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”
F. Lopez
Who else, besides the UN or the Serbs, would know if the Bosnians were shelling their own people?
Of course Halilovic isn’t a disinterested party. He was the commanding officer of the Bosnian Army. The Bosnian Government, who Marijana would have you believe was incapable of attacking its own people, killed his wife and his brother-in-law in a botched attempt to assassinate him. They fired a rocket at his apartment and they even planted fragments from a Serbian rocket to make it look like the Serbs had done it.
Edin Garaplija, a Bosniak, was the AID agent tasked with investigating the activities of “Seve,” a secret unit of the Bosnian MUP that operated in Sarajevo during the war. In addition to uncovering evidence that Seve was responsible for the attempt to assassinate Halilovic. He also learned that snipers from Seve shot and killed French UN Peacekeepers that were putting up protective planking to shield Bosniak civilians from Serbian snipers.
Unfortunately, Garaplija’s investigation was stopped and he was arrested, held in solitary confinement, and prosecuted on trumped-up charges by the Bosnian Government, who obviously wanted to cover-up this sort of information. Clearly, Bakir Izetbegovic has an interest in covering-up the crimes of his father.
This isn’t all speculation coming from the UN either — although there was plenty of suspicion. There are also explicit and undeniable examples.
Richard Gray (chief operations officer for UNMOs in Sarajevo) recounts an explicit example from July 17, 1992 when 10 civilians were killed/wounded in the vicinity of the BH Presidency building during a visit by the then British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. Col. Gray was standing right there and was an eyewitness to the mortars exploding. He was only 200 meters away. He heard the charge from the mortars being fired and then almost immediately there was the impact. He also noticed that the Bosnian soldiers in the area took cover just before the attack took place. The mortars could only have been fired from the Bosnian side.
Clearly, on this occasion, the Bosnians staged a “Serbian” mortar attack against their own people in order to impress Douglas Hurd and obtain foreign intervention against the Serbs.
Unfortunately, in most cases, there wasn’t an UNMO standing 200 meters away from every mortar impact to be able to report what happened. In fact the UN almost never investigated shelling incidents. The investigations in Sarajevo were almost always done by the Bosnians themselves, and obviously they’re not going to admit to this behavior. Of course their investigation is going to find the Serbs responsible.
I would also point out that the Kosevo Hospital was not on the front lines. It was well inside of Bosnian territory. They had no excuse whatsoever to be firing mortars from the grounds of the hospital. There was no military need for that. The only reason they would have done that was to draw retaliatory Serbian fire against the Hospital.
F. Lopez
The Carrington plan called for “Sovereign and independent republics with international personality for those that wish it.” That was sec. 1.1(a) of the plan. That’s the first thing on the list. It effectively abolished Yugoslavia.
Of course Milosevic rejected it, no Serbian leader could have accepted that in light of the genocide that Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia had been subjected to only 46 years prior when the territory of those two republics formed the Independent State of Croatia.
Marijana
So, in other words, because of things which happened almost half a century before in a totally different context by totally different actors, makes sense to me (as if Serbs are the only people in the Balkans to have experienced persecution anyway…). Yet Milosevic had already declared in March 1991 that Yugoslavia no longer existed. The plan would have preserved Yugoslavia as a confederation of sovereign states with autonomy for national minorities. Milosevic rejected it not because of what had happened 45 years earlier, but, at least in part because he feared it implied autonomy for the Albanians of Kosovo and the Muslims in Serbia’s Sanjak region (whose claim to self-determination under IL was argubly better than Croatian or Bosnian Serbs). Carrington consequently modified the plan: Croatia would be denied any
military presence whatsoever in the so-called ‘Krajina’ region while Serbia would be given a completely free hand to suppress the Kosovo Albanians and Sanjak Muslims. Milosevic nevertheless continued to unilaterally reject the Carrington Plan because he would not be allowed to annex any areas from Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in the belief that he would get a better deal.
Marijana
Most of this doesn’t really go beyond what we discussed or is obfuscatory as to my actual point, so I’ll just point ouf a few things. It’s off topic anyway, so I suppose we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
-The UN never formally accused the Bosnian government of shelling its own civilians. As I mentioned, there were informal attempts by some UN officials to implicate the Bosnian government in self-shelling, although these allegations remain wholly unsubstantiated, or in some cases have been completely discredited.
– The assassination attempt on Halilovic (which was undoubtedly carried out by elements of the Bosnian MUP) was part of a power struggle within the army and the SDA. It had nothing to do with wanting to provoke western intervention.
– It’s certainly possible and in fact probable that the ARBiH attacked UN peacekeepers on occasion. Such things are hardly uncommon in the chaos of war. However, they were hardly the only ones to do this; the VRS for example on numerous occasions took UN peacekeepers hostage or used them as human shields.
– The Bosnians were not the only ones to investigate the shellings, as the ICTY reports make clear. I am not aware of any evidence that these investigations were improper, if you have any (reliable) sources which say that they were please share it. It was the UN for example whose official investigation showed the shell which caused the second Markale massacre was fired from Serb held positions.
– Kosevo hospital was near the front lines in the North east. It should be remembered though that Bosnian held territory was only 2 miles deep, so pretty much anywhere was near the front line.
F. Lopez
Marijana,
If you think I’m suggesting that the Serbs are completely innocent in this, I’m not. The fact that the Bosniaks shelled their own people and exacerbated the suffering of their own people doesn’t let the Serbs off the hook for what they did.
Col. Gray testified about two incidents. He was absolutely 100% certain that the Bosniaks attacked their own people on the July 17th incident outside of the presidency building. Here’s what he said when he testified at the ICTY: “The honour guard of the Bosnian police moved away from the impact area prior to the mortar bombs landing. I had been talking to two ABiH officers on the front steps and they looked at their watch and they moved inside the Presidency building and closed the door behind them, leaving me standing by myself on the front steps and then the mortar bombs landed because the people who fired them had stuck to the original timings that they’d been told to fire those mortar bombs. And an ambulance appeared on the scene almost immediately and there were camera crews on the scene almost immediately to record the poor, wounded, and dead people. And that one incident proved beyond all possible doubt that the Presidency were killing their own people for the sake of the media, and I stand by that.” The prosecutor didn’t even question him about that incident.
The other incident was when a group of teenagers were struck by a mortar outside of the PTT building as Canadian UN soldiers were giving them candy. That was the incident the prosecution cross-examined him about. The UN wasn’t certain which side had fired that shell because the ballistics report said it could have come from either side of the front lines, but he suspected that the Bosniaks had done it because it was such a direct hit and there was no line of sight to the Serbian side, and so the Serbs wouldn’t have been able to see those kids to target them like that. That was the incident that he wasn’t completely sure about, but he was sure about the other incident.
And I’m not just pointing to the incident where the French UN soldiers were targeted for the simple sake of saying that the Bosniaks attacked the UN. They didn’t just attack the UN for no reason. They attacked the UN while the UN was trying to put up protective planking that would protect the civilians in Sarajevo from sniper fire, and the only conclusion you can draw from that was that the Bosnian government wanted the population of Sarajevo to be exposed to sniper fire.
They did other things too, they sabotaged repairs to the electrical grid and the municipal waterworks so that the people of Sarajevo would be forced to go without water and electricity — all of this contributed to the suffering of the people trapped in the city.
You know that the SDA was (and still is) corrupt. You know that they used guys like Caco and Celo, and that guys like that were two-bit thugs that weren’t above killing Serbs or Bosniaks. The SDA certainly had people at its disposal who were immoral enough to slaughter their own people.
One thing I can point to that causes me to question the impartiality of investigations conducted by the Bosniak side is evidence that Bosniak investigators were subjected to death threats if they reached the wrong conclusion. Berko Zecevic testified during the Karadzic trial that he got death threats, and attempts were even made on his life, because he identified one *potential* firing position for one shelling incident that was in ABiH territory. He said, “this threat was made during the war. It is well known who was supposed to cut my throat. He made three attempts to accost me, but he failed. He was supposed to kill me with a knife. Everybody knows the name of that person and I said on many occasions that although I received threats nobody wanted to undertake any action. One of the reasons why I resented coming here to testify was that I was provided with absolutely no protection by any quarter as a witness, either here or in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”
You’ve got these Bosniak investigators operating under conditions where their lives are threatened if they reach a politically inconvenient conclusion. If they even dared to say that the shell or the sniper fire came from anywhere other than Serb-held territory that’s what they had to expect. Zecevic didn’t even say that the ABiH had even done it, only that it could have maybe done it, and what he got in return was threats that people would slash his throat followed up by three actual attempts to attack him.
But at the end of the day, the point that I’m making here is that the whole concept of R2P has unintended consequences. R2P gives belligerents an incentive to stage atrocities against their own people and to put their civilian population in harms way so that they can attain the benefit of foreign military intervention. The Izetbegovic regime in Bosnia wasn’t just behaving like this to be mean. They had a specific goal in mind, and the goal was to get NATO to bomb the Serbs.