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”
NickD
“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.”
Two points. Firstly, you can support the principle of international military intervention (as I believe I did do, viz points on channelling arms to rebels etc, which you haven’t addressed yet) without condoning intervention per se. Secondly, yes to the above, but you only describe a certain type of leftist, imprisoned in dogma and ideology or the kind of outrage that can’t always find the most felicitous words and tends to latch onto ready-made explanations. The mode of argumentation you started the thread with (i.e. bad faith) is only likely to reinforce that, in my opinion. The Euston Manifesto / Harry’s Place-style argument is the complement to its opponents’, who represent a small (if vocal and significant) section of the left. There are ways to break the deadlock and find common ground.
“the likes of StWC who are more concerned about ‘not in my name’ than ‘do the right thing’.”
As I suggested, many people walked behind the STWC banner who found their politics trite or simplistic or downright wrong in certain respects. However crude / narcissistic etc etc their slogans were, or obnoxious some of their spokespeople, they were right about Iraq. It was brave of Oborne to point this out, because I’m sure he didn’t much like them either.
F. Lopez
Given the number of shells and projectiles that rained down on Sarajevo on a daily basis during the siege “a minimal fraction” of that could still be a meaningful number, and depending on which particular incidents were part of that “minimal fraction” they could have been politically significant incidents.
I am well aware of the ICTY’s response to “Srebrenica: A Town Betrayed,” and that response came from the Outreach Office, not from the trial chambers. The Outreach Office is the PR section of the Tribunal and it does not adjudicate fact.
The Outreach Office’s response did not cite any evidence or any particular judgment from the trial chambers that contradicted the content of the documentary, and the reason for that is because the trial chambers have not dealt with the question of whether Srebrenica was sacrificed by the Bosnian Government or not.
Regardless of how often they did it, the fact remains that the Bosnian Government occasionally shelled, sniped, and purposefully jeopardized the safety of its own civilian population. Their motive for doing that was to provoke NATO intervention against the Bosnian-Serbs.
You would have had to have been living under a rock in 1994-95 in order not to hear the chorus of people clamoring for Western intervention to put an end Serbian atrocities in Bosnia, and the Bosnian Government’s behavior was a clear attempt to exploit that sentiment.
That’s why I say that R2P has unintended consequences. It gives belligerents a reason to fabricate evidence of war crimes or to goad their opponent into perpetrating war crimes in order that they may attain the benefit of foreign military intervention on their behalf.
R2P creates an unfortunate situation where we have to be very skeptical about allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity because it gives belligerents a strong incentive to stage incidents and to lie about those issues.
Brownie
Firstly, you can support the principle of international military
intervention (as I believe I did do, viz points on channelling arms to
rebels etc, which you haven’t addressed yet) without condoning
intervention per se
Supply of arms to one side or the other engaged in a civil war, or to a revolutionary army looking to overthrow a dictator, is intervention; it’s just the kind that means we avoid the nasty business of repatriation of our soldiers’ bodies and all that other stuff that creates uneasiness ‘at home’. Which is not to say that it won’t sometimes be the correct, most effective action to take, just that I have a problem with the integrity of some non-interventionists who, when faced with the question of what to do, trot out this suggested policy as if it doesn’t contradict the arguments they deploy against direct intervention. For example, I had friends opposed to our intervention in Iraq who had no problems advocating a supply of arms to anti-Baathists in Iraq, as if this policy somehow didn’t infringe Iraq’s sovereign rights, could not be seen as a naked pursuit of the west’s own geopolitical interests, was guaranteed not to generate more death and misery in the long run, etc., etc.. In virtually all respects such action is materially indistinguishable from direct intervention save for the fact it is an easier sell to a sceptical and war fatigued public, and the ‘arm’s length’ ensures those with impeccable anti-imperialist credentials can look themselves in a mirror, comforted by the fact that we are doing *something* instead of nothing.
As I say, this is not to argue against the supply of arms in principle, but to argue for it renders one an interventionist whether this is acknowledged or not.
Related, did you see the poll in yesterday’s Sunday Times? Most Brits are in favour of military intervention in Syria…just not by us. There’s a job that needs doing, apparently, but it is someone else’s turn.
Secondly, yes to the above, but you only describe a certain type of leftist, imprisoned in dogma and ideology or the kind of outrage that can’t always find the most felicitous words and tends to latch onto ready-made explanations. The mode of argumentation you started the thread with (i.e. bad faith) is only likely to reinforce that, in my opinion.
To clarify, the thread was in full-swing by the time I joined and my contribution was prompted by a reading of the same tired, glib, simplistic anti-intervention analysis I saw here in response to Marko’s post. It wasn’t written in a vacuum and inviting other commenters (the majority of who I’m assuming would self-describe as on the left) to consider how they might have responded to the rise of Fascism in 30s Spain was not ‘bad faith’ but a crude test of the non-interventionist arguments I saw deployed.
The Euston Manifesto / Harry’s Place-style argument is the complement to its opponents’, who represent a small (if vocal and significant) section of the left. There are ways to break the deadlock and find common ground.
It’s interesting what you did there, The Euston Manifesto included signatories who were stalwart opponents of the war in Iraq and existed only because a group of us on the left thought there were certain principles that were worth asserting and defending, whatever disagreements we might have had about how best to combat tyranny at any given place and time. We’re talking about an era where those in the vanguard of ‘no war’ were Stalinists, Islamists and sundry other illiberals. It’s not HP’s fault that attendance at a StWC march meant having to listen to Galloway, German, and whatever reactionary, gay-hating, adulterer-stoning fruitloop they’d manage to get past immigration that week. It’s not HP’s fault that these were the people invited onto telly to give us the anti-war view and asked to write the anti-war columns. If HP hadn’t existed back then, you’d have needed to invent it. (BTW, I’m making a distinction between the ABL posters and the BTL commenters, many of whom are an embarrassment).
As I suggested, many people walked behind the STWC banner who found their politics trite or simplistic or downright wrong in certain respects. However crude / narcissistic etc etc their slogans were, or obnoxious some of their spokespeople, they were right about Iraq.
In Feb 2003 I think everyone is entitled to a pass. If you were still walking behind a StWC banner in 2005, you shouldn’t have been. There are plenty of honourable people who opposed war in Iraq who never did.
Brownie
The war was a mistake for the Bosniaks too.
All things considered, I don’t believe they agree with you on that.
NickD
“the integrity of some non-interventionists who, when faced with the
question of what to do, trot out this suggested policy as if it doesn’t
contradict the arguments they deploy against direct intervention.”
I agree that this happens. But I also feel the “direct”, aerial bombardment or boots-on-the-ground interventionists are too ready to trot out their solutions – solutions ossified in the rhetoric of Hitchens, Cohen et al circa 2002. MAH’s piece fits that exactly – it has the confident style, the heavy-handed moralizing, the superficial, predictable judgments (Iraq should have, if nothing else, bred a new humility of tone). It is virtually indistinguishable from something you would have read ten years ago, and can read every week on Harry’s Place. Hence, why I would argue that a comfortable pattern of complementary arguments has emerged in “leftist” discourse, the one bolstering the other. I’m not trying to be clever or retreat to meta-analysis, which is also a very comfortable spot to occupy, as you might rightly counter – I genuinely think this is a problem.
Phrases like “combat tyranny” are a case in point. They occlude reality, i.m.o, rather than illuminate it, and invite a kind of tit-for-tat exchange of hyperbolic insults. They set up the possibility of false equivalences by substituting for more insightful, concrete description of particulars the kind of heroic narratives that are too easily falsified (after that, anything goes) or, on the other hand, subsumed into the kind of orientalist fantasies I’m sure you’d find repellent.
If you think this is an indulgent or irrelevant postmodernish line of thought, look at the language now being used to describe the rebels in Syria by those who wish to demonize them in the interests of forestalling intervention. It sounds very similar to the kind of rhetoric deployed by supporters of the Iraq war to quash talk of a legitimate resistance. I find this fascinating, but not very surprising. You would probably find nothing more than mere hypocrisy or opportunism, but I would suggest that this is built into the dialectic.