Right to attack Syria but we must stand back now
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Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said air strikes had made East-West relations worse than in the Cold War.
He said: “During the Cold War there were channels of communication and no obsession with Russophobia, which looks like genocide by sanctions.”
MPs overwhelmingly backed Mrs May over RAF involvement in the air strikes, but Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn faced Tory cries of “shame” as he said: “The Prime Minister is accountable to this Parliament, not to the whims of the US president.”
A string of Labour MPs distanced themselves from their leader’s continued questioning of whether Syria was to blame for the chemical attack on Douma earlier this month.
To cheers from Tory MPs, former shadow chancellor Chris Leslie said: “Pinpointing and degrading Assad’s chemical weapons was necessary. Intervening to save civilians from future gas attacks was absolutely the right thing to do. Those who would turn a blind eye, who would do nothing in pursuit of some moral high ground, should also be held accountable.”
And Tory MP Richard Drax said: “Leadership takes great courage. The Prime Minister has that in spades.”
IT IS right and proper that the Prime Minister should be grilled in the Commons over her decision to dispatch RAF jets in the US strike on Syria: this country’s involvement in Middle Eastern affairs has frequently ended in disaster. But that said, in this particular case, some action plainly had to be taken. The wider world cannot allow a tyrant to use chemical weapons on his own people, nor indeed anyone else, and President Obama’s unfortunate instruction to Bashar al-Assad not to “cross a red line” back in 2012 probably encouraged the tyrant to think he could act with impunity. Whatever else one may think about President Trump, at least he follows words with actions.
But we must not allow this to escalate, not least because it would be a disaster if this ended up as a conflict with Russia. The targets were chosen carefully and as the Prime Minister said in the Commons yesterday, the aim was not to become involved in the greater conflict but to degrade Assad’s chemical weapons capability.
That has now been done. And as for Jeremy Corbyn’s laughable assertion that the chemical attack could have come from elsewhere and that military action was not justified, may we point out that this is the man who as prime minister would be in charge of our Armed Forces. A terrifying thought.