David Cameron made a characteristically fluent case on Thursday. But he did not actually answer the two critical questions that must precede any decision by Britain to initiate hostilities within Syria: namely, what is the political end game and what is the military plan to achieve it?
The first is incredibly difficult but not impossible. We need to drag all the interested parties around a table and hammer out a mutually acceptable solution.
If we are still a long way from a consensus, it is because most of the main players seem more intent on destabilising their enemies than stabilising their friends.
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have a history of enabling financial support for any jihadi group that attacked the Shia – including Isis. Turkey has facilitated the sale of up to a billion dollars of Isis oil, has held open the border for jihadi groups and their intelligence agency has supplied arms to jihadis in Syria.
We need to bang our supposed allies’ heads together and stop this nonsense. It can be done. The Arab nations are waking up to the dangers of their own activities, with the sacking of some of their pro-Isis ministers. Similarly, the Russians need to grip the Iranians.
And we have to stop obsessing about Assad. His regime is vicious, but so is nearly every active player in this conflict. The British government’s line smacks of a retrospective wish to justify its abortive 2013 attempt to bomb him. But the Syrian government still controls most of the cities and is the only plausible guarantor of the safety of all the non-Sunni communities threatened by a jihadi victory. The wisest course is to start negotiations on the future of Syria and Iraq without any preconditions.
The second unanswered question is even harder. What is the military plan? Since we cannot win with air alone, this reduces to “where will we find a pro-western army?”
David Cameron asserted that the “Free Syrian Army” commanded 70,000 troops. What this probably refers to is a disparate range of up to 1,500 different tribes and villages, in possibly 40 loose associations. Many of these operate under the control of Isis or the two essentially al-Qaida affiliates. Only the Kurds are in truth independent of the jihadis.
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