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”
smileoftdecade
so the answer is, NO, you haven’t thought it through.
The parallel, however crude, was to make you think outside of “powerful Britain knows what its doing” inanity…
Marijana
You conveniently fail to mention the Carrington Agreement which Milosevic unilaterally rejected twice in November 1991, which would have preserved Yugoslavia and prevented any wars from breaking out at all, even though, unlike the absurd Lisbon ‘agreement’, it was in fact extremely favourable to him.
Marijana
For the record, the ‘evidence’ that the Bosnian army shelled its own civilains consists entirely of either unsubstantiated testinomy from UN officials (invariably people like Lewis Mackenzie or Philip Corwin) or Serb sources. Even Michael Rose himself, who was notoriously hostile to the Bosnian Government, acknowledged that there was no evidence that he had never seen any evidence that the Bosnian army had fired on its own people, and added that the shell fired in the first markale massacre was the same calibre as three indisputable Serb rounds which had killed nine people in a Sarajevo suburb in the previous week. Moreover, despite informal attempts to undermine the Sarajevo government with false allegations, the UN never pubically accused the Muslims of being behind the “politically significant incidents”. The UN report in fact squarly put the blame on Serb forces.
The Stanislav Galic, Dragomir Milosevic and Momcilo Perisic judgements all conclusively proved, using expert and eyewitness testimony and forensics, that the shells which caused the Markale massacres were fired from Serb-held positions. The allegations were also comprehensively examined by Professor Charles Ingrao of Purdue University, and Professor Darko Gavrilovic of the University of Banja Luka (and others) in the seminal Scholar’s Initiative. They note that ‘The only “evidence” of ARBiH culpability in the three attacks comes from Bosnian Serb sources’, and goes on to demonstrate the attempts by Serb sources to frame the Bosnians as having shelled themselves, which are easily rebutted. For those trusting souls that believe that UN officials do not tell lies; they show that in at least one case, a UN colonel did deliberately lie about the evidence in order to frame the Bosnian army. David Hartland, head of UN Civil Affairs in Sarajevo, is also on public record admitting to fabricating stories about the Bosnian Army shelling itself.
On the paragraph quoted from the Galic judgement, it actually stated that, based on the unsubstantiated testimony from the aforementioned UN representatives; “information had been gathered indicating that elements sympathetic or belonging to the ABiH MAY have shelled on occasions the Muslim population of Sarajevo.” (emphasis in original), but added that while it “could not be excluded” that this conduct occured (which is far from saying that it definately happened), it could only reasonably account for a “a minimal fraction of attacks on civilians”. Moreover, the Dragomir Milosevic judgement casts serious doubts on the allegations of self-shelling (paras 238, 795 and 433-438).
It’s certainly possible that the Bosnian government abandoned Srebrenica to its fate (though by no means certain, Halilovic is not exactly a disinterested party), it was after all an isolated enclave in the middle of VRS-occupied territory, does that really exculpate the VRS’s responsibility for the massacre? Of course not.
There is just one grain of truth in F. Lopez’s post, and that is that the ARBiH on occasion fired from the grounds of Kosevo hospital grounds. This was partly because the hospital itself was on the front lines. However, as the Galic judgement notes; by no means every time the hospital was shelled was it in response to ARBiH morter fire, The Bosnian Serb ‘parliament’ even went as far as advocating destroying the hospital. F. Lopez almost makes it sound as if the people defending Sarajevo were the attackers, and the Serb army besieging it were only retaliating. As the aforementioned, and more, judgements note, Kosevo hospital was merely one small part of the city, and by focusing on it you ignore the rest of the VRS campaign against Sarajevo, the nature of which can be adjuced by the Galic-Milosevic-Perisic judgements; it consisted of indiscriminate sniping and shelling against the civilian population, and was in the overwhelming majority of cases not provoked. The focus on Kosevo hospital while ignoring the rest of the campaign against Sarajevo can in my view be justifiably seen as an attempt to whitewash and obfuscate the nature of the VRS campaign against Sarajevo.
S&A
In case you haven’t noticed, there already is a war going on in Syria right now.
Just thought I’d remind you.
S&A
‘The implication at the time was that if you didn’t support the illegal war, you were tolerating the people who Saddam had killed’.
During the February 2003 march the STWC stewards confiscated any banners that criticised Saddam and the Baath regime.
I’d also add that the majority of ‘anti-war’ types also opposed the containment and sanctions policy of 1991-2003 as well. So by implication, your side supported a course of action which would have seen Saddam stay in power, and also rebuild not only his NBC programmes (which he was planning to do – as the Iraq Survey Group has showed) but also do whatever the hell he wanted to his own people. You would also have ended the no-fly zone over free Kurdistan, and handed its people back to the man who gave the world al-Anfal.
So in fact you were basically supporting Saddam. It’s just that you weren’t honest enough to admit it.