Amid the expanding column inches on the advisability of whether the UK should expand airstrikes against Isis, there is a mysterious absence. Those against the intervention are certain of ways in which it must surely fail. Those in favour talk up the positive outcomes.
What is absent from the debate is any concession to a fundamental truth about conflict – especially regarding limited warfare – and that is how outcomes, not least long-term outcomes, are both difficult to predict and essentially unknowable.
That truism – dramatised by Carl von Clausewitz, the great theorist of war – is no less valid today.
War is non-linear. Escalations – as demonstrated by events of recent weeks – are difficult to manage and control. Intrinsic and extrinsic factors, human error, hubris and accident can be as decisive as tactics or superiority on paper. Initial success can be the father of failure, and failure the mother of unexpected consequences.
In the first column one can place the string of Confederate victories in the American civil war that preceded Gettysburg, the Union’s first success. In the second category you can put the disastrous Soviet-designed campaign in Angola to defeat Unita, which led to defeat, retreat and the siege of Cuito Cuanavale by South African forces and their allies, concluding with a South African disengagement that would ultimately contribute to the ending of apartheid.
All of which underlines the logical fallacy of the foreign affairs select committee’s list of tests for intervention in Syria – asking as it does for a kind of guarantee that cannot be delivered.
A second tendency much apparent in the past few days is the desire – like the generals of the cliche always fighting the last war – to see conflicts through the prism of preceding ones. But the comparisons with Iraq or even Libya, both conflicts that I covered, are specious.
The Iraq conflict removed a functioning but dreadful state and in trying to reshape it broke Iraq at a fundamental level. In Libya there was not even much of an effort to remake it.
If an example is necessary of the inability to predict outcomes – even by those journalists closest to events – then the Arab spring should serve as a warning.
Few reporters who covered it, myself included, were able to gauge how the Egyptian military would react in the long run, how counter-revolution would be embraced as readily by middle-class Egyptians as they would revolution; how Libya would disintegrate so quickly, or President Assad in Syria survive so long.
The tendency to look to the past – even when it is inapplicable – is understandable. The hazard of conflict is located in a future we can’t grasp, in the hands of politicians and generals for whom failure must be inconceivable. The past is a crutch we use to prop up our preconceptions.
The reality is that, after 23 years spent covering conflicts, after 15 years spent reporting from the Middle East and a spell as a defence correspondent, the path to both ending the violence in Syria and ending Isis’s depredations seems no less murky to me today than it was two years ago.
Emotionally I can recognise I would like to see Isis destroyed not only because of Paris, the murder and kidnap of colleagues whom I knew, but also because of the slaughter of Syrians and Iraqis. But the emotional argument, I also recognise, is insufficient.
What also seems insufficient, however, is an argument that seeks to pretend that we are not already living with the real consequences of the war in Syria. The attacks in Paris, Sharm el-Sheikh and Beirut are changing the reality we live in. The large-scale slaughter in Syria – in large part at the hands of the Assad regime – and in Iraq, the flight of refugees in large numbers to Europe and the destabilisation of the region only underline this.
The questions that we need to ask are about our sense of confidence in our resilience as societies as much as morality: to quantify how much we feel threatened, both in our security and the resilience of our values under threat.
And seen in military terms – if not political – a tipping point was reached some time ago. Immune to political pressure and to the threat of force, the question has become whether to act, and how extensively, and what the consequences of not acting will be. Whether we have reached a moment of last resort.
The question is not what can be achieved – although that can be hoped for – but whether we believe the risk is justified, including the risk of unintended consequences.
In the end, I fear, the question that needs to be answered is a subjective one, unsatisfactory and uncomfortable as questions about whether to go to war should be. It is right it should be hesitant and conflicted, recalling the bleak comment of Robert E Lee surveying the slaughter he had inflicted at Fredricksburg that “it is well war is so terrible otherwise we should grow too fond of it”.
And because we should recall that those who claim to speak with certainty about where a military intervention will lead are blowing smoke.
