THE WEST’S ‘ETHICAL’ FOREIGN POLICY HAS BECOME A BLOODBATH

Naive do-gooding. An addiction to meddling. And for what? Putin in charge, and a Briton in jail for 14 years without trial. That’s why our ‘ethical’ foreign policy is a...

FOR the first time in more than a decade, it is no longer ‘ the West’ making headlines in the greater Middle East. Now it is the turn of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. His intervention formally began at 9am on Wednesday, when a Russian general appeared at the American embassy in Damascus to announce that a bombing campaign would commence within the hour.

Would the Americans ‘please’ clear Syrian airspace?

Even as Russian jets took to the air, the Russian parliament authorised air strikes that have been weeks in the planning, while the Orthodox Church declared a ‘holy war’.

Many, including Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, have been fiercely critical of a campaign which seems to target moderate, Western-backed opponents of President Assad as much as Islamic State. But legions of Western commentators have bowed down with grudging admiration. Putin’s macho decisiveness contrasted with the hesitancy of the Hamlet in the White House.

For all the concerns it has raised, this eye-catching intervention masks the deeper problem in Syria and in the region as a whole, which is that a decade of naïve, do-gooding Western intervention has resulted in a disastrous mess. Instead of the democracy once promised by Western governments – in countries with no tradition of democracy – there is instead a series of bloodbaths with no end in sight.

An addiction to an ‘ethical’ but wholly misguided desire to remove regional strongmen – admittedly ghastly – has opened the doors to a world of horror, from the present destruction of Syria right across the globe to the shameful detention without trial of those imprisoned by the world’s leading democracy, America, at Guantanamo Bay. Among them is Shaker Aamer, the British resident who will only now be released after 14 years of illegal torture and imprisonment.

In all this the British Government, particularly the administration of Tony Blair, has been complicit, and from the outset.

The unravelling of the Middle East began with the mass mur- ders of 9/11 and the series of kneejerk but profoundly dangerous responses that followed. In 2001 coalition forces deposed the Taliban in Afghanistan, who had played host to Al Qaeda.

Then in 2003, egged on by febrile neoconservatives, and acting on flawed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, George W Bush, Blair and their obedient military lackeys invaded Iraq.

Toppling Saddam Hussein’s bronze statue proved easier than occupying a complex country. Iraq duly collapsed into sectarian chaos.

The local cell of Al Qaeda, supported by Saddam’s remaining Baathists, mutated into the IS death cult now threatening governments across the region.

In reality, of course, Putin has acted for reasons of fear and weakness as much as thuggish bravado. Russia has watched world events with mounting horror, especially as the West sought to incite revolutions in its near neighbourhood, in states such as Ukraine that had been part of the defunct Soviet empire.

THE Assad dynasty is a longtime Soviet client, providing Russia’s navy with a modest Mediterranean port. Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez learned to fly combat jets in the old Soviet Union and his torturers learned their trade from the KGB, some of whose alumni are among the 33,000 Russian expats married to Syrian men or women. Putin wants to restore Russia’s power in the Middle East, at a time when the US seems to be withdrawing after a decade of wars.

And Russia is as alarmed as anyone else by the rise of IS, whose ranks i nclude 2,000 Chechens who will return home one day. Russia has 16 million Muslims, which is more than 11 per cent of the population. IS has already shown videos of the Kremlin in flames.

But if Russia is concerned, this is nothing to the misery now unleashed on the millions in the Middle East and beyond. The monthly death tolls from Iraq since 2003 stagger the imagination, as if 3,000 here or 4,000 there – all men, women and children – are just statistics. Half a million is a conservative estimate of the total; some say it is as high as a million.

Haider Al-Abadi, the man dubbed the ‘last prime minister of Iraq’, is struggling to hold the country together as it breaks into three or four sectarian fragments that will unleash more refugees fleeing ethnic or religious cleansing.

A quarter of a million people have died in Syria, with nine million displaced from their homes, of whom four million are refugees abroad, including those beating down Europe’s new border fences.

Since Assad cannot continue to rule the whole of Syria, it is more than likely that the country will break up into three or four enclaves.

Thousands of armed gangs control Libya, infecting neighbouring Algeria and Tunisia with jihadist terrorism.

Iran and Saudi Arabia are fighting devastating proxy wars in both Syria and Yemen, the latter virtually unreported. The West has suffered immense reputational damage, too, through the covert war on terror, of which Shaker Aamer’s story is an egregious example.

Military trials at Guantanamo Bay are mired amid legal complexities, many arising because the accused (and some witnesses) were tortured by the CIA. Western conduct of the parallel ‘war on terror’ resulted in CIA ‘black sites’ from Poland to Thailand where torture was routine, and the legal void that is Guantanamo Bay. This handed radical Islamists a propaganda victory on a plate.

The implosion of several once stable states has unleashed a tide of refugees flooding into Europe which shows no signs of abating. EU governments manifestly underestimated crisis this summer, and are struggling to deal with it.

The divisions this has opened up, notably between Germany and countries such as Hungary, are all grist to Vladimir Putin’s mill, as they are to Europe’s far Right populist parties. If elections were held in France today, Marine Le Pen would probably be President.

NOW things have come full circle. The Taliban are on the rampage, as we saw this week when they took Kunduz. None of this is to excuse the medieval barbarity of IS or those who literally have blood on their hands.

Nor is it to say that the likes of Gaddafi or Saddam – or for that matter Assad – are anything less than repulsive.

Yet the jejune moralism of Western foreign policy has resulted in more than a decade of global chaos, with a sinister death cult on the rampage, and the return of Cold War animosities we had put behind us.

Whether Britain drops a few more bombs on Syria is irrelevant. British people are rightly sceptical of boy’s-own ventures with hugely depleted defence forces.

Our generals and spooks may not be up to much, but we do at least have capable diplomats.

Britain should use them to gently push its Saudi, Qatari and Turkish friends into joining Syrian peace talks involving Iran, leaving more powerful actors, including Russia and the United States, to take care of IS.

Only then can we put an end to the senseless spiral of violence, the growing refugee crisis – and the moral abyss into which Western policy has sunk.

Misery now unleashed on millions in the Middle East