David Cameron’s case for military intervention in Syria is like that old Groucho Marx joke: “We have to have a war. I’ve already paid a month’s rent on the battlefield”.
Cameron wants us urgently to sign up to his war effort.
But on the basis of what?
He claimed this morning that he had “a credible military strategy” to defeat Islamic State.
The more he spoke, the more apparent it became that he has nothing of the kind.
Worse, he has learned nothing from the mistakes that led us into Iraq more than a decade ago.
Syria exists as a united entity only on the maps.
On the ground, it is fractured between competing interests.
Syria’s Russia-backed secular dictator, Bashar Assad, controls a significantly shrunken territory.
The Kurds, who are bravely fighting Islamic State, dream of self-rule in the north.
Then there is ISIS itself, and an ensemble of overlapping opposition groupings whose ideological leanings are virtually impossible for us to determine.
Cameron wants to enter this mix.
He wants to bomb ISIS from the skies and hopes to use “moderate” rebels as ground forces.
Simultaneously, he wants to rid Syria of Assad and install a representative government that can finish off his fight against ISIS.
This is an ambitious plan. It is also fantastic.
It is absurd for Cameron to believe that they will switch their loyalty to a Western-backed government once Assad is deposed from power.
When I reported from Syria in 2012, non-Western diplomats were openly scornful of what they saw as Western naivety – even after the experience of Iraq – about Syria.
As the ambassador of a major Asian country told me, “the French, British and Americans have no understanding of what’s happening here”.
Many decent people are justly appalled by Assad.
But outrage is not policy.
There exists no force in Syria capable of reconstituting the country if Assad goes.
And as we have seen in Libya, actions driven by good intentions can produce deadly results.
Cameron has no workable plan.
Instead, he is attempting what the French call on s’engage, puis on voit : first engage, then figure out.
But there is no reason to believe that Syria’s miseries will be relieved – or Europe’s security enhanced – if Britain started bombing a country that’s already being pounded daily by multiple powers.
It would be inexcusable to enable Cameron to ignore history and plunge Britain head first into this homicidal cauldron.
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Didn’t the Syrians vote overwhelmingly for their ‘dictator’ in 2014?
The western propaganda appears to be working on the writer of this article. Last year there were elections in Syria in which independent international observers were impressed by the fairness of the process. The winner was Bashir. Just like Libya, most of the people who aren’t influenced by western money and aggression, loved Ghadafi. There was a million person march in support of his rule. Look at Libya now, Look at Iraq now and look at Syria. People who commit murder wholesale on their populations do not get elected Funny how western “help” always seems to involve massive civilian casualties. No minute of silence for them. No news articles on how survivors cope with the aftermath. These western made problems will persist as long as it pays, which it will always do. Peace, love and light to all the haters. Duncan Wheeler. Ireland