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
It’s been 18 years since the Srebrenica massacre, and the survivors are still upset by what happened, and I’ll bet that in another 28 years they’ll still be upset by it. If you survive something like that it defines you.
Surely you can understand that genocide isn’t something that people can just put behind them and forget about. 46 years isn’t a long time. In 1991 there would have been a lot of Serbs alive who could remember what things were like for them in the Independent State of Croatia.
It is easy to understand why Croatian and Bosnian Serbs didn’t want to give-up Yugoslavia and why they couldn’t go along with Croatian or Bosnian independence. I don’t blame them for a minute.
Were those people just supposed to trust Tudjman and Izetbegovic? Tudjman and Izetbegovic had both been arrested by the Yugoslav authorities for inciting nationalism and inter-ethnic hatred. Tudjman was a Holocaust denier and an anti-Semite and Izetbegovic was an Islamist and an admirer of the Iranian revolution. What were the Serbs supposed to think when they saw the HDZ and the SDA arriving on the scene?
Whether you like Milosevic or not, he didn’t have any obligation to accept the Carrington plan and I think he rejected it for good reason.
The SFRY Constitution required secession to be negotiated and unanimously agreed to, and I think that the borders should have been negotiated. The borders of the republics were completely arbitrary. They were, and still are, the product of a communist dictatorship led by Tito.
If the Croats and the Bosniaks wanted to leave Yugoslavia that was their business, but they didn’t have the right to take the Serbs with them and to deprive the Serbs of their right to continue living in a common state.
Even Carrigton has admitted that premature recognition of the break-away republics was disastrous and that it sewed the seeds of war. You really can’t pin this on Milosevic. At the end of the day he wasn’t the one trying to break away from Yugoslavia.
Guest
Frankly your argument is ridiculous. Citing the SFRJ constitution in 1991 is meaningless guff – the constitution was long a dead letter thanks in large part to constitutional violations by Milosevic. By saying that the border should have been “negotiated” what you really mean is that Serbia should have been allowed to annex large parts of Bosnia and Croatia. The claim that the intra-republican borders were “arbitrary” – i.e. similar to intra-colonial borders in Africa – and therefore could be redrawn at will is total nonsense; Bosnia’s borders were vitually the same as those with which it had had under the late Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empire (except for some territory that was given to Montenegro after WW2). Croatia’s borders were virtually the same as those it had had in 1918, with some Italian territory in Istria added after WW2. None of their territory had ever formed part of modern Serbia.
Indeed, it’s highly indicative that the “arbitrary communist borders” argument that Serbian nationalist apologists use is never applied to Serbia; Serbia was given Kosovo, despite its overwhelmingly non-Serb population and against the wishes of the majority of its inhabitants (the population of
Albanians in Kosovo is almost the same as the population of Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia combined), and Vojvodina, which was not historically Serbian did not have an ethnic-Serb majority before World War II. The Communists awarded the largest portion of the Muslim majority Sandjak region, as well as the regions of East Srijem and Bačka with their substantial Croat populations, to Serbia, even though the last two were again, not historically Serbian. The Communists, in fact, incorporated a similar number of Croats in Bosnia as Serbs in Croatia; many more Muslims in Serbia than Muslims in Croatia; and many more non-Serbs within Serbia than non-Croats in Croatia.
Before Tudjman and the HDZ were even elected (May 1990), Milosevic had already illegaly ended the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina while keeping their votes on the presidency to represent their non-existent local governments, crushed the Kosovo Albanians, overthrown the government of Montenegro, held a series of mass nationalist rallies to coerce the other Yugoslavs and the Federal authorities, attempted forcibly to recentralise the Federation, illegally imposed a trade embargo on Slovenia and driven the Slovene and Croatian Communists out of the 14th Extraordinary Congress of the League of Yugoslav Communists.
Already in March 1990 – before Tudjman and the HDZ were elected – the Serbian leadership had decided to prepare a new constitution that would be able to ‘”cover” the ‘new independent Serbian state’, as Borisav Jović, Serbia’s representative on the Yugoslav Federal Presidency, records in his diary.
Already by June 1990, before Izetbegović was elected (November 1990), Serbia had already decided to break up Yugoslavia and create a greater Serbia by ‘expelling’ Slovenia and Croatia from the federation and annexing parts of Croatia, as Borisav Jović recounts in his diaries, and Veljko Kadijević recounts in his memoirs. The planning for the war had begun by the summer of 1990 at the very earliest.
Before Izetbegović was elected, Serbia had already promulgated a new constitution in September 1990 which declared Serbia a sovereign and independent state with the right to its own foreign policy, It also empowered the president of Serbia (Milošević) to “command the armed forces in peace and in war and to order general and limited mobilization”, and gave Serbia the right to override federal law if it was against Serbia’s interests. These clauses were completely illegal under the federal constitution still allegedly in force.
So I’m afraid trying to date the beginning of the war to the election of Izetbegović is pretty ridiculous.
Quite apart from the fact that Izetbegović was not initially in favour of BiH’s independence from Yugoslavia, and actually lobbied against international recognition of Croatia. The SDA party actually initially supported a united, federal Yugoslavia. It was only much later, when it began to reluctantly move towards independence, in response to bullying and obstruction by Serbia and the JNA, as well as the activities of the SDS, which made Bosnia’s continued stay in the federation
untenable.
Quite apart from the fact that the claim that Izetbegović was an Islamic fundamentalist is a 2 decade old smear, based on a highly selective reading of his writings, which has little basis in reality. Although he was religious, and an Islamic scholar (with all
the spooky connotations that may invoke), in all his years as president of BiH, Izetbegović made no attempt to institute Islamic law, and Bosnia remained and remains a secular state.
I do find it interesting that you defend Milošević for rejecting the Carrington Agreement, even as Carrington bent over backwards to make concessions to him, yet you seem to think that Izetbegović was under a moral obligation to capitulate to Karadzic’s blackmail and threats of violence, and consent to the ethnic partition of his republic – even though Karadzic made it very clear that he saw the agreement merely as a “non-binding, but a useful starting point for the confederlization of Bosnia and the annexation of the Serb lands to Yugoslavia” (hardly the letter and spirit of the agreement).
Arch-appeaser Carrington’s argument is chronologically absurd. Without any real explanation how something that
occurred in mid-December 1991 could have killed something that had already died
six weeks earlier. On 5 November 1991, Milošević rejected the Carrington plan
for the second time, leading to the suspension of the EC Conference and to its de-facto death. At this time war had already been blasting forth on all cylinders for months and tens of thousands had already been killed.
Suada
Col. Gray’s allegations about self-shelling on both occassions are little more than a vague hunch and unsubtantiated conjecture.There’s also no evidence that the French peacekeepers you refer to were tageted by the Bosnian side (the area he was killed in, the strip between the presidency and the assembly, was a notorious Serbian sniping target). You also convientantly fail to mention that fact that the sniper barriers in that area were taken down in the first place by the UN at Serb insistance.
The allegations of self-shelling are very serious charges which require very serious evidence, especially given the implausability of the charge. It’s therefore highly indicative that even after 20 years, and despite the vast number of military observers, witnesses and investigations held in the city; the best that VRS apologists can come up with to support their allegations of self-shelling are a number of vague, unsubtantiated allegations – in most cases beyond the scope of the witnesses’ personal knowledge. Beside the lack of hard evidence, VRS apologists have also never explained the logic of the allegations; such a strategy on the part of the Bosnian army would have been extremely high risk, with a near 100% chance of getting caught, and which would have resulted in little/no political gain in the context of the already ongoing VRS campaign against the city.
For the record, the rumours that the Bosnian army in Sarajevo was guilty of shelling its own civilians to blame it on the Serbs was comprehensively examined by Professor Charles Ingrao of Purdue University, whose article covering the topic was endorsed by a team of twenty scholars (Charles Ingrao, ‘SafeAreas’, in Charles Ingrao and Thomas A. Emmert (eds), ‘Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholars’ Initiative’, Purdue University Press, 2009, pp. 201-229).
Professor Ingrao examined the three most notorious massacres of Sarajevo civiliansduring the siege, around which the rumours of Bosnianself-shelling have principally revolved: the May 1992 breadline massacre and the Markale marketplace massacres of February 1994 and August 1995. He noted that ‘The only “evidence” of ARBiH [Bosnian army] 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.
He found there was no evidence to show that any of these three attacks had been carried out by the Bosnian side, though he noted that in the second attack, the forensic examination was initially inconclusive, while in the third attack, despite more conclusive forensic evidence proving the VRS’s responsibility, some Western intelligence officers dispute the origin of the shell. Yet in at least one case, a UN colonel did deliberately lie about the evidence in order to frame the Bosnian army.
In Ingrao’s words: ‘A detailed forensics report for the second Markale explosion presented at General Milosevic’s ICTY trial appears to establish that the shell came from a VRS [Bosnian Serb army] position, a judgment that has always been disputed by Russian UNPROFOR Colonel Andrei Demurenko, who was initially reprimanded by his superiors and dismissed from the ICTY trials of Generals Galic and Milosevic after he admitted to knowingly misrepresenting the existence and substance of the report, as well as the scientific credentials and procedures employed by the Russian team investigating the report.’
So, that is the best answer to those trusting souls who believe UN officers are incapable of lying. I’m not going to speculate about whether Gray is consciously lying or whether he actually believes his own propaganda, but his accusations of deliberate Bosnian self-shelling reflect the anti-Bosnian, anti-Muslim agenda of those UN commanders in Bosnia who spent the 1992-1995 war aiding and abetting the Serb aggression.
It is one thing to say that in the chaos of war, Bosnian [and other] forces may have sometimes accidentally fired on their own civilians. But the idea that Bosnian forces deliberately and systematically did so in order to frame the Serb besiegers who were anyway massacring thousands of Sarajevo civilians, so as to provoke Western military intervention, is perhaps the most despicable of all the myths used to whitewash the Serb aggressors.
Caco and Celo were criminals, sure. But despite their nature, they were never accused of deliberately firing heavy ordiance at their own population (it’s doubtful that they would even have had the equipment to do so), and you don’t have a shred of evidence that they did. In any case, it would have been difficult for them to have been responsible for the Markale massacres, given that Caco was already dead and Celo had been evacuated from the city after being wounded.
You have deliberately selectively quoted and misrepresented Berko Zecevic; Zecevic did say that (though none of the other investigators testified to that effect), but was emphatically dismissive of Karadzic’s insinuation that his investigation’s results were acheived through threats. immediately afterwards went on to say “I can tell you that I did not carry out any analysis under threat. Every analysis I made was based strictly on technical data and anyone can check that and try to dispute it.” Moreover, as I’ve said before, Berko Zecevic and local investigators were not the only people who conducted an investigation; investigations were also conducted by the UN – which broadly supported Zecevic’s analysis. In any case, and as you convientantly fail to address, was the fact that ICTY, looking at all the evidence, and even giving the VRS every benefit of the doubt, nevertheless concluded that the VRS was responsible for the attack.