Politics isn’t a joke, a theatrical show of ego and image. Or at least it shouldn’t be. It’s about the livelihoods, hopes and futures of millions of people: and, as Syria demonstrates, about whether human beings live or die. Tawdry, depressing and wholly unsurprising, then, that the Tories have delighted in using Syria’s agony to exploit Labour’s entrenched divisions. But the Tories have a knack of deriving partisan advantage from crisis, and there’s little point complaining about it. Labour – and I mean all sides of Labour – needs to get its act together, expose the disastrous consequences of Tory policies, and offer a coherent alternative that can actually inspire the majority of people.
Tuesday, 1 December 2015
Syria airstrikes: everything you need to know
As Jeremy Corbyn offers his party a free vote over military action in Syria what are the arguments for and against the UK extending its air campaign againstIslamic State militants?
Why are we debating airstrikes in Syria?
The government is planning to hold a Commons vote on Wednesday on extending Britain’s bombing campaign against Isis from Iraq to Syria as public alarm about the extremist group’s continuing strength increases in the wake of the attacks in Paris. David Cameron set out the “moral” and “security” case for bombing Isis in Syria in the Commons last week, saying it was morally unacceptable to leave the US, France and other allies to carry the burden. “If not now, when?” he asked MPs.
The issue has exposed deep divisions in the Labour party. In 2013 Labour’s opposition helped inflict a surprise defeat against Cameron and his plans to launch airstrikes against the regime of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, over his use of chemical weapons. More than two years later many in the parliamentary Labour party, including half the shadow cabinet, are much more convinced by the case for airstrikes in Syria against Isis, which has seized and held territory amid the civil war. Corbyn, the party leader, is opposed.
PM seeks formal cabinet approval for Syria airstrikes before Commons debate
The prime minister is seeking the formal approval of the cabinet for airstrikes against Isis targets in Syria ahead of a 10-hour debate in the Commons on Wednesday, in which the government is almost certain to win a majority for military action.
Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to allow Labour MPs to have a free vote on whether to bomb targets in Syria will hand David Cameron a “guaranteed majority” in parliament, the former shadow home secretary David Davis has said.
The cabinet will be asked to agree to the scrapping of the weekly session of prime minister’s questions to allow the prime minister to open the debate at midday with the vote scheduled to take place at 10pm.
Corbyn will set out his opposition to the bombings when he replies to the prime minister. But Labour divisions will be highlighted when Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, who supports the bombing, winds up for Labour at about 9.30pm. Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, is expected to conclude for the government.
Davis, who will be among a small number of Conservative MPs to vote with Corbyn in opposing airstrikes, said the Labour leader’s decision to allow his MPs to have a free vote has guaranteed the prime minister victory.
The former shadow home secretary told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4: “The thing that has triggered this has been Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to have a free vote on this, Labour party disunity. However you want to put it, that’s what’s given David Cameron a guaranteed majority. He [Corbyn] is new politics in at least one sense: he is giving everybody the right to [have a] say. Frankly, to be honest, this is a matter of life and death. You can’t whip an issue like this.”
The Tory whips are confident that they have substantially reduced the number of Tory rebels who voted against airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad in August 2013 to well below 20.
The Tory rebels are likely to be strongly outweighed by as many as 60 Labour MPs who are prepared to vote in favour of airstrikes.
But Clive Lewis, a shadow frontbencher who is a strong Corbyn supporter, warned that Labour MPs who vote with the government will face reprisals if the airstrikes lead to more terrorist attacks. Lewis told the Today programme: “If there are members of the PLP that want to bomb in Syria and vote with the Tories, then on their heads be it.
German cabinet approves anti-Isis military mission in Syria
The German cabinet has approved plans to commit up to 1,200 soldiers to support the international coalition fighting against Islamic State in Syria.
The mandate, which requires parliamentary approval, was endorsed by ministers on Tuesday. It is not yet clear when lawmakers will consider the proposals, but Angela Merkel’s governing coalition has a large majority and approval looks assured.
Following the Paris attacks, the chancellor agreed to honour a request from France to provide support for its operations against Isis in Syria. Germany plans to send reconnaissance aircraft, tanker planes and a warship to the region in support roles, but will not actively engage in combat.
The mandate is for one year at a cost of €134m (£94m) and can be extended next year.
Germanys’ foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, acknowledged ahead of the cabinet vote that it could be a protracted fight. “We are doing what is militarily necessary, what we can do best, and what we can back politically,” Steinmeier told the daily Bild. “We need patience against an enemy like IS.”
No date has been set for the parliamentary vote but approval is considered virtually guaranteed as Merkel’s “grand coalition” government has an overwhelming majority.
A German frigate could help protect the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle in the eastern Mediterranean, from which fighter jets are carrying out bombing runs, and tanker aircraft could refuel them mid-air to extend their range, the defence minister, Ursula von der Leyen, said last week.
Blair guilty of 'criminal irresponsibility' over Iraq war, says Livingstone
Tony Blair was guilty of “criminal irresponsibility” for launching the Iraq war in 2003 based on the testimony of one discredited local politician who said that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, Ken Livingstone has said.
