Until quite recently, British Prime Minister David Cameron gave the impression that the only thing he knew about Isis was that it was a river flowing through Oxford down which he used to punt his girlfriends.
There was a muted response from his government as the extremists, who have now renamed themselves Islamic State to end any further confusion in Downing Street, made their sensationally swift gains across swathes of Iraq. Prior to American military intervention from the air, they’d taken Iraq’s second city, grabbed its central bank, captured a lot of weaponry, posed a grave threat to the Kurds and were knocking on the door of Baghdad. If no one else in the West or the region does, they at least have a clear war aim: To establish a global “caliphate” and kill anyone who does not surrender to their poisonous, totalitarian ideology. Of course, the British government was noticing all this. What it feared was too much conversation about it. When I asked one senior figure why they hadn’t recalled parliament, he replied: “What would it have done?” Might have asked some questions, that’s what it might have done. Parliamentary scrutiny would have exposed the prime minister to probing about whether he had any sort of plan.
Only in the last week one of horror at the gruesome beheading of the American journalist James Foley by a extremist with a British accent has there been a flurry of visible activity from the government. The defence secretary, Michael Fallon, was mobilised to Cyprus to try out his impersonation of Winston Churchill on an audience of RAF crews. We will fight them with reconnaissance missions; we will fight them with aid drops. Philip Hammond is now flying regular sorties into hostile airspace well, that’s how Tories tend to regard the BBC where he tries to sound as purposeful as a foreign secretary can when his government doesn’t possess a coherent strategy. The clinching confirmation that the government was finally taking things a bit seriously was when the prime minister deigned to take a 19-hour break from the Cornish beach to pop back to London.
Constant policy revision
During his return to Downing Street, I’m told he watched the decapitation video in the company of Chris Martin, his private secretary, Craig Oliver, the Number 10 communications chief, and two MI5 officers who then explained to the prime minister how they would use the video to try to identify the killer. His people say the prime minister was “shocked” by what he viewed. But, then, they would scarcely say anything different.
This dimension of the crisis is preoccupying the highest levels of government. It has long been known that British citizens have gone out to fight for the self-styled caliph, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.
He has about 500 recruits with British accents according to Whitehall’s best guesstimate. It has also been known to the intelligence services that some of them have already returned to Britain after their apprenticeship in terror in the killing fields of Syria and Iraq. The charge that extremism was incubated on British soil, exported to the Middle East and then reimported to these shores and the government did insufficient to curb it that is the charge that most frightens ministers.
The slow pace at which the government has addressed this crisis, and the contradictory things it has said about it, have swelled the number of voices saying Britain no longer has anything that might be called a foreign policy. That’s not quite right. Cameron does have a foreign policy. But it is subject to constant revision under the pressure of events, the shifting moods of public opinion and the varying clamours of the media and backbenchers. On this, as on many other things, he has often been a man of strong convictions weakly held.
In opposition, he made contemptuous remarks about former premier Tony Blair and “naive” interventionists who tried to “drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000ft”. That was in tune with war-weary times. In government, exposed to briefings about potential threats and taking on the responsibilities of being prime minister, he has been an interventionist.
He ordered British forces into action in Libya to help topple its dictator, he gave military assistance to the French in Mali, and he wanted to join punitive strikes against Syria’s Bashar Al Assad for using chemical weapons until he was stopped by parliament this time last year. For that humiliation, the Tory leader still bitterly blames the alleged perfidy of Ed Miliband, but the prime minister’s fundamental problem then was that public opinion was running strongly against him and he couldn’t convince enough of his own MPs.
His friends say he is conscious that Britain’s response to the threat from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) does not sound robust and he would favour being more muscular. But he fears he couldn’t carry either enough of his own side or of the voters behind him. The result is that we have a discordant contradiction between his words and what his government is doing. At a rhetorical level, he is now coming on strong about the threat from extremism, adopting Blair-like rhetoric about an existential menace and a “generational struggle” that will last for “the rest of my political lifetime”. He declared last weekend: “True security will only be achieved if we use all our resources aid, diplomacy, military prowess to help bring about a more stable world.”
Well, hold on the bit about deploying Britain’s “military prowess” such as it is these days. Soon afterwards, he was on breakfast TV to declare: “I want to be absolutely clear Britain is not going to get involved in another war in Iraq, we are not going to be putting boots on the ground, we are not going to be sending in the British army.” No one thought or thinks he was going to send in the army; hardly anyone is suggesting the most effective way to tackle Isil is to deploy large numbers of western boots on the ground. So why did he feel the need to say that? One of his team says: “Voters fear mission-creep, that we are going to be sucked into another long war.” Not wanting to feed that fear, Number 10 gets angsty when other ministers talk about military forces being engaged “for months”.
Unconvincing Europe
The British government is not the only one racked by confusion. US President Barack Obama began his second term by pronouncing in his inaugural address: “A decade of war is now ending.” Events have since proved that wars don’t always end simply because you wish it were so, not even when you occupy the White House. The American president declared himself against using air power to assist the resistance to Isil until he then authorised it.
Europe is all over the place, as unconvincing in its response to this crisis as it has been to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adventurism in Crimea. In so much as I can detect a Labour policy, it is to call for more “clarity” from the government, which is a way of Labour trying to obscure and avoid its own agonies and splits about whether it still believes in liberal intervention.
Amid the maelstrom sits a prime minister trying to find safe passage between two fierce political weather systems. On the one side, there are his own interventionist impulses and an appreciation of the menace posed, at home and abroad, by extremists. That’s combined with anxiety about history’s verdict if Isil achieves its ambitions on Cameron’s watch while Britain watches impotently from the sidelines. On the other side, there is fear of another parliamentary defeat: “The shadow of the Syria vote is a dark one,” says one of the prime minister’s friends. There’s also the strength of “stop the world, I want to get off” opinion.
On one prime ministerial shoulder sit his electoral strategists, murmuring that there are few votes to be won, and potentially rather a lot to be lost, from more military commitments in the Middle East.
On the other shoulder sits Nigel Farage with his squawk “it’s none of our business”, which roughly translates as “let these people get on with killing each other”.
It can sound smart to say we no longer have a foreign policy and hooray for that. It can sound clever to suggest a pusillanimous Britain vacating the world stage and any sense of global responsibility or moral obligation is to be preferred to Blair’s messianic tendencies.
Commentators in rightwing newspapers write nostalgically about the tyrannies of Saddam Hussain and Muammar Gaddafi and compare them favourably to the head-chopping psychopaths of Isil. Commentators in liberal newspapers approvingly quote the Muslim saying: “Better a thousand years of tyranny than a year of anarchy.”
Anti-interventionists cry “the Iraq war” as a conversation-stopper and can now supplement that with a gloat that things are not turning out well in Libya either. They tend to be quieter about Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Syria and any other place where their policy of inaction is drenched with blood.
Action has consequences and they are not always the ones that were hoped for. Inaction also has consequences and they can be worse. And then there’s something called leadership. That’s about making judgements and choices and going out to make the case for what you think is right.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
