Britain is already engaged in a limited form of warfare against Isis, or Daesh as they call it in progressive circles. Islamic State and associated franchises are certainly engaged in asymmetrical forms of warfare against us and have been since well before Tony Blair learned where Iraq was on the map. Islamist supremacist fantasy has a long pedigree.
But I struggle to see the military case for the RAF helping to bounce the self-styled caliphate’s rubble in Syria as well as neighbouring Iraq, the issue which David Cameron eloquently appealed to MPs to support on Thursday. Read him here – it’s good stuff – and Jeremy Corbyn’s seven questions, also sensibly challenging points.
No, the case for a yes vote this Wednesday – if Cameron risks it – is political and diplomatic. It is the need to show solidarity with our French, American and Middle East allies who have asked us to join their air campaign against military and economic targets (eg oil-transporting lorries) on the Syrian as well as Iraqi side of Caliph Baghdadi’s imaginary realm.
Flattering though it is to be told that the UK still possesses important, highly accurate weapons like the British-designed Brimstone missile, which even the US does not have, as well as formidable Raptor reconnaissance capacity (collecting 60% of airborne intelligence over Iraq), I do not think the Yanks need us to do much heavy lifting.
They didn’t in Iraq, as the Bush White House helpfully pointed out when Blair’s commitment was at risk from a sceptical House of Commons in March 2003. No, the issue is alliance solidarity – Turkey is also an important Nato member, with its second largest army – and the need to send a determined signal to the wider world.
Having survived Hitler’s airborne blitz in 1940-41, his unprecedented rocket attacks in 1944-45, IRA bombs, al-Qaida suicide bombers, etc, London and other British cities can “keep calm and carry on” against a few more if they must. It buys time to patch together a political solution to ease Syria’s dreadful anguish, one in which Isis goes the way of all such depraved apocalypse merchants, vicious, greedy and randy, down the centuries: nowhere.
Symbols matter and so do signals. If Asquith’s Liberal cabinet had made it much clearer in August 1914 that it would stand by its French alliance, perhaps the German warmongers would have hesitated before unleashing their fearsome gamble. Ditto August 1939. It is often dither that causes the serious trouble, as cerebral Barack Obama showed in March 2013 when he allowed Bashar al-Assad regime to overrun his supposed red line against using chemical weapons against the respectable insurgency.
Let’s put aside for today Corbyn’s party management problems, richly deserved for such a serial rebel. Let’s ask how hesitant MPs on all sides should vote, the ones who are genuinely open-minded. By that I distinguish them from assorted nationalists and Greens, honorary Swedes sheltering under US nuclear protection, but usually hesitant to get their “neutral” hands dirty except for self-protection (1940) in the past 200 years.
As Matthew d’Ancona lucidly explains, it’s not like Iraq, a war of pre-emption to invade a disruptive state and (lower your voice) replace its ugly regime which has haunted British thinking since the occupation and attempts at state building – the invasion itself was a rapid triumph – went so badly wrong. Simon Jenkins, consistently an exponent of worldly Tory pessimism, thinks otherwise with his usual trenchant clarity, a Corbynite for the day.
In the protracted crisis of 2001-03 I started out opposing the shallow bellicosity of the uniformly unimpressive Bush administration after the daring 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York, followed by the campaign against the Afghan Taliban who had hosted – in a Google sense – Osama bin Laden. It’s worth noting that 9/11 came 10 years after the first bid to topple the twin towers as well as the 1998 “soft target” US embassy attacks in Africa. Only 12 of the 224 people killed were Americans; 5,000 were injured.
By the end of the protracted global negotiation over the Saddam Hussein problem – serial invader, domestic tyrant, etc – I had watched enough Russian, Chinese and French manoeuvres, a mixture of geopolitics and commercial calculation, to conclude unenthusiastically that the Bush/Blair option, armed with a deliberately ambiguous UN resolution (1441) was the least worst on offer. The UN wouldn’t be doing much, alas.
Let’s not waste more time on that now. Few partisans are likely to change their mind. I can remember asking Blair at a press conference why he thought postwar Iraq, traumatised for decades, would prefer to enjoy liberal democracy over ancient hatreds and majoritarian revenge. He waffled as usual, but the occupation and reconstruction proved far worse than I feared.
By any test though not as bad as Syria in 2015. If I must share a sliver of blame for the Iraqi debacle, Jeremy Corbyn, Ed Miliband and allies must take their share for Syria where the Iraq effect helped fumble western responses at crucial moments – as it did not those of theocratic Iran or Putin’s Russia.
So let’s be cautious. Will the benefit of symbolic solidarity with our friends (and some dodgier Sunni “friends” in the region) help stabilise Syria or merely add to the body count of innocents while helping Daesh to tighten its brutal grip on its citizen prisoners?
That has to be the test. Not the legality of UNSCR 2249, such resolutions can always be disputed – here’s a disputant – or the threat of more attacks on the UK mainland. We are already a top target for the idiots Daesh/Isis are grooming online. Remember, Belgium, which hasn’t been much of a player here, has more Isis recruits per capita than any other EU state.
Efforts are under way to create a coherent diplomatic alliance to force disputants in Syria’s civil war to negotiate a transitional government that leaves in Assad’s Shia/Alawite regime in place for now – no Libya-style chaos please – and ends the bloodshed.
It will require the west and Russia and Iran, the key outside players sustaining the Assads, to compromise. Turkey too, Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s footballing moneybags. No use telling them all to concentrate on eliminating the nihilists in Raqqa when they have other sectarian fish to fry.
Ankara’s obsession with Kurd-curbing may be deplorable but it is also understandable. And what everyone agrees is that Muslim boots on the ground are the only boots appropriate to take back Raqqa and Mosul. As part of Cameron’s phantom army of 70,000? Don’t hold your breath. It’s worth noting in passing that Isis says “bring it on”. A battle to the death at Dabiq in north-west Syria is the prediction the death cult seeks to fulfil. Here’s a long read. More reason for caution.
As things stand I can see why – as Patrick Wintour reports – so many Labour MPs are wavering for respectable reasons. I remain roughly where Tory rebel David Davis planted his standard in Sunday’s Observer, still asking what the diplomatic and military plans really are.
I realise it puts me (“objectively” as left comrades would put it) in some grisly company: the Stop the War Coalition, nice-but-naive Jeremy, the Media Lens crowd, assorted Trots, pro-Moscow fellow-travellers and armchair pacifists, cynical Sunnis and headbangers.
Sorry Dave, sorry decent Hilary (strange to hear that unmistakable tone of voice making the un-Bennite case against Dad’s case) Benn. Brimstone missiles cost £100,000 a piece. Better to spend the money on more robust diplomacy and let embattled François Hollande have his Gaullist moment. We are fighting Isis. We don’t have to prove it every day with high explosives.
