If the West does not act against Assad and Putin their lies will have won

Theresa May must make her case for military action to MPS and the country firmly, clearly and quickly

Before she was murdered during the EU referendum campaign in 2016, the Labour MP, Jo Cox, was working on a pamphlet about military intervention. This was posthumously published by Policy Exchange early in 2017. Its co-author was Tom Tugendhat, the Conservative MP who is now chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee*. Intervention is an issue which – probably helpfully for Theresa May just now – crosses party lines.

The pamphlet argued the general case for intervention on humanitarian grounds, citing numerous successful examples, including Sierra Leone, Kosovo and the no-fly zones imposed on northern Iraq from 1991. By contrast, it cited the horror of Rwanda, in which more than half a million people were massacred, as the classic case of what happens when you cannot face using military power to help. The paper’s title was The Cost of Doing Nothing.

That cost is hard to compute, but it is real. As Britain joins the United States and France to act against the chemical weapons (CW) that Bashar al-assad, Syria’s president, is using against his own people, it is only natural to try to calculate the price of action. Current argument against intervention ranges from perfectly sensible questions about the reliability of intelligence, our military capacity and the exact nature of our aims, to wild talk about this being like 1914. The price of not intervening is less discussed.

Jo Cox argued that “Syria is our generation’s test”. The West failed that test in 2013. The House of Commons defied the Prime Minister of the day, David Cameron, and rejected intervention in response to Assad’s chemical attack in Ghouta, which killed perhaps 1,400 people. President Barack Obama took this vote as his excuse to scrub out the red line he had himself just drawn. The dreadful fate of the Syrian people since then – numerically worse than that of intervention’s most notable modern failure, Iraq – is closely related to what the Western world didn’t do in 2013. Aleppo was destroyed. Isil rose. Europe was hit by a refugee crisis. Iran and Russia were empowered. The cost of doing nothing has been punitively high.

It cannot be fully recouped. The purpose of the action now proposed is not to take sides in Syria, nor to get rid of Assad, let alone to start a Third World War with Russia. It is to make the world understand that no one, anywhere, can use CW without reprisal. Their use has been prohibited by global agreement since 1925 and their possession since 1997, so you might think this should be an uncontroversial aim. Since CW have been used by the Syrian regime – with Russian assistance – quite often in the conflict, and since they have also been used recently, by the Russians, in the streets of Salisbury, you might also think it is an urgent one.

When the Cabinet met on Thursday, it was clear about this. CW had been used, it heard. This use must be punished and repetition prevented, it agreed. The military advice was that there is a plan to do this. The necessary action is in hand.

What would be the cost of doing nothing now? Most obviously, it would permit the Russians/syrians to use CW much more. After all, these hellish weapons work well in what the British Army calls FIBUA (Fighting in Built-up Areas), since they reduce the risk to the aggressor, and drive out or destroy the local population while leaving the buildings standing.

Assad and Vladimir Putin would also conclude that Donald Trump’s missile attack on Syria a year ago had been a gesture, not a policy. They would note that President Trump was either too distracted by internal scandals or too much of a blow-hard to follow anything through (or both) – that, for all his sound and fury, he is strangely close to Obama in his fear of doing anything serious on the global stage.

They would notice that the Western alliance was disunited and unwilling to fight. They would see that Western solidarity against the attack on the Skripals was merely a gesture. From this, dictatorial regimes like Assad’s would conclude that Russia was a friend worth having. Russia itself would rejoice at the proof that illegal acts are no bar to global power. Putin’s idea of “Russian values” – the right to do what the hell you like in what you claim as your sphere of influence, and the idea that international relations boil down to a struggle with the West that you must win – would have been vindicated.

It was a long-running theme of the Cold War that the Soviet Union not only had large amounts of CW material, and of biological weapons too, but also that it lied about them. Russia still has them and still lies about them. To these lies, it now adds a smokescreen of further lies, which invent preposterous bad actions by Western agents. If the West backs off, all those lies will have won. It will be the greatest post-truth moment yet.

The cost of doing nothing would be high at home, too. It might spare the Government a close-run vote in Parliament, but it would also be a victory for the Corbyn view of the world – that we must sit round a table and jaw-jaw with all horrible regimes while they continue, outside the room, to war-war to their hearts’ content. One must not use the phrase “strong and stable” these days, but if Mrs May were to retreat, her current creeping recovery to power rather than mere office would collapse. So would her capacity to sustain her country’s international friendships post-brexit.

Whenever a thoroughly unpleasant ruler struts the world stage, you will always find plenty of people in the West who warn against “provoking” him. From such talk, anyone would think that it was we who are sticking nerve agent on door handles and making Syrian children choke on chlorine gas. (Indeed, that is exactly what the Russian government now alleges.) Behind this fear of upsetting Putin lies the illusion that a bad man must be a strong one.

It would be rash to claim to understand modern Russia, but does it look like a place that is doing well for itself? Is it getting richer, freer, less corrupt, culturally stronger? Do more people than ever want to attend its universities, emigrate to it, learn its language? I would suggest that it looks more like a country with growing internal conflicts and institutional decay, whose government’s desperate solution is to try to export its problems through belligerence.

And although Putin is populist – perhaps even popular – his powerbase is a tiny shifting court of super-rich barons and a web of security organisations. Now that American measures are excluding the oligarchs from the dollar economy, the effects are beginning to hurt them and therefore make them angry with Putin. Not much longer, one hopes, before they experience more trouble from the sterling economy too.

Mrs May has no constitutional duty to get a binding parliamentary vote before she acts. But she has a moral and political one to make the case in the Commons and in the country, firmly, clearly and quickly, before the airwaves clog with cyber-nonsense. If she is doing something, she has to say why.

*Jo Cox’s place in finishing the pamphlet was filled by the Labour MP Alison Mcgovern.