The politicians lying about Syria

Old grievances in Western politics have been reopened by the sudden fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. And they are as dispiriting in their dishonesty as they are myopic in their self-interest. On the one hand, we have the unrepentant interventionists convinced that the tyrant’s fall would have happened years earlier were it not for Ed Miliband’s recklessness in 2013, when he blocked British airstrikes. On the other, we have the unrepentant anti-interventionists, led by Miliband himself, who say the real criminals are those who recklessly pursued the Iraq war a decade earlier. To paraphrase Henry Kissinger, it’s a pity that both sides can’t lose this tedious and tendentious war of history that reveals far more about the failures of our political class than either side appears to understand.

To take the interventionists at face value, you would think the fall of Assad in 2024 is somehow proof of their own wisdom in supporting airstrikes on his regime 11 years earlier in response to his use of chemical weapons. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, said last week that “if the West had acted faster, Assad would have been gone”. By not intervening when it had the chance, the West “created a vacuum that Russia moved into and kept Assad in power for much longer”, Streeting argued. It’s a neat story with a pleasingly simple moral at its core: take action or somebody else will.

Streeting’s account of recent history — notably far from his health brief — is the conventional view in London, Paris and Washington; the view of what Barack Obama once described as “the blob”. It is no surprise, then, that it was echoed by George Osborne on his podcast, Political Currency, last week. Osborne described David Cameron’s failure to win parliamentary authorisation for military action in 2013 – inadvertently setting off a train of events culminating in Barack Obama’s decision not to impose his red line against chemical weapons — as one of his greatest regrets from government. “Forget about the suffering the Syrian people have endured for the past 10 years as a result [of non intervention], look at the massive migration flows into Germany, the pressures that put on European governments, the collapse of more moderate centrist administrations, ultimately the small boats that come across the English Channel,” Osborne explained. All could be traced back to the West’s failure to take control back in 2013 when it had the chance.

To support Osborne’s case, he played a clip of the British diplomat Hugh Powell reflecting on the lost parliamentary vote a decade in.

Powell was Cameron’s deputy national security adviser in 2013, and scion of Britain’s greatest diplomatic family. He is the son of Margaret Thatcher’s former foreign affairs adviser, Charles Powell, and nephew of Keir Starmer’s national security adviser, Jonathan. In Hugh’s view, the 2013 vote against intervention was “a massive mistake”. The key point, he said, was that the Assad regime was always fragile and could have been knocked out of power with more forceful Western intervention. “2013 was an opportunity to help crack it well before Hezbollah and Russia came to its rescue,” Powell told Osborne and his podcast partner, Ed Balls. “And with Assad gone we had a good chance of installing a power-sharing government in Damascus that might well have prevented the hidden expansion of ISIS.” It’s a neat story.

“Osborne’s attempt to claim the Syrian non-intervention led to the small-boats crisis is particularly lamentable.”

The thing is, though, Powell’s explanation is exactly the opposite of what David Cameron insisted was the case at the time. In 2013, Cameron told MPs that he was seeking parliamentary approval for military action for one reason alone: to deter the use of chemical weapons. “The question before the House today is how to respond to one of the most abhorrent uses of chemical weapons in a century,” Cameron began in his statement pleading for their support. “It is not about taking sides in the Syrian conflict, it is not about invading, it is not about regime change, and it is not even about working more closely with the opposition; it is about the large-scale use of chemical weapons and our response to a war crime — nothing else.”

So, which is it? Was it a missed opportunity for regime change, as we are now led to believe. Or was it a failure to punish the use of chemical weapons that had nothing to do with regime change, as Cameron insisted then?

Powell’s apparent admission that there was a wider ambition was picked up by Ed Miliband to defend his decision to vote against military action. Responding to Wes Streeting’s comments, Miliband correctly stated that the 2013 vote was — at least ostensibly — to authorise a “one-off bombing of Syria”. However, Miliband then claimed the reason he did not support this one-off bombing mission was because “there was no plan for what this British involvement would mean, where it would lead and what the consequences would be”.

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Miliband’s account is just as lamentably dishonest as Cameron’s. If Western intervention would have made no difference to Assad’s grip on power because it was a “one-off”, then his argument for not punishing Assad in 2013 is logically bogus. But if it were not, then he cannot at the same time claim with certainty that the air strikes would not have undermined Assad’s grip on power. They were either one-off strikes or they were not. Miliband, like Cameron and Osborne, is trying to have it all ways.

Just as it now seems obvious that Cameron was hiding the real motivation of his policy 2013, so too does it seem obvious that Miliband was too. Cameron couldn’t be honest about his intention because it would’ve sparked even more opposition. Miliband couldn’t be honest, because his calculation was fundamentally not about the policy but his own self-interest. Labour opposed intervention in Syria in 2013 because they believed it was necessary to win the general election in 2015.

