Leaders Bored: Syria, Corbyn and Foreign Affairs as Domestic Kudos

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 26^th, though. Suddenly ISIS in Paris became ISIS in Syria.

“"That bomb in Paris, that could have been London. If they had their way, it would be London," said Mr Cameron.

[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)

“He said there was strong legal justification for extending the current military action in Iraq on grounds of self-defence, and insisted that the Government saw military action as part of a “comprehensive” strategy to bring peace to Syria.” 

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.

What is it Good For?

Libya 2011 bemused. All the arguments they, our leaders, were making could have been made of other places, were truer of other places. It seemed inevitable we were going in and it sounded insincere. But the peaks and troughs of our interest in Syria over the last two and a half years? A month ago we had the chemical attack, the Commons no vote and the resultant ‘not another Iraq’ comments and protests, seemingly overlooking Libya.

Even that threat of intervention seems to have been just another peak. We’ve returned to vigilant condemnation, having reproachfully noted the umpteenth serious/shocking escalation of the conflict. But I suddenly catch myself considering Syria as a ‘better example’ of somewhere to intervene in, and realize what I’m tacitly calling for as a consequence – whether it be a no-fly zone, bombardment or an invasion.

‘War is a crime against humanity. I renounce war, and am therefore determined not to support any kind of war. I am also determined to work for the removal of all causes of war.'

Peace Pledge Union

Try as I might, ‘And yet…’ seems to define my response to the above. I find I can state the first and last statements with ease, confidence. Probably most members of the public, the political world and the armed forces would agree with them at least nominally, in principle. But I have a problem with the middle one. And I have a problem with the fact that I have a problem with the middle one.

It’s always been a grey area, I’ll admit. War is awful. Killing a human being is so viscerally repugnant. The insanity of one life judging that another should end, of ranking life so highly in survival efforts and yet ending other lives as part of that survival – ending the same life in others that you value so highly and protect so much in yourself and your people. It’s a terrible thing to do and a terrible thing to have to do (and yes, ‘have to do’ is a loaded description). Sending troops in knowing they will both do this and be the victims of it is the highest level of inhuman arrogance at worst and detachment at best, detachment from the most precious thing we have. Consider your own death, decades of consciousness into oblivion, as someone else’s decision, with them numbed by strictly tactical thinking – and you numbered by it.

And yet… the strategic engagements and the inevitable killing the armed forces do to limit a war, or to intervene in a humanitarian crisis at the hands of militias, depots or terrorists, are not things I’m prepared to completely come out against. I always allow a sort of settlement with the conflicts; one where I think that war was what the other chap was doing.

It’s a convenient way of attacking war and warfare while not actually going anywhere near criticizing what the armed forces do. Hitler, Saddam, bin Laden… look what you made us do. This allows me to keep my conscience relatively clear and have it both ways. I am able to acknowledge that both forces’ part in the warfare and killing, theirs and ours, was a terrible thing, and can do so without attacking the military’s actions or very purpose. What we did was an abhorrent last resort that we had to fall back on because of the impossible position the other person left us in. All the killing and horror that occurred during combat is laid at the door of the person who caused a situation where we had to fight. This is also how the criticism of the politicians goes – they who will happily take us into wars when it’s the armed forces that have to fight them.

With a conflict in place the forces are brave because they go into impossibly bad situations. Impossibly bad not just (just!) because of the danger but also because these are places where there is a total failure for everyone else on the planet, a situation that no one can touch. Invasions of countries, civilian deaths and hardship: situations where the knowledge that killing is wrong is neither any help to the people dying nor any hindrance to those killing; situations where all the possible solutions are themselves abhorrent, where morality has to be ranked, utilitarian; situations where the forces’ response is going to involve death – killed and killing – but less death – killed and killing – than there would have been. These situations give the armed forces a context, their raison d’être.

Whether I’m attacking al-Qaeda and the Taliban for their bloody provocation, provocation which killed civilians, East and West, and which drew our forces into an ugly conflict with ugly fighting, or Blair and Bush for sending young men to die in Afghanistan and Iraq for reasons that seem forever in flux, I never stop to think: what would the armed forces do if these people didn’t start it all?

When it’s bald like that, without the enemy, I suddenly feel awkward. Because then the only thing left to say when you give your ‘war is wrong’ speech is that the force is wrong: the guns, explosives, and the men and women who sign up for it.

 
It hits me more with remembrance and memorials. War: what they were in was wrong; what they did was brave. It looks so easy, put like that, but there is far more of an overlap, with pro and anti war/militarist sentiments moving in. A clearer distinction might be War: what they were in was wrong; what they did was wrong; that they were faced with having to do it, and did it, is what makes them brave. Politicians’ speeches praising the efforts of the forces, punctuated with negative-sounding adjectives about war and conflict, tend to leave a disingenuous gap in the middle where somehow the wars, which are wrong by nature, seem to have been fought with admirably good warfare. Perhaps if warfare were not what it actually is then it would be a good thing.

How can one reconcile the view that warfare is a terrible last resort, carried out by brave people doing an awful-by-nature job, with the ‘I’m proud to fight for my country’ sentiment? It is certainly acknowledged and appreciated when we commemorate the forces and make speeches about them. So can we appreciatively cite a combatant’s pride if we think conflict is terrible? Can you be proud to do a terrible job, or does the pride suggest you don’t think the job is terrible?

Warfare takes the armed forces into wretched situations, and what they have to do in those situations is awful – combat, facing horrendous permanent injury and having to kill or be killed. People are brave, are heroes, if you like, for being prepared to go into these situations and do these things, but we shouldn’t clumsily invert that and try to suggest that the things they face are heroic. The fact that they fought is brave, is worthy of pride, praise, acknowledgement and remembrance; their fighting is not.

You are not a hero for fighting the enemy, but for being prepared to. If we think participation in warfare is anything other than the worst human situation on earth then we are condoning conflict and downplaying the risks to and bravery of the forces.

Going back to the second statement from the Peace Pledge Union, I do not ‘support’ any kind of war or any particular war, whatever stance I might adopt case-by-case. I acquiesce to the West’s part in certain conflicts in a lesser of too evils sense. And my tentative ‘yes’ is obviously given from the safety of personal opinion as a member of the public, uninvolved in either combat or in making the call, or not, to intervene.

Perhaps pacifism is just theoretical. But it is there, in your head, to be considered or ignored. The fact that we have armed forces and people who will take up arms makes conflict an option for political decision makers, or any type of leader – more of an option. Armed forces perversely make war both more likely and less likely, both cause and end wars. War exists, so the forces have to exist to fight, limit and end them, but if the forces didn’t exist then wars couldn’t exist. Arguments in favour of the armed forces are like those of nuclear deterrent: it’s not us; it’s them. We don’t want an army ourselves, but while other countries out there pose a risk to us, or to the democratic world, we need our army to defend us/it. But, theoretical or not, if no one joined the armed forces or took up arms, in any country, combat would not be an option for anyone, whether they be a right-minded democratic government or a genocidal tyrant – assuming tyrants could exist without armies.

In the practical meantime, where wars exist and the brave sign up to fight them and lessen their effects, we have to return to blaming the person, the people in charge, rather than the force. The terrorist leaders, the hateful self-appointees, the life-trampling despots, the trigger-happy political monsters with bloody hands and bloody egos spitting from Westminster and Washington and the rest of the world. They don’t fight for us; their words don’t speak for us. These people will often talk about the debt we owe the armed forces. They owe them a damn sight more, not least in terms of apologies and explanations.  

Thanks to Ajit for inspiration, and this: