In the ancient legend, Prometheus is chained to a rock, where his liver is pecked out by an eagle every day - only to regenerate each night, ready to be eaten once again. As British politics wrestles again with whether to commit the military to another post-9/11 conflict, it is easy to get the feeling that a collective Promethean agony is being repeatedly re-enacted here too. Look more carefully, however, and something may be changing for the better.
True, the questions that David Cameron posed yesterday over Syria in the Commons have an extremely familiar feel: Why? Why us? Why now? Is it legal? Will it work? What happens next? Those were exactly the same questions, almost word for word, that Tony Blair faced over Iraq in 2003.
It can also be tempting to think, especially in a media and online culture that so disdains politicians, that the MPs have learnt nothing from the experience. From Afghanistan to Iraq and Libya to Syria, MPs have had to grapple with the risks each time. Technically, the military answers may have been very different in each case — ground forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, air power in Libya, staying at home over Syria. Yet none has worked, and still the problem returns fully charged, as it has now done for a second time in Syria.
In reality, however, MPs are slowly getting better at their task. They are scrutinising better — as the role of the foreign affairs select committee and an independent-minded defence committee chair exemplify in the Syria argument. They are taking their time, not throwing themselves into war, as they did at the time of the Falklands war of 1982.
But they are not, most of them, forever stuck in 2003. Above all, they are being pragmatic, by recognising better than ever the limits of British military power, as well as the risks in humanitarian and domestic security terms. The long learning process that began with Suez in 1956 may now finally be bearing fruit in British defence policy in ways that it never did before.
True, there are some ideologically driven politicians who see each iteration in exactly the same sterile terms. Post-imperial Atlanticists of the right, like the former defence secretary Liam Fox, will always put up their hands for the strongest action on offer. On the other side, anti-Americans of the left will always oppose even the most carefully calibrated strategy if it means committing to air strikes, especially alongside the US. Labour’s current problem, as he has made clear, is that Jeremy Corbyn is one of these.
Yet in the end, these are both minority positions. The Bufton Tuftons and the Dave Sparts are thin on the ground these days. Most MPs are not reflexive in this way. Most MPs, like most of the public they represent, are neither anti-war nor pro-war. They certainly have party loyalties that shape their calculations. But what was extremely clear from yesterday’s long debate was that the overwhelming majority were trying to do the right thing.
Most of them are not forever stuck in 2003. They are being pragmatic, by recognising the limits of UK military power.
Doing the right thing is of course extraordinarily difficult in Syria. The situation is spectacularly dangerous and confusing, deeply rooted in ancient animosities and rivalries.
The international configurations are volatile and full of risk. And the domestic blowback in all parts of the UK could also be lethal and arbitrary, as the Paris attacks showed. In such a globalised minefield, most MPs inevitably and sensibly step gingerly and uncertainly. Very few, though, think these are good enough reasons for doing nothing.
Best approach
In this they are surely right. Most MPs, like most voters, can see Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is a ruthless danger that must be resisted and crushed, not ignored. They can see our neighbours face the same danger, and that cooperation with these allies is the best approach to destroying the Daesh threat. They understand that the options are limited, partly by successive defence cuts and partly by the errors of the past; and they recognise that, without diplomacy and politics, the guns and bombs will not be sufficient and could even make things worse. Almost every MP who spoke yesterday’s expressed most of these views in some form or another.
In other words they were engaged, they were realistic and, above all, they were acting like a mature modern European democracy should. That’s something to celebrate in grim times. In a formal sense, the power to make war still remains with the monarch in the privy council, just as it did in the two world wars of the 20th century and, indeed, in the days of Henry VIII. But in an informal and practical sense, MPs now have that power and they are using it.
At the risk of poking the usual wasps’ nest, we have Tony Blair to thank for that. As late as 1998, when Blair sent UK planes into action with the US against Saddam Hussain’s Iraq, MPs only got to comment two days later: there was no vote at all. By conceding the advance vote on Iraq in 2003, however, Blair effectively ended the prime minister’s traditional power to use the royal prerogative to take military action. Cameron is living with the consequences.
It would be hard to listen to the debate and not conclude that most MPs are now guardedly open to British military engagement in Syria under the right conditions. That is true among the Conservatives and Labour alike, where the mood is clearly shifting, and perhaps even within the SNP.
It does not follow that Cameron will assemble the majority he needs to win a vote next week.
The issue of whether there are in reality sufficient Syrian opposition ground troops to take and hold Isis territory is the biggest example of what one Tory MP called a “twitch factor” that could keep sceptics out of the government lobbies. On the other hand, the odds were shortening last night that Labour would agree on Monday to vote for UK action.
If that happens, the Britain that votes to join the anti-Daesh alliance will have crossed a post-Iraq watershed. It will look, from home at least, less like a state with permanent post-imperial delusions than at any similar time in recent years.
Weighing the issues yesterday, MPs sounded more like representatives of a modern medium-large size European multicultural nation state, who want to be good allies and make a practical military difference against a common terrorist scourge, while avoiding foolish provocations and blunders. That is, after all, exactly what they should be.