The dishonesty of the two sides trying to recast their roles in recent history captures the essence of our governing class’s failure in recent years. For so many of our leading politicians and diplomats, it seems, their views are essentially unfalsifiable acts of faith. Casting my mind back across the great titans of 21st-century British policies it is hard to think of a single big beast who appears capable of genuine reflection on the inadequacies of their way of understanding the world. The world of podcasts is teeming today with former ministers or political leaders explaining why what they have always said remains entirely true.

It is for this reason that I find myself reflexively jumping to Miliband’s defence despite his reprehensible behaviour in 2013. For Osborne, nothing seems capable of shaking his faith in the benign power of the West and its ability to make the world better for all.

Osborne’s attempt to claim the Syrian non-intervention led to the small-boats crisis is particularly lamentable. Of those trying to make it to Britain illegally today, most come from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Albania — none of whom are wanting for lack of Western intervention. What is more, the ability of the EU to deal with illegal migration flows across the Mediterranean have grown immeasurably worse because of the Cameron-Sarkozy decision to intervene in Libya in 2011, toppling the Gadaffi regime and creating an anarchic vacuum of power which continues to this day. Where is the real reflection from Osborne et al about this failure, let alone the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan?

There is a fundamental complacency to our outgoing political class today, which seems happy to wallow in what Keir Starmer might call the “tepid bath” of its simplistic analysis, unable, it seems, to wrestle with the complexities of foreign and economic policy today and to level with people about the trade-offs. It is striking that David Lammy’s “progressive realism” places ever greater emphasis on the realism of its creed rather than the progressivism, emphasising, for example, the recent push to develop ties with the Gulf. The days of Tony Blair’s Chicago speech setting out his interventionist “doctrine of the international community” seem as ancient as those of Kissinger.

In Hugh Powell’s account of 2013, for example. Western intervention would have led to the fall of Assad and the emergence of a unity government of some kind. In Osborne’s telling, this would have prevented the various crises which swept over Europe thereafter. Both are essentially declarations of faith.

Today, Powell says the only outside power able to impose order on Syria is Turkey and that President Erdogan will need to send a Turkish Richard Holbrooke figure with the skill and determination to pull Syria’s various ethnic and religious factions together in a Lebanon-style power-sharing arrangement. The references to Holbrooke and Lebanon are inadvertently telling.

Lebanon is a failed state with a record of catastrophic mismanagement and corruption that has destroyed a once thriving country. Living in Lebanon might have been better than living in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan in recent years, but it was worse than almost everywhere else outside sub-Saharan Africa. Is this really the best solution?

Richard Holbrooke, meanwhile, might be a hero to the interventionists today, but his record carries lessons that are more uncomfortable than they imagine. A biography written by Holbrooke’s friend and admirer, George Packer, is a reminder that he rose to prominence in the Sixties as a far-sighted diplomatic realist who saw that America’s war in Vietnam was going catastrophically wrong in a way that the country’s foreign policy establishment seemed incapable of understanding.

In the late summer of 1966, after returning from Saigon, Holbrooke found himself at the White House with President Lyndon Johnson. “The belief that America could do whatever it wanted remained strong as iron,” Packer writes. But Holbrooke dared to question. “Mr President, I’ve just come back from Vietnam and, you know, I’m a little worried about this… there are some limitations to what the Americans can do in the civilian field in Vietnam.” Johnson then stared at Holbrooke and replied: “Well, son, your job is to get rid of those limitations.”

The wise men of the American establishment were wrong in 1966 and Holbrooke was right. But it was the wise men who would be summoned to the White House, as Packer writes, “to assure Johnson, on the basis of nothing except heavily slanted briefings, an unexamined attachment to the domino theory, and their own code of resoluteness, that this distant country they didn’t understand was a necessary battlefield of the Cold War, before returning to their stately offices and sterling reputations”.

It is an irony — though perhaps a revealing one — that Holbrooke ended his career as such a wise man convinced of his and America’s ability to overcome their limitations in another faraway country, Afghanistan. Today, in his place, we have new wise men, clinging to their unexamined theories and codes of resoluteness convinced of their own fantastical tales of recent history. The truth is that both Ed Miliband and David Cameron are losing their battle for history — and deservedly so. The vote in 2013 and the fall of Assad 11 years later are just two crises in an epoch of Western failure that has given us the world of Donald Trump and Abu Mohammed al-Julani in which we live today. If Britain and its new Foreign Secretary really wants to learn from its recent past, they will need more young Holbrookes and fewer wise men clinging to their unexamined faiths which have long since lost credibility.
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