Not really.\u00a0He always said that he would not go to the Commons unless he knew there was a majority for a bombing campaign on IS targets in Syria. It is now abundantly clear that no such majority exists and is never likely to. The intervention of Russia and\u00a0Iran\u00a0has changed the game. To send more planes into a crowded theatre would do more harm than good and make no practical difference whatsoever. It would be another tokenist military gesture of the kind Cameron loves and comes in his general folder of ‘doing the right thing’. Well it’s the wrong thing and it’s stupid.<\/p>\n
Russia and\u00a0Iran have a strategy. It is to shore up the state structures of the Assad regime, reduce the immediate threats to its survival, then to negotiate a political settlement with all reasonable\u00a0parties. They believe, rightly, that to allow another state collapse, on top of Iraq and Libya, would ensure a quick take over by IS in\u00a0Damascus, most likely followed in fairly short order by their arrival in Tripoli. Whatever anybody thinks of Assad, his is the only functioning government in the neighbourhood. \u00a0Iraq is paralysed by internal discord and\u00a0Libya has at least two, with additional warlords and bandits. Russia\u00a0insists that Assad stays until there is a viable political settlement but are happy to see him go at that point. They see the uber enemy as IS. So does the West see IS as enemy no 1.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately everything after that in the West’s muddled thinking is either impractical, impossible, based on wishful thinking or a fantasy. It has learned not one single lesson from Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. It has no strategy or end game. It is buffeted by its Arab allies, some of whom push it in one direction while they themselves arm and fund another. It has not learned that you cannot replace a government led by a strong man, however big an ogre, by a coalition of nonentities who fall out among themselves the instant their common foe is vanquished. Until the West can grow up and produce a coherent strategy which looks workable and likely to deliver, it\u00a0needs to avoid inflaming the problems by piecemeal campaigns and pointless bombings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Not really.\u00a0He always said that he would not go to the Commons unless he knew there was a majority for a bombing campaign on IS targets in Syria. It is now abundantly clear that no such majority exists and is never likely to. The intervention of Russia and\u00a0Iran\u00a0has changed the game. To send more planes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-malcolm-blair-robinson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9395"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9397,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9395\/revisions\/9397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}