Assad’s a monster. But attacking Syria now would be senseless virtue signalling
The most difficult thing is sometimes to do nothing. Yesterday, so- called liberal interventionists were queuing up to demand that ‘something be done’ about the chlorine bombs dropped on the suburbs of Damascus. But what?
The only answer I get when I ask this is that we should drop a bomb or two, to send a message to Syria’s murderous president Bashar Al Assad. We should show him there is a ‘price to be paid’, that we can ‘stand up and be counted’.
Apparently, now we want to be seen standing alongside America’s tub- thumping President Donald Trump and France’s egotistical leader emmanuel Macron, both with their own domestic reasons to be seen as tough.
Anarchy
Kill a few enemy combatants from thousands of feet up in the air — that will show Assad what sort of people we are. Big guys, concerned guys.
It is upsetting, watching those pictures of dying children on television. We want an eye for an eye.
This is virtue signalling of the most senseless sort. Leaders in the West grown used to bossing around the world cannot imagine that anything they do will cause more harm than good.
Yet the shambles Britain and its allies — under and since Tony Blair — have inflicted on Iraq and its neighbours after the 2003 invasion has brought little but death, destruction, anarchy and misery.
For the first time in two millennia, it has driven the Christians out of Iraq. It has forced millions to flee their homes — many to arrive on europe’s doorstep. It has seen some of the most ancient relics of human civilisation destroyed. And for what?
We have no control in the region, no leverage, not even an army of occupation.
Which is why no amount of belligerent rhetoric — or even a few aerial bombing raids — is going to stop the Syrian regime’s victory after seven years of civil war. A war, remember, that has nothing to do with Britain or its allies. At the start, Western intelligence told the media that president Assad was about to fall. That was a disastrous misjudgment.
Now it must be obvious that every ounce of aid given by the West and Saudi Arabia since 2011 to the Syrian opposition — much of which has been made up of Islamist jihadi groups — has prolonged the agony of this conflict.
half-hearted intervention is always the worst sort. The fact is that we were never going to beat Assad with powerful allies such as Russia and Iran supporting him militarily. We just want to feel good in ourselves.
Assad’s use of chlorine against civilians at the weekend in rebel-held Douma — assuming it was him — was against international law.
Though any attempt to curb the horrors of battle is welcome, the ban on chemical weapons was always odd, to my mind, because it implied that some forms of killing were more acceptable than others.
Why nuclear bombs should be acceptable but chlorine gas should not is bizarre. Assad’s sarin and ricin are beyond the pale. Yet the West’s delayed-action cluster bombs (which scatter bomblets across a wide area) and white phosphorous (an incendiary and toxic chemical) are, or were until recently, seen as fine.
Inhumanity
The trouble is that chemical weapons are what poor armies tend to have, whereas ‘our’ side can kill more efficiently. Western television decorously never shows the body parts of our victims, blasted to pieces by high-explosive missiles.
Under a 2013 disarmament agreement with Syria, that country was a year later declared free of chemical weapons by international inspectors.
So much for inspectors. Last year, the resumed use of the weapons precipitated a ‘shock and awe’ response by Trump. This involved 59 American missiles raining down on the Syrian air base at Shayrat. It was described as being used ‘to send a message’.
Message to whom? Regimes fighting for their existence do not care about liberal condemnation or the niceties of international treaties. Nor do their backers, in this case Russia and Iran.
The reality is that the inhumanity of war lies in any killing of non-combatants. The early Geneva conventions specifically forbade this, as they forbade the bombing of civilian rather than military targets.
Nobody obeys them now. Britain certainly does not. In Iraq and Syria, the West — and that includes Britain — has been shamelessly bombing civilian communities for the simple reason that determined enemies such as ISIS use them as shields and do not care how many people die in their cause.
Protestations that we scrupulously avoid civilians with our bombs are rubbish.
Last summer, a combat monitoring body called Airwars estimated that more than 8,000 civilians died in the fall of Mosul in northern Iraq, the last major city to be held by ISIS. Most of those people were killed by indiscriminate Iraqi, American and British bombs and shells that were fired at Islamists hiding among the population in tightly packed urban areas.
even the Pentagon accepts it has killed hundreds of civilians in Iraq and Syria. As the British commander, Major-General Rupert Jones, said last year, civilian deaths are nowadays ‘the price you pay’ for fighting in cities. I am sure president Assad would agree.
Many will argue that ‘our’ side did its damnedest to avoid civilian deaths, while the Syrian army cares little who dies under its bombardments.
But can we really now ascend some moral high horse?
Shells, bombs and missiles in populated areas are by their nature indiscriminate weapons. We use them for the simple reason that we don’t want to win desperately enough to commit ground troops. Civilians are killed so our soldiers are not. If we really wanted the Syrian civil war to stop, we would send in the British Army and fight house to house — but Parliament would throw a fit if the Prime Minister suggested that. hundreds of our soldiers would die.
This week’s discussion of how to react to the chemical attack has become a conversation between ourselves in the West. We don’t really believe anything we do will provoke a change in behaviour on Assad’s part.
No one really believes that what Theresa May says in Parliament, or even what she drops on Syria, will affect the outcome of the civil war. It is our self-image we care about, whether we can appear macho, or caring.
Horrific
We like to portray those who disagree with us as ‘allowing’ Assad to get away with it.
They are idly standing by, ‘letting evil happen’, when by implication they could somehow stop it. This is idiotic politics. Of course we should intervene where we can affect an outcome, as rightly we did in Kosovo in the Nineties.
even now, we could go round the world and find equally horrific scenes of inhumanity, in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and in the Congo for a start. Why are there no interventionists demanding British bombing raids there? Is it because those countries are further away? Is morality a matter of air miles?
The bloodletting in Syria has been a war for survival on both sides, but one that Assad is clearly winning. The kindest thing we can do is not impede that victory, because then more people will die as the fighting drags on.
Our moral duty is to relieve the suffering of war’s victims in every way we can, and offer asylum to those who escape. Otherwise, leave well alone.
When this horror is over, then we can sit down and decide what damnation to call down on Assad’s head. he deserves the worst. But right now, Western military intervention against him would be counter-productive.
We must kick the habit of trying to rule the lives of others, especially when we have no power to do so.