The former London mayor spoke out as he defended his claim last week that Blair was to blame for the 52 deaths in the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005 after ignoring warnings that the invasion of Iraq would provoke terrorists.
His claims prompted calls at a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party on Monday night for Livingstone to be sacked from his role as co-convenor of Labour’s defence role.
But Livingstone strongly defended his remarks on Question Time on BBC1 last week in which he said that Blair’s failure to heed warnings from the security services about the impact of the invasion of Iraq on terrorism had “killed 52 Londoners”.
He told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4: “I simply told the truth. Everybody knows who saw the website they [the 7/7 bombers] left; they’d actually gone to kill Londoners and give their own lives in order to do that because of our involvement in Iraq. This is the problem.
“Tony Blair was told by the security services when he took that decision this will put us at risk. We started preparing for that. We spent four years of tests and exercises because we knew that terror attack would come.
“If that had been the truth – that Saddam Hussein had had nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction. But to base that whole war on the testimony of one discredited local politician now in retrospect looks like absolutely criminal irresponsibility.”
Livingstone’s remarks may have referred to the late Ahmed Chalabi, a founder of the Iraqi National Congress, who passed on intelligence to the US in the run-up to the war claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD.
In his appearance on Question Time, Livingstone said: “I remember when Tony Blair was told by the security services: ‘If you go into Iraq, we will be a target for terrorism.’ And he ignored that advice and it killed 52 Londoners.”
Bombing Isis is not enough – we’ll need to talk to them too
David Cameron says we should fight Islamic State. Jeremy Corbyn says we should talk to them. They are both partly right – we need to fight and talk. Each is necessary but not sufficient. If it is really our intent to “degrade and destroy” Isis, then we need both a military and a political strategy.
Bombing is necessary. It can help stop Isis advancing, and it was crucial in allowing Kurdish fighters to retake Sinjar and hold on in Kobani. And it makes no sense whatever to bomb Isis on the Iraqi side of the border, but not the Syrian side. If the difference is supposed to be that we have the permission of the government in Iraq but not in Syria, that is a joke. I haven’t noticed Bashar al-Assad objecting to Russian and French bombing. And if the argument is that Isis will attack us here because we start bombing them in Syria, but not because we’ve already been bombing them in Iraq for a year, then that is absurd.
Monday, 30 November 2015
Is climate change to blame for Syria’s civil war?
Was the Syrian civil war partly caused by climate change? Prince Charles, for one, seems to think so. “There is very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria was a drought that lasted for about five or six years,” he told Sky News, adding that climate change is having a “huge impact” on conflict and terrorism.
The Prince is not alone on this one: he joins a chorus of voices making similar claims. In the U.S. President Barack Obama, Al Gore, and the democratic presidential hopefuls Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders have all talked of a link between climate change and the Syria conflict.
Having spent some time analysing the evidence, we believe there is good reason to doubt the veracity of these claims. First, most of the public and policy discourse on the conflict implications of climate change is driven by politics, not science.
The earliest reports on the subject were not scientific studies but military-led attempts to dramatise the importance of climate change by linking it to security interests. And the recent outpouring of claims about Syria’s civil war is motivated by a similar attempt to “securitise” climate change ahead of the Paris summit. While some scientific studies do find that climate change has conflict and security implications, just as many disagree.
Deeply flawed study
There appears to be some scientific support for the climate-conflict thesis: a study by Earth scientists at Columbia University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found: “Climate change is implicated in the current Syrian conflict”. The problem is, this study is deeply flawed.
First, the study is not even about Syria specifically, nor about the links between Syria’s drought and civil war. Rather, its key finding is that there was a multi-year drought during the late 2000s across the “fertile crescent”, a region defined by the authors as stretching from southern Russia to Saudi Arabia. Through statistical modelling, it is then claimed that this drought was made two to three times more likely by human-caused climate change.
On to this analysis, the authors simply bolt a few dubious, secondary assertions about the links between drought and conflict in Syria. Crucial among these is that pre-war drought in Syria led to the displacement of as many as 1.5 million people to the country’s cities. But this figure — widely reproduced in media reports — is almost certainly wrong: the sole source for it is a single short news report, and it is completely out of line with Syrian government, UN and other estimates, most of which suggested numbers in the region of 250,000.
Moreover, whatever the level of pre-war internal migration within Syria, it is misleading to pin this mainly on drought. Syria’s cities were growing throughout the 2000s, thanks to economic liberalisation. And most of the “drought migration” occurred in 2009, after the overnight cancellation of subsidies on diesel and fertilisers.
Most important of all, the Columbia authors present no serious evidence whatsoever that Syria’s “drought migrants” helped spark the civil war.
They offer no evidence that any of the early unrest was directed against the drought migrants — which one would surely expect if they were indeed a cause of social stresses. And this, to put it bluntly, is because there is no such evidence.
The case for international action on climate change is strong enough without relying on dubious evidence of its impacts on civil wars. Claims such as these are mostly rhetorical moves to appeal to security interests or achieve sensational headlines, and should be recognised as such. Prince Charles and others should steer well clear.
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