The fate of the rebel areas in Aleppo and the people still in them is utterly horrifying. In Britain, we are right to consider anything we can do to alleviate the suffering, and right to seek to identify our own contribution to this tragedy so we can better ensure it never happens again. But the right time to do this properly is when the immediate crisis has been dealt with.
When we do it, it is imperative we should do so on the basis of the facts, to learn the right lessons for the future about when we should authorise intervention, and on what basis. One issue that has figured in the debate this week about our own culpability is the decision made by the Commons on the 29 August 2013 not to authorise the government to join military action against the Assad regime in response to its use of chemical weapons.
Reasonable people disagreed at the time about whether that decision was right or wrong, and continue do so now, but what we should not do is leap to conclusions that are unsupported by the evidence. It is easy to think on the basis of what has been said this week that the vote in 2013 was about whether to overthrow President Assad, stop his attacks on his opponents or to support the rebels against him. It was nothing of the kind. As the prime minister said at the time: “If we were to take action, it would be purely and simply about degrading and deterring chemical weapons use.”
What the House of Commons debated was the response to the appalling chemical weapons attack in Ghouta. Parliament was recalled to debate the UK response. It was united in its revulsion at the attacks. The issue that day was not a disagreement about the need to prevent further use of chemical weapons but whether the case had been made for military action to be authorised. The material questions were whether military action was part of a proper, thought-through plan, whether it would work, whether it was legal and had been properly considered by the UN Security Council, and whether it would make the situation better or worse.
The action being contemplated was a limited missile strike designed to reduce the control system of the Assad regime, with a view to deter and degrade its ability to use chemical weapons. Many at the time pointed out the difficulty of achieving, with any degree of certainty, an effective reduction in the regime’s ability to use chemical weapons. And they wondered how the deterrence would be effective without siding very strongly with one side in the civil war.
A short, focused series of rocket attacks was unlikely to deter the Assad regime. Sustained bombing over a long period of time was precisely what the government was not suggesting, with all the unforeseen consequences that would bring. As President Obama said earlier this year, strongly defending this decision not to intervene: “While we could inflict some damage on Assad, we could not, through a missile strike, eliminate the chemical weapons themselves, and what I would then face was the prospect of Assad having survived the strike and claiming he had successfully defied the United States, that the United States had acted unlawfully in the absence of a UN mandate, and that that would have potentially strengthened his hand, not weakened it.”
His view refutes the often-repeated argument by critics of parliament’s actions that Obama had set a red line around the use of chemical weapons and then allowed it to be crossed. Obama himself said, with hindsight, that the use of force would have made the position worse.
It was because of these anxieties, and a perception that there was a precipitous rush to action, that the House of Commons refused to give the government the green light for the use of the force it sought on that day. Indeed, it went further in defeating the Labour motion that would have allowed the government to return to the House of Commons to authorise force. The mood of the house was not to rule out force under any circumstances. However, given its defeat, the government chose not to return to parliament with such a plan.
For parliament that day, it was a very finely balanced decision. No one was unaffected by the horror of what the Assad regime had done. But parliament was right to say force should only be used if it could be seen as likely to achieve its object without making the situation worse.
Subsequently the Assad regime entered an international agreement to give up its chemical weapons and not use them further. That is part of the reason why military action was then taken off the table. Although that agreement has almost certainly been broken subsequently, it was not clear at the time, or for some time afterwards. It almost certainly reduced Assad’s use of chemical weapons.
Is the lesson to be learned that the Commons should have voted that day in 2013 for military intervention despite the problems and the uncertainties around aims and planning? My view is, no.
Parliament did its job. It was right to challenge the government to produce a proper plan before it used military force. If there is one lesson we have learned from past interventions, it is this. Of course, these are incredibly difficult decisions, as is obvious from from Iraq, and indeed from Libya, where Labour supported the government’s military intervention in 2011.
It is right to examine what could and should have been done by the international community to prevent the horrors that have unfolded in Syria. But what is imperative is that we debate these questions in a sober way that does not pretend there are simple answers to the most complex questions facing our world. Only by recognising this complexity will we learn the right lessons for the future.
