Can you achieve the “military defeat” of an enemy without using force