Syria: The Benefit of Hindsight?

Three years ago today, I posted this beautiful quotation from Robin Cook to this blog.

It was extremely fitting. The British Parliament had voted down David Cameron's plans to launch airstrikes against President Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria. In the days before the vote, the world had been inching closer to war. Presidents and prime ministers in the West were preparing to lead their airman towards the sounds of gunfire. The two year old Syrian conflict was about to get a lot messier.

All of that came crashing to a halt when British MPs went against the pleading of their own Prime Minister. Their decision to prevent British involvement brought the entire march to war to a shuddering halt, as leaders fell over themselves to check with their own legislatures, or paused to gauge support. It wasn't there. And so the crisis passed, and nothing happened.

At the time, I was jubilant. The elected representatives of the British people, by putting a check on the actions of their own prime minister, had helped to prevent another war between the West and a Middle Eastern dictator. MPs had made up for the catastrophic error of judgement they had made a decade earlier, and restored some moral authority to the Mother of Parliaments.

Three years on, I am not so sure. The decision to spare the Syrian government may have been the worst foreign policy decision we have made about Syria.

Earlier in August, reports began to emerge from Syria of a fresh horror. A suburb of Damascus had been attacked from the air. It wasn't long before hospitals were crowded with people who had clearly been poisoned. Chemical warfare had returned.

There had already been accusations that chemical weapons had been used in the Syrian conflict. But this was evident. One of the clear lines of international relations, that states that use weapons of mass destruction must be held accountable, had been crossed. The War Crimes Tribunals from Yugoslavia had ruled the use of chemical weapons was one of the highest breaches of international law. Britain and America had attacked and destroyed Iraq over the merest hint of a chemical weapons programme. Would Syria be allowed to get away with this appalling slaughter?

The short answer was yes. Although Russia and the USA negotiated a deal to remove and destroy the weapons, the message was clear. The international community did not care enough about the use of chemical weapons to punish Bashar al-Assad and his government. Assad saw that the rest of the world was divided, and so continued his savage fight for survival, safe in the knowledge that not even using poisons against his own people was enough to bring down the wrath of the international community. He has used them again. As have the rebels. The Western world had apparently decided that the use of chemical weapons was not so bad it demanded punishment. That is a staggering message to have sent the rest of the world, to every state considering using these vile weapons in a future conflict. We essentially declared that this wasn't a big deal, providing they tried to make amends afterwards.

And what did the Syrian rebels make of this U-turn by the rest of the world? They had hoped that the rest of the world would be shocked into action by Assad's barbarity. Instead, the world had shown them that it did not care how many Syrian civilians died, or in what manner they died. Instead, many Syrian rebels turned to the groups that promised to take the fight to Assad, no matter what. During late 2013, a group that had existed in the shadows since the suppression of the Iraqi Insurgency announced it was taking control of several Syrian Islamist rebel groups. In honour of this new venture, it called itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

I'm not saying had we unleashed cruise missiles against Assad's chemical weapons plants that ISIS would never have come into being. But the message it pushed was that jihad would provide the path to ousting Assad. Given the timidity of the rest of the world, you can understand why many Syrian rebels chose ISIS.

When David Cameron took his proposed airstrikes to the House of Commons in August 2013, the example cited was the Iraq War of 2003. That is not right. Iraq was an illegal war, which destroyed the Iraqi state on false pretexts and inflicted misery on millions. That is not what MPs were being asked to endorse. Were it, they should have shot it down in an instant.

No, the better template seems to me to be the end of the Yugoslav Wars in 1995. There, the genocide of Srebrenica hammered home the reality of the conflict. There was outrage, and the UN asked NATO to respond. Under the hammer blows of NATO airstrikes, the Serbs were forced to the conference table. Within a few months, the Dayton Accords had imposed peace on the region, a peace which has now lasted two decades.

I'm not saying we should be trigger happy, or that bombing Syria would not have been difficult, and led to bloodshed, and possibly have made things worse. I have not suddenly become a Chicago-esque, liberal interventionist.

All I'm saying is, three years on, I am not so sure we made the right call.