David Cameron accepted defeat with a shrug. “I get that,” he conceded after MPs threw out his request two years ago to punish the Assad regime for scorching and gassing civilians. Like it or not those words will be his political epitaph. They should be carved on quite a few Syrian tombstones too.
Bashar al-Assad, although he was supposed to have surrendered his entire arsenal, is still using chemical weapons against his people. Artillery shelling and primitive barrel bombs rolled out of aircraft have killed more than 120,000 since that vote. There are a million extra refugees, some of them swelling the migrant wave across Europe. And the Islamic State terror group has grown by leaps and bounds, operating a thriving terror metropolis in Raqqa.
None of the arguments presented in the Commons against even limited military action that August now hold water. Diplomacy was held up by the Labour party and coalition backbench rebels as the only option. Yet four years into Syria’s civil war, the only solution being bandied about is to split the country into three components — Assad-land, Sunni-heartland and the Kurdish lands. That’s not diplomacy; that’s sledge-hammering. Not a single good thing came from that Commons vote. Vladimir Putin probably raises a glass to British parliamentary democracy every August 29. It was the day that signalled he could annexe territory without risk.
Now another Syria vote looms in parliament and there is a chance for a new government and the Labour party under new leadership to recover some of Britain’s lost influence. The motion will not contain even a hint of future regime change. It is about functioning as a full ally in a war against Isis which has been quite unambiguously identified by our government and by public opinion as an enemy of the British state. Iraq has asked for help, and to meet this request properly allied aircraft have to hit Isis headquarters in Raqqa, which is in Syria. Since Assad fears the planes could be turned against him, he will not give formal overflight permission. US fighters are none the less flying missions. Britain should be there too.
Conservative backbenchers and Labour claim they are motivated by the higher principles of intervention. Both are making their decisions contingent on the early publication of the Chilcot report, endowing it with canonical significance. The report however is not supposed to be a handbook to be consulted every time someone asks “should we go to war?”. Chilcot is supposed to be an authoritative (ie glacially slow) account of the interlocking responsibilities of the intelligence services, the military command and the political class in 2003. It will have nothing to say that is relevant to the war against Isis.
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Every unhappy intervention is unhappy in its own way. The non-interventionists in 2013, now busily regrouping to do parliamentary battle again, want chiefly to duck out of sharing responsibility for difficult decisions. For a Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn it is also about a continuing process of exorcising Tony Blair. Mr Corbyn even wants Mr Blair to face a war crimes trial. The person who should be facing justice in the Hague, however, is Syria’s President Assad. Earlier this month he launched an airstrike against a market in Douma, a Damascus suburb. His forces have been bombing queues outside bakeries. Those are war crimes — which could have been prevented had Labour, and Mr Corbyn, voted differently in 2013. I don’t worry as much about Hugo Chavezian Corbynomics as about jumbled-up Corbynethics and the Tories who seem to think he has a point when it comes to avoiding foreign missions.
The sense that this is not our war because of its manifold complexities does not represent the moral high ground. It’s just laziness. Isis trains frustrated young men to kill our tourists on beaches. We can do more to thwart this group, and we should. Airstrikes can change battlefield outcomes — in the Kurdish defence of Kobane against Isis troops for example. As for the non-interventionist claim that we should seek permission from Assad to legitimise air raids, well, that seems to be a very strange concept of legitimacy. More people have been killed by the Assad regime than the victims of all the Arab-Israeli wars since 1948.
What little influence we still had in the Middle East was thrown away in 2013. Of course, a few more bombing raids by the RAF won’t rid the region of tyrants. Sadly only Russia and Iran now have the political clout to get Assad to leave his palace. These are unpleasant realities. But if we call on Arab states to take up the fight against Isis, then we have to be there as well, over the skies of Raqqa. Let’s hope parliament sees it that way too.