Let’s start with the weaknesses in the thinking of many people on the left. It is astonishing how many of those who consider themselves to be champions of liberty and equality are completely incapable of recognising that very many of the strongest opponents of Western governments are champions of autocracy and inequality. The enemy of your enemy is rarely your friend.
After provoking a horrible civil war and putting it down with extreme brutality there should be no illusions about what Assad is capable of doing to stay in power. He has used chemical weapons before and now that he is winning he is twisting the knife by using them again.
His ally Putin is every bit as capable of ruthlessness and he was quite prepared to carpet bomb Chechnya. Under his rule a whole string of his opponents have ended up dead or in jail. Anyone in doubt about that statement ought to try looking up what happened to Boris Nemtsov and Anna Politskovskaya. Putin poses as a strong defender of Russia and her interests. He is actually allowing a class of oligarchs to bleed the country dry and making the country dangerously dependent on extracting fossils and raw materials whilst he provokes nationalist adventures in order to cover up. In the days of the cold war at least Russia pretended to pay some lip service to the concept of socialism. Under Putin it has got the worst of all worlds. Raw capitalism, criminal gangs, extreme narrow minded nationalism and a whole series of horrible environmental crises. Not my idea of a regime that anyone on the left should go misty eyed over.
Yet there are still people who refuse to accept that Assad and Putin are capable of horrible acts and believing their smokescreen of propaganda about the need for factual proof. No one can ever produce enough factual proof that chemical weapons were used by Assad’s regime or that Putin’s secret service friends commit murder for his benefit. Any proof will always be denied and subject to ludicrous denials. Such as the ridiculous claim that chemical weapons not only escaped from Porton Down but just happened to end up on the door handle of the home of someone Putin regards as a traitor two weeks before his election.
Unfortunately, naivety and bigotry aren’t solely in evidence amongst some elements on the left. Most of the right has gone in for it in an even bigger way. Just because someone somewhere in the world does something utterly horrible doesn’t automatically mean that the government of the UK has to do start dropping bombs. A government is supposed to ask itself hard questions before it puts the lives of its soldiers and airmen at risk and kills people in another country.
If the UK government is going to take military action it is a good idea to know what that action is going to achieve and how our troops are going to win the battle. Dropping bombs as a gesture that you are cross and angry simply communicates incompetence and impotence.
If anyone believes that we should take military action in Syria then they need to tell us how that action is going to be successful. I can respect a view that says the UK has a moral obligation to put huge amount of force onto the ground and fight for years to establish a part of Syria that is safe for citizens to live their lives the way they choose. Such an attitude can be defended as the hard but the moral choice. Unfortunately, it requires a very large number of deaths of British troops, will take years of hard fighting that will kill a lot of innocent citizens and some equally innocent soldiers who have been forced into Assad’s army against their will. It also runs the risk of war with Russia and Turkey. Furthermore we have tried this policy recently in Iraq and it didn’t exactly prove very successful.
Most people aren’t prepared to pay the price of getting involved in another foreign adventure with no clear end in sight. If we aren’t prepared to put up with years of hard drawn out warfare then what exactly is the point of any other form of military action. The idea that it will teach Assad a lesson and prevent him using chemical weapons is completely wrong. He is not going to take any notice of any army that doesn’t have troops that are capable of changing the situation on the ground and once the air raids are over he will carry on killing his own citizens with increased enthusiasm.
Dropping bombs when you know you can’t possibly win the ground war is a highly irresponsible action. Just consider the issues it throws up. What and who do you bomb? How many bombs do you drop? When will you stop bombing? What will you do when Assad does something else equally unpleasant? What message does it give your enemies if you take military action and still lose the war? Who wins the propaganda battle when the first case of the bombs hitting the wrong target takes place and there are pictures of dead children all over the TV screens that out country has killed?
When it isn’t clear what you are going to achieve by military action and you can’t possibly win the war then it is naïve and reckless to engage in military action. It is gesture politics of the worst kind. It kills people, it weakens our country and it muddies the water over who is the blame for the situation in Syria.
That is why the UK parliament voted against military action in Syria after the last use of chemical weapons. The Conservatives were at that point asking us to bomb Assad’s forces. Two years later they started bombing Assad’s opponents. Exactly what that has achieved is extraordinarily hard to detect. Yet I did detect the news a couple of weeks back that a brave SAS man had been killed whilst engaging in action on the ground in Syria. You may have missed that one as it wasn’t heavily reported. What he was doing there and how many of our troops are deployed on the ground in Syria without proper parliamentary approval wasn’t explained.
Now we are back to being asked to bomb Assad’s troops. It would be helpful if the Conservatives could make up their minds as to exactly which side they support. It would be helpful if they could work out what their attitude is to the invasion of what is effectively Kurdistan by Turkey. It would be helpful if they could explain exactly how any ordinary Syrian person’s welfare has been protected by their actions to date.
The Conservatives are busily trying to take us into a war that they don’t understand and cannot win without any clear objectives. That is naivety of the worst kind. And as I said at the start there are few worse things at a time of crisis than utter naivety.