Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

This Blog has been a persistent critic of the foreign policy of the West, post the Arab Spring. Coming on top of the clear failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring provided an  opportunity to show a less ideological and partisan approach to affairs in the Middle East.

At the beginning the Americans held back from condemning either Mubarak or Gadaffi, so Britain and France took the lead. Many thought involvement in Libya a mistake because it is a cardinal rule of statecraft to stand clear of civil wars. Nevertheless, when France and Britain eventually persuaded a majority in NATO to support military action, made lawful by a somewhat ambiguous UN resolution, the resultant No Fly Zone and general air support for the rebels needed American logistical help and it was given. When Gadaffi fell, Britain, with its allies, hailed a gleeful victory. Unfortunately this tactical success turned out to be, like so much else of recent years, a strategic blunder.

Politically Russia and China felt NATO had extended the UN mandate beyond its remit as another excuse for regime change, which post cold war, has become a NATO speciality. This powerful combination of a former super-power and a rising mega-power determined that such a thing would not happen again. This would have far reaching consequences.

Meanwhile as the Arab spring spread to Syria, an enthusiastic France and Britain mis-calculated that the Assad regime was about to topple. They anticipated another Libya. Unfortunately so did the militant elements opposed to Assad. They fuelled the temper of an autocratic and politically brutal regime, confident that when violence became widespread NATO planes would be in the sky above. They did not appear, so the violence escalated in the sure knowledge that now NATO would have to take to the air. Still they did not. So the skirmishes and bombings became a full scale civil war. NATO has not come and Assad is now winning.

Meanwhile Britain and France blame the Russians. When you have nothing useful to say in international crises, this is always a clever thing to do. Unfortunately with the ending of the stand-off between capitalism and communism these simplistic nostrums are now quite futile. Russia and China asserted from the beginning that there was a danger of turning the protests into violence and then into civil war. They blocked UN authorisation of anything which could be construed as a licence to intervene militarily.

More recently Russia has forestalled clamour from the pro-rebel hawks for a no fly zone by upgrading Syria’s already formidable air defence system. Even our incompetent Foreign office can see that two or three RAF Typhoons shot down at £200 million a piece,  with the crews either dead or taken prisoner, is a price the war weary, austerity suffering British electorate (we have now been fighting for over ten years) simply will not stomach.

Meanwhile the scale and intensity of the fighting in Syria is creating areas of Stalingrad style ruins and unimaginable suffering and displacement of innocent civilians. Not only has the western policy demonstrably made matters worse, but it finds itself locked in to supporting a rag tag and bobtail mixture of competing groupings who would likely turn on each other if Assad did fall, and, worst of all, in which the best organised equipped and disciplined units are those affiliated to Al Quaeda.

Enough is now enough. The time has come for the consumption of a good deal of humble pie. First, maximum weight must be thrown behind the conference initiative launched by John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov and nothing silly, like supplying arms to rebel groups, should be done to sabotage it. Second, renewed efforts must be made to achieve a unified position in the UN between the Western powers and Russia and China. This will have to face the embarrassing reality that while Assad may have once been the source of the problem, he is now an indispensable part of the solution. At all costs this must be aimed to stop the fighting rather than to fuel it.

Finally and most important there will then be required an international effort on an unprecedented scale to help clear up the mess and restore some human decency and quality to the lives of ordinary citizens of Syria, whose attitude can best be summed up by the words of a ten year old girl interviewed for TV by a western commentator. She pleaded for the fighting to stop.

‘I spit on both sides’ she said with feeling.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 9th, 2013 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.