The PM’s won in Syria – but has she lost at home?
THERE SA MAY is winning the battle but losing the war over Syria. Britain’s Armed Forces have performed with predictable courage and distinction, and according to initial damage assessments have effectively degraded the conveyor- belt of death that resulted in chemical weapons being dropped on the children, women and men of Douma.
But the equally vital – and increasingly vicious – struggle to convince the British people of the need for an effective response to the gangsterism of Bashar al- Assad and Vladimir Putin is not going her way. Indeed in the fight for hearts and minds, she is currently staring defeat in the face.
It was around this time last week she was informed the Syrian regime had again dipped its murderous hands in its stocks of chlorine. When she saw footage of the incident, what she focused on was how the victims were huddled in an air raid shelter. ‘Those children were trying to find safety. And Assad still went after them,’ a government official said. ‘That affected her deeply.’ And it was at that moment that Mrs May began the emotional process of preparing herself to deploy British forces in a concerted way for the first time in her premiership.
Unfortunately, this instinctive and humane decision that Assad’s barbarism could not go unpunished has proved her first mistake. Because it is not currently shared by a nation exhausted by austerity, scarred by the poisonous legacy of Iraq and scared of the prospect of a direct superpower confrontation.
Mrs May has been playing catchup with public opinion. On Thursday, a YouGov opinion poll showed only 22 per cent of Britons were in favour of a missile attack on Syria’s armed forces – and almost twice as many (43 per cent) were against. And a Mail on Sunday poll t oday r eveals t he public are opposed to her decision to bypass Parliament by a factor of two to one – and a vast majority are against her doing so again.
During the week she went about carefully constructing the case for intervention, and the political and diplomatic coalition to implement it. On Tuesday and Wednesday, National Security Council briefings analysed open-source material that identified Syrian helicopter activity over Douma in the moments before the attack, and pieced it together with covert intelligence revealing Syrian air-command co-ordination.
On Thursday she presented that evidence to Cabinet and invited contributions from all Ministers. Sajid Javid reportedly made a strong case condemning the failure to intervene in 2013, while Matt Hancock impressed colleagues – and May herself – with the argument that she had the authority to launch strikes without sub-letting the decision to Parliament.
On Thursday evening she spoke to Donald Trump and reached a final agreement on the decision to launch a limited, proportionate attack.
Finally, at 5pm on Friday, she met Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson at Chequers and signed off the specific strike packages for the RAF Tornados conducting the raids.
But Mrs May neglected to engage with her most important partner of all – the British people. With the result that as UK servicemen prepared to take to the skies over the Mediterranean, their government appeared to have gone AWOL.
Where Ministers should have been setting out the evidence, strategy and rationale behind military intervention, a vacuum was allowed to develop. One that was swiftly filled by everyone from the cyberconspiracy theorists to Putin’s comical apologists and Jeremy Corbyn. Admittedly, as the week went on, the distinction between these disparate groups became harder to distinguish.
But they were still easier to spot than members of the Government making a calm and compelling case for military action.
There is such a case. In 2013 we were told the decision to draw back from action would spare lives. Instead, it sacrificed them. We were told a deal had been brokered between Putin and Assad to destroy Syria’s remaining chemical weapons. It was a lie. We were told negotiation offered the best path to peace. Russia’s own intervention, and selective deployment of her UN veto, shut that path down for good.
But no one has been given licence to make that argument. The Prime Minister was correct, brave even, to take the decision air strikes did not need parliamentary approval – but then left Plymouth MP and former Commando Johnny Mercer to defend it in heroic isolation.
On Friday she met Mercer in Downing Street where he urged her to take her arguments out into the country.
Belatedly she followed his advice, mounting a solid defence of her actions at a press conference yesterday. But today that is where Mrs May remains. On the defensive.
Privately, Ministers say that now the requirements of operational
She failed to engage with a key partner – the people Without action it is not just Syrian children who will burn
security have been lifted, they are much freer to make an aggressive case for responding to Assad’s butchery. But they also concede they need to be more effective in disarming the Syria-Russia propaganda machine, or what could more accurately be called the Syria-Russia-Labour propaganda machine.
We have now reached the incredible situation where two hostile foreign states and Her Majesty’s official opposition are operating in de- facto alliance to subvert the actions of the British Government.
No sooner does a lie raise its head in Moscow, than it is dispersed through Vladimir Putin’s bot-farms, into the social media accounts of the Corbyn cultists and on to the Twitter pages of Labour MPs.
It’s time for Mrs May to fight back. And her battlefield must not now be the skies over Syria but the Commons chamber. Tomorrow she appears in Parliament to deliver her statement on her decision to strike Assad. She, her Ministers and her party must take off the gloves and take the attack to their opponents.
First, they must expose Jeremy Corbyn’s craven, self- righteous duplicity for what it is.
His statements prove there is no act of brutality that will scar his conscience sufficiently for him to endorse a military response.
‘Bombs won’t save lives or bring about peace,’ was his infantile reaction, implying he now supports unilateral conventional weapon disarmament along with nuclear unilateralism. Every sentence he utters has no practical purpose other than to act as a shield around Assad and his murderous regime.
Corbyn does not want proportionate action – he wants no action.
Then Mrs May and her colleagues must again destroy the fiction there is a ‘UN solution’ to the crisis.
The pubs, supermarkets and school-runs of the nation do not echo to the sound of people delving deep into the inner workings of the UN Security Council. It needs to be explained clearly and concisely that Russia’s veto, coupled with Putin’s cynical surrogacy of Assad, makes the UN route a dead-end.
Finally they must destroy the perverse fiction that inaction equates to security.
If we allow maniacs such as Assad to toss chemical weapons around with impunity then it is not just Syrian children who will burn.
In 2013, we failed to act because chemical weapons in the Middle East were supposedly ‘ none of our business’.
Five years later, they appeared on the streets of Salisbury.
Last week the Prime Minister rightly took the lead in ordering British forces to redraw the red lines over the production, use and proliferation of chemical weapons. But she failed to take the British people with her. Tomorrow she must.