It’s not every day I spring to the defence of Ed Miliband, Secretary for Environment, Net Zero and all the rest of it. But for him to be taken to task for not backing the bombing of Syria back in 2013, as Wes Streeting cautiously does today, is actually to criticise him for his most statesmanlike act during his entire period as Leader of the Opposition.
Miliband was given a rough ride by Nick Robinson on the BBC Today programme about it: would he be able to look the relatives of the unfortunate people murdered in the dictator’s prison in the eye and say that he does not regret not bombing Assad’s forces? To which he stoutly, and honourably, replied that he doesn’t. And good for him.
No one in 2013 was under the smallest illusion about the nature of the Assad government
It would, he said, have been irresponsible to have put British troops ‘in harm’s way’ in that conflict, particularly when there was no obvious exit strategy. ‘This is not,’ he said with masterly understatement, ‘an area of easy answers.’ As to the notion that simply bombing Assad after using chemical weapons against his own people would lead to his overthrow, well the US did bomb Syria and that didn’t happen.
Let’s remind ourselves of the reasons why attacking Syrian forces would have been a bad idea. The chief of them is that before attacking a regime we should be mindful of what might replace it. And what the alternative to the Assad regime was at the time was a coalition of forces, only a minority of whom were paid-up democrats, with a significant part of the rest being paid-up Islamists. The jihadist groups operating in, say, Idlib, should have told us exactly what might lie in store for Syria if Assad had indeed been overthrown.
The second, related issue is that the Islamic State (IS) was still in situ in Syria at this time, in Raqqa, and the Syrian forces, backed by Russia and Iran, were the most likely alliance to overthrow it. Before you say it, I do realise that the former president played a very ugly game with the leaders of IS, using them as well as attacking them, but in this situation we’re talking about the least worst option and that was Assad and his coalition. Bombing his forces would not have assisted the fight against Islamic State, which took control of Mosul swiftly and unexpectedly in 2011, catching our intelligence services on the hop. A bit like the latest takeover by HTS, then.
The third is that the example of Iraq – which Ed Miliband correctly invokes – and of Libya should have given the Tory government pause before it embarked on a bombing spree. The displacement of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadaffi did rid the world of two unpleasant despots but it replaced their repressive regimes with anarchic orders in which the respectable middle classes and minorities such as Christians suffered catastrophically. We have not yet been forgiven for Iraq, by the way. The ignoble but prudent strategy in these cases is the one outlined in Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary verse about Jim, Who Ran away from his Nurse and was Eaten by a Lion: ‘always keep a hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse.’ In this case Bashar al Assad was a known horror, not an unknown one.
Any humane person will recoil at the present revelations of the atrocities carried out in Syrian prisons by the regime, though as Ed Miliband pointed out, no one in 2013 was under the smallest illusion about the nature of the Assad government. But human rights abuses do not of themselves justify military intervention by the British government. Ed Miliband was right and responsible in that vote in 2013 and David Cameron was wrong and irresponsible. Let’s admit that, shall we? And let’s hope that the Islamist HTS government will turn out differently.
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