Syria has bubbled up to the top of the political agenda and
news bulletins once again. Whether we act or not, it’s seemingly more
interesting to us because of what it means for the leaders on either side of
the UK political spectrum, rather than for what is happening – and what might
happen – on the ground or in the air in Syria.
When it comes to our response, we’ve been here many abortive
times before. The short version is, as a rule: yes, it’s terrible, yes, it’s
been going on in mass, bloody daily civilian death tolls since, gosh, 2011
(back when people were self-immolating and we got all excited about an Arab
spring), but it’s complicated. Yes it’s a 200k+ body count about now, yes Assad’s bad,
but ISIS are worse (and also huge and complex – vaccinating and handing out aid with one hand
and killing soldiers, journalists, civilians… with the other). Plus there’s all
the other groups, and trying to decide if some, all, or any of them are
preferable to Assad or Isis is too nuanced and verbose for anything that
could be pitched to the nation prior to bombing the fuck out of shit. We would
like Assad gone, worded carefully, but we don’t want Isis to take his place.
Westminster clocked up 2hrs 40 on the subject on the 26th, though. Suddenly ISIS in Paris
became ISIS in Syria.
[I hate to be inversely unpatriotic, but surely they did
have their way, and they chose Paris].
"I can't stand here and say we are safe from all these threats. We are not. I can't stand here either and say we will remove the threat through the action that we take.
"But do I stand here with advice behind me that taking action will reduce and degrade that threat over time? Absolutely and I have examined my conscience and that's what it is telling me."
Will this lens be enough to push a vote in for action?
2013 gave us demonstrations and a no vote in the commons for
any action over Syria. Not another Iraq, we said, Libya 2011 airstrikes
notwithstanding. Radio 4 would have weepy pieces about teachers who didn’t have
to worry about their retarded pupils (they’d missed so much school from
bombs/airstrikes they were mentally backward by preteen) any more (one last
strike had blown up the school with the kids inside).
But that was then. Now we have a Labour leadership poised
for self-destruction. So while there was a protest over the
morality/effectiveness/motive behind Syrian intervention, the rights and wrongs
of it are less interesting, it seems, than whether the Labour party agrees with
Jeremy Corbyn about it all.
Who’s for and against action in Labour, who’s giving the
juiciest quotes about dissention. Who’s namechecking Bolsheviks and dark ages
and describing shadow cabinet meetings with all those words like brutal and
bloodbath and hell and other things in all those disembodied quotes that always
make for cracking news slots.
The former ministers are the ones who get to give the media
what they really want. JC should resign! “How does Jeremy Corbyn and
his small group of tiny Trots in the bunker think they've got the unique view
on it all?” – mixed far left and right imagery there.
“BBC chief political correspondent Vicki Young said she was told Mr Corbyn was given a "thorough kicking" at the meeting with his shadow cabinet.
“He had previously suggested he wanted to agree a united position within his shadow cabinet and for Labour to approach the question “as a party". The free vote means Labour MPs will not be ordered to vote with the leadership.”
Reading that back, stickler here, but I can’t help thinking
that there’s either a ‘free vote’ or no vote at all.
But Corbyn was, it seems, bullied into the free vote, having
thought to impose a three line whip to make sure the party toed the line. It
seems a shadow cabinet meeting put paid to this:
“At an extraordinary meeting of Labour’s front bench team this afternoon, shadow ministers lined up to support David Cameron’s position and called for the party to vote with the Conservatives in favour of airstrikes.
Those in favour of action are understood to include the shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn, Mr Corbyn’s deputy, Tom Watson, as well as his Justice, Education and Health spokespeople. Only three shadow cabinet ministers out of 31 voiced opposition to air strikes at the meeting.”
And bullying apparently works both ways. Over eager left
leaning supporters have been quite free with their angry encouragement/threats
to airstrike supporters, including anti-war protestors sending a photo of a dead baby to an MP with
a note to vote against the strikes - you know, like those illustrated, 250%
opinions you get from certain contacts in your Facebook feed, when young,
bright enthusiasm ends up hurting people, or at least their feelings.
Just because the youth and passion for your cause is pure
and looks so winning and admirable (which is supposedly why the parties put
people like this in charge of social media and smaller party/public interface
roles), it doesn’t necessarily follow that the ways and means you come up with
to express and act on that young (perhaps green) passion will be pure, or even
particularly nice.
And on the other side there’s the rather unfortunate and
hawkish: you’re either with us or with them. Once David Cameron says ‘terrorist sympathisers’ in a speech there’s no
way of backing down or qualifying who was being referred to – if you use the
term then you’ve allowed yourself the easy, mindless motivational soundbite and
a disingenuous, fictional polarised rendering of the situation. If you object
to military action against a terrorist group then you support the terrorist
group. There’s another one of those 250 percent opinions. And see the ‘I’m a terrorist sympathiser’ social reaction.
It’s high stakes, though, isn’t it? David Cameron needs
enough labour MPs to vote yes to cover his Tory dissenters. So the vote is to
be timed for maximum support.
And it’s a long old one, though. Wednesday is to be the
debate and vote, running from 10:00am to 11:00pm and some. Just imagine all
those thick papery Few Good Men case studies the young, up and coming and
caffeinated backroom boys are preparing round the clock right now. A precedent
for every eventuality. These are the leader quality politicians of ten years’
time or so – this is what Cameron, Osborne, Burnham, Miliband et al would have
been doing 15-20 years ago, for the Majors and the Portillos and the John
Smiths.
Though it is a shame that career paths and the fate of a
country and its people have to be so intertwined. Why is a fusty crisis of
cabinet aggravation with mildy annoyed complaints from hitherto unheard of MPs
to the media more interesting than what happens on the ground in foreign
affairs?
Maybe it’s a leadership/ election thing, maybe when we’re
all excited about how our domestic politics is going to turn out we have to go
for this angle. Any foreign policy stuff becomes about the policy makers, not
the foreign situation. So American foreign policy is now rendered through the
Obama-before-the-election lens. Sort of, ‘what does Donald Trump say about it?’
The leaden gravity of the situation and the bloody reality
of life and death on the ground in Syria aside, it’s not as if it isn’t
exciting as an international relations gig, either. We’ve got a ‘we’re next!’ approach
to the Paris attacks, with DC putting us at the top of ISIS’s hit list, so
we may as well defend ourselves. (C4)
Do we think it will go Cameron’s way? Which IS Cameron’s
way, exactly? Is he using ISIS outrage to try and get through what failed the
last time? The government and the people opposed military intervention in Syria
in 2013. “I get that” Cameron said in immediate
response, with clear anger and frustration.
Of course, as with Iraq, where a humanitarian crisis was
trumped by terrorism concerns, only to become once again about a humanitarian
crisis when the terrorism threat looked a bit weak in retrospect, Syria never
quite cut it as a humanitarian crisis we should put a stop to. It took the
threat of ISIS for a convincing case to hit Syria to appear. We’ll worry about
their territory in Iraq and elsewhere another time, perhaps.
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