than a extremely limited number of rouge elements within or sympathetic to ABiH.
As to the matter of Srebrenica, ICTY did respond to the Norwegian documentary “Srebrenica: A Town Betrayed” which contains basically the entire theory about a sacrifice of Srebrenica, and stated that much of what the documentary alleges have been disproven in previous trials regarding the Srebrenica massacre. The Helsinki committee also criticised the film for lacking any concrete evidence or documentation for the allegations that the town was purposefully sacrificed.