Ed West Ed West

There’s nothing ‘conservative’ about supporting foreign intervention

These are the Arab countries the Foreign Office currently advises it is safe to visit: Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Oman and Jordan. Call this list A.

These are the Arab countries the Foreign Office currently advises avoiding travel to, or to some regions at least: Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, the Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Call this list B.

Anyone notice a pattern here? Answer at the end.

I have to admit to not having a clue whether we should be getting involved in Syria. For the first time yesterday morning I listened to Radio 4 and felt there to be a sort of right-wing bias to it, the entire news story presented as if Jeremy Corbyn was wrong; I know that party splits are of great interest to the media, but maybe Corbyn is right and we shouldn’t be getting involved in Syria – who knows?

I don’t know whether there really are 70,000 ‘moderate’ Syrian opposition soldiers ready to fight Isis, as the Prime Minister claims. The last I heard the American-trained opposition force was down to 4 or 5 (not 4,000, literally four guys). I don’t know whether both Isis and Assad can be beaten. All I can say for certain is that if Isis attacks France then that’s an attack on Britain and I’m happy for us to kill as many of them as possible; it won’t eradicate the risk of terrorism in Britain, which is here to stay whatever happens in Syria and the wider Middle East in the long term.

But as for that long-term plan in Syria, after we’ve killed some jihadis: what I don’t understand is how Conservatives can argue in favour of intervention and nation-building, as David Cameron, William Hague and Boris Johnson have all done.

I supported the Iraq invasion in 2003, by about 75/25, but I didn’t write about politics at the time and so never expressed any public opinion; I was from that generation that had watched helplessly as Africans starved in the 1980s and, following Bosnia and Kosovo, neo-colonialism in the name of liberalism and justice seemed like a good idea at the time.

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