Last September, the House of Commons debated the merit and wisdom of sending British servicemen and women into action yet again. The enemy was the same then as it is now and many of the arguments for and against military action were just as familiar. But back then, back in September 2014, parliament was convinced. MPs voted in overwhelming numbers to authorise military action against ISIS in Iraq. 524 MPs voted Yes and only 43 opposed sending the RAF into the sky again.
Then, as now, this was a limited action with a sharply limited set of objectives. As close to a police action as it was to a fully-fledged “war”. But it was not, quite evidently, considered hugely controversial. No-one threatened to deselect MPs who voted the ‘wrong’ way. No-one, or almost no-one, was labelled a ‘warmonger’ for backing the use of high-explosive force. Something, parliament acknowledged, needed to be done. Someone had to do something to stop ISIS’s advance. And if not us, if not us and our allies, then who?
Of course there were some differences. The Iraqi government, for one thing, had requested assistance. Secondly, and importantly, the western air offensive was designed to assist the Kurdish peshmerga on the ground and aid their attempts to regain territory lost to Islamic State. The Syrian situation is undoubtedly more complicated. Those differences are important but they’re not so important as to explain the colossal change in attitude between what we saw in parliament a year ago and what we have seen this week.
Given that ISIS have dissolved he border between Iraq and Syria there is something illogical about insisting that the RAF respect a border that no longer exists. They can fly only so far but no further. If a target scurries over the old border he cannot be touched by the Typhoons and Tornados. The logic of that attitude escapes me.
Moreover, almost all the arguments made against intervention this week – that Britain will be made less safe, that the RAF’s capability does not add much to the fight anyway and so drearily on and on – applied last year too. The United Kingdom is no less safe this week than it was last week and it seems spectacularly disingenuous to insist it must be. Equally, just as the endgame and exist strategy from Syria are, at present, unavoidably opaque so there is no imminent likelihood of the Iraqi portion of the mission being concluded any time soon.
In other words, on the ground and in the air, there has been little functional change in circumstance. So what gives? What explains the remarkable – and shrill – temper of the debates in the Commons and across the country this week?
The obvious answer is that the Labour party leadership is now indistinguishable from the leadership of the Stop the War (sic) coalition. How could it be when many of the same people are involved, or have been involved, in both organisations?
Hilary Benn’s speech yesterday has been widely – and justly – praised. But it leaves open at least one question: how can he continue to serve Jeremy Corbyn? Their disagreement is hardly trivial or of little account. On the contrary, it could hardly be more serious, significant, or complete. Their differences cannot be reconciled or patched-up or ignored. They are fundamental. This is more than a little tiff over a particular policy proposal; it is a thorough and irrevocable disagreement over what kind of party the Labour party should be and what kind of country the United Kingdom should be. You can be Jeremy or you can be Hilary. You cannot be both and that applies to the Labour party as a whole just as surely as it applies to individuals.
(As a side note and on a matter of personal interest, it was surprising enough to find myself voting for Labour in May; it is even more surprising to discover this morning that I am now, it seems, a Bennite. The world is a mysterious place, right enough.)
Anyway, as I have said before, almost no-one who supports taking the fight to ISIS does so with any great measure of relish far less any expectation of extravagant success. But it remains important to insist upon some elementary truths, the most important of which is the same as it was last year: this is not a battle of our choosing.
Nevertheless, when civilians in Paris, Ankara and Beirut are murdered by barbarian fanatics, when holiday-makers sunning themselves on a Tunisian beach or returning home from Egypt are slaughtered, it is quite something to turn around and argue first that these people were betrayed and endangered by their own governments and, secondly, that these atrocities should be met with little more than a shrug. Because that’s just the way the world turns and, anyway, it is in some vague but obvious sense, largely our own fault anyway. If we were different they would be different.
Except they wouldn’t. Because they are exactly as they want to be and they neither need nor seek any encouragement from us – or anyone else – to be the way they want to be.
Pious intimations that a ‘comprehensive regional peace settlement’ are all very well and good but, actually, not very useful at all when there’s no prospect of peace in the first place because vanishingly few actors in the region have any desire for a peace settlement in the first place.
But of course containing and squeezing Islamic State is a very limited goal. Modesty, in this argument, is on the side of the interventionists. They appreciate that our options are as limited as they are unattractive; the immodest claims are made by those opposing intervention. It is they who make immodest, fantastical, claims about the possibility of ‘peace’; it is they whose declared ambitions are richly extravagant.
Of course the risks of intervention are real but they are no more real now than they were when British forces were intervening in Iraq last week. If that was a risk that could be borne last month so it is one that can be shouldered this month. Parliament was sanguine about that last year and nothing of substance has changed in the intervening 15 months.
And, of course, even defeating Islamic State or, failing that, severely depleting its capacity for organised action, will not be the end of the matter. Here again, however, it is the interventionists who appreciate the modesty of our ambitions and they, especially those interventionists still part of the Labour party, deserve something better than to be traduced by their notional comrades on the left. Then again, that left – that anti-fascist left – is not what once it was. As two votes in the House of Commons, just 15 months apart, so clearly tell us.
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