Parliament has sent a clear message to Assad: he can go on killing without fear of British reaction

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”

  1. Scott Millar

    Warmongering idiocy – the author (in his twisted mind) would seem to have more info on the attack than the JIC.

  2. Trispw

    Poor, little, badly led, broke countries like Britain should stop interfering in other people’s affairs. We can’t run our coun country. By comparison with our near neighbours big and small, we live in an antiquated, run down, broken mess. We have soup kitchens, people living on the streets, hospitals that kill people for want of water or basic drugs, people who work for less than it costs to rent their miserable hovel (the smallest houses in Europe), and yet Cameron, after 2 years, on orders from Obama, is suddenly in a strop because they used chemical weapons. So, it’s Ok to bomb them but not Ok to poison them. That, coming from America, is rich.

    Everywhere that we have ever poked our nose has ended up a disaster, cost us a fortune, and made the names of our “leaders”.

    And all so that we can pretend to be a big powerful country and the likes of Cameron, a stupid, spoilt Eton boy, a world leader. If that is a world leader then go help the world.

    I was particularly impressed with the press briefing from Downing Street to, I believe, The Times (unofficial, of course) which was in such bad language that the only way I can represent it here without being barred for life is to translate it to the language of Eton and Oxford.

    Numero X Extrarius Muneris et cogitare Miliband est stupri cunno et cupro carinis mauris. Franci iam odii et suus obtinuit occasionem nullam societatem aedificare US Democratic Party.

  3. Boneheaded Dinosaur

    My advice is to get yourself to Syria, put on a balaclava and join those cuddly scamps Jabhat al-Nusra. Syria needs humanitarians like them.

  4. smileoftdecade

    Korea, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Suez, Afghanistan again, and again,
    the list of failed interventions is a tiny bit longer than just Vietnam

  5. Stella Kordun

    This article bemoaning the fact that democracy had an uncharacteristic hearing in Parliament yesterday is not what I would have expected to read in a left leaning publication. I suppose that it keeps the reader ‘on their toes’ and ‘fresh’. To add more violence to the region by sending US and UK troops into Syria will add little but increase bloodshed, I feel. Yes, parallels can and will be drawn with Iraq.and the fact that Tony Blair is calling for military intervention in Syria should alert us to its dangers, seeing as the rule of law becomes secondary once western powers become involved and it’s all about what western powers can gain from a region. Tony Blair has made a ‘killing ‘apparently from his involvement, wearing various hats.

    I don’t believe that the UK will step away from Syria anyway. The Western superpowers apparently (and believably) have a master plan which involves the plundering of oil and its resources, meanwhile subjugating populations. Western governments are good at creating pre-texts whilst suppressing sub-texts though less so nowadays thanks to whistleblowers as they are ungraciously called. It was with dismay that I saw the article above this morning and the West can help, send aid, assist aid organisations but sending troops in will escalate an already horrendous situation.

    The writer says that ‘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.’ Yes, that is true, a second vote would be necessary in Parliament but the US and the UK have ignored international law, the UN before, What counts as the rule of law, once unrest and fighting have beset a region? I can already see the troops getting their boots on, supported by Western giants. Let’s see an end to this obscenity and the brute over-use and unequal display of power.

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