Syria's Civil War

David Aaronovitch writing in The Times the other day made a powerful case for intervening in Syria - in an effort to stop the terrible bloodletting by the Assad regime against his own people.

As all such issues are, the use of force is a very tough call - even after a relatively successful outcome in Libya, so far at least, there is no guarantee that intervening in these disputes will bring about peace and democracy.

Because some of the players involved are not remotely interested in democracy or peace - and simply want to establish their own brand of tribal or religious supremacy over their fellow citizens and neighbours - which is exactly what happened in  Rwanda, of course.

On balance, I support the case for intervening in the conflict because the involvement of foreign Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon marks a dramatic escalation - which has significantly tilted the civil war towards a victory for Assad.

President Assad has shown no sign of being willing to stand aside and allow an interim, representative government to negotiate a new constitutional settlement in Syria - as happened in Egypt recently, for example. 

And a military victory for Assad and his Russian backers will simply entrench yet another vile dictatorship in the Middle East - despite all the high hopes raised by the Arab Spring.

The case for doing nothing except watching from the sidelines is simple anmd easy to make - especially in the bloodly aftermath of Iraq.

But the cost of doing nothing also has to be carefully weighed - which is the real point of David Aaronovitch's timely contribution to the debate.

Keep out, they say. But then comes cataclysm

By David Aaronovitch

If Assad, Russia and Hezbollah win the civil war in Syria, the rest of the world is likely to pay a heavy price

It is one of those little ironies that the one thing people are worried about the West doing over Syria, is the one thing that it isn’t doing at all. We are not “arming the rebels” and in any sense that we would be likely to arm them, it wouldn’t make much difference even if we did.

This “dramatically escalating humanitarian crisis” (David Cameron’s words yesterday) owes none of its escalation to us. Russian-trained pilots fly Russian-made jets to fire Russian missiles at Syrian rebels (or, at any rate, in their general direction), and the foreign boots on the ground belong to Hezbollah. Into the vacuum created by the international community’s unwillingness to act have stepped regional players with their own agendas. Where once Syrian democrats might have prevailed, private money from the Gulf has armed Sunni militants.

Estimates of deaths are notoriously unreliable, but let’s say many tens of thousands — mostly civilians — have died in the last two years and at this rate many more will die. We’ll probably watch them perish till we get bored. Maybe we’re bored already. Ancient cities have been destroyed, perhaps as many as six million people have been displaced and there are something like two million refugees outside Syria. So far.

The war has burst the boundaries of Syria and threatens the peace of Lebanon, the precarious democracy of Iraq, as well as Turkey, Jordan and even Israel. And there is no obvious end in sight. There is no endgame. There is no exit strategy. It seems to me that a perfectly feasible consequence will be a victory for Assad and Hezbollah, a full-scale repression in Syria and a seething Sunni resentment towards the rest of the world, which will not be magically contained within the region. The issue, in this connected world, is not whether we keep out of the Syrian civil war, but whether it keeps out of us.

But things could get worse if we intervene! If I had a rouble for every time I have heard or seen that sentiment written or expressed then I’d be able to buy my own Sarin gas plant from an oligarch. And of course I understand it: the coffin parade through Wootton Bassett, the maimed servicemen and women, the chaos and the claims about Muslim radicalisation. There is something like exhaustion. The public school pundit-diplomats are all over the airwaves with their strange cricketing analogies and their assertions that the oiky Blairs and Bushes never did understand the complex nobility of the Pashtun, or the true and inevitable hatred between Shia and Sunni.

Many of those against intervention long ago ceased to have to engage with the arguments, simply repeating their mantra of isolation. This is despite the fact that no one has ever suggested an invasion of Syria and despite the success of the Libyan intervention. Never mind. It is enough to cite that the Syrians are a faraway people of whom we know little. Best left alone.

Some — a few — think otherwise. Eight days ago, it seems that John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, went to a meeting and urged limited US airstrikes against Syrian airfields, in response to the now established belief that the Assad regime used chemical weapons. The man who opposed him in this instance was the Army Chief of Staff, General Martin Dempsey. Despite the Israelis having hit Syrian targets to interdict supplies to Hezbollah, General Dempsey argued it would take too much money and effort as well as beginning something that the US might not be able to finish.

General Dempsey’s view, for all the talk of rebel-arming, is Mr Obama’s view. He is determined, in the words of one leading British politician I spoke to, “to lead from behind”. Some US commentators are convinced that Mr Obama is encouraging a Hezbollah versus jihadi war to thin out the numbers a bit. This is nonsense. Mr Obama is about getting out of wars, not getting into them. That four Americans were killed yesterday in Bagram by the Taleban, one day after it was announced that there would be peace talks with the friendly little fellows, illustrates the fact that if heavy duty intervening gets done, it’s usually the US that has to do it.

Apart from Mr Kerry and a few Republicans like Lindsey Graham and John McCain all the public pressure runs in favour of keeping out. This is despite the fact that most forms of intervention do not involve huge investments of human capital. Probably less than drone deployment and capturing Osama bin Laden.

But the argument is going by default. As it is here. There is no real political pressure on David Cameron to act on Syria. From right to left it’s “keep out”. Nigel Farage fears that Syrian involvement will contaminate Britain. George Galloway fears British involvement will contaminate Syria.

The Tories, from Boris Johnson to the swivel-eyed, are in full Bosnia mode. Many tribes old thing, can’t impose order, better out of it. Boris’s argument was that if we were going to intervene it should have been done ages ago (when he probably opposed it), but we didn’t and now it’s too late.

And Mr Cameron, who I think can see, like me, where this Syrian disaster is heading, looks over at the Opposition bench and finds no cover. Just 11 months ago Douglas Alexander, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, one of the best and brightest in Labour’s firmament, warned the Russians that if they continued to arm Assad and thwart international sanctions they’d “bear the stain”. But now he says we should “not take actions that compromise the commitment of the Russians to take part” in the Geneva II peace talks.

In so far as Labour has a view and doesn’t just behave like a select committee (“holding the government to account”), it appears to be putting all its eggs in the Geneva II basket. Let the Russians and the Americans somehow sort it out, even if they haven’t even got a date for the talks to begin.

So let me ask this. What evidence is there that either Russia or Assad are prepared for an outcome in which the Syrian President stands aside and is replaced by a transitional government including the opposition? I mean, what tiniest sliver of evidence? They think they’re winning. And with the aircraft and the heavy weaponry, so they are.

Never mind Bosnia, back in 1936 — and I mention this recreationally — Labour decided to back non-interventionism in Spain. The problem was that Hitler and Mussolini were unpersuaded. That didn’t work out and it seems a shame to work so hard to slough off one legacy (that of Iraq) simply to assume another worse one. Because I don’t know what form Syria’s Guernica or Srebrenica will take, just that it is probably going to happen one day soon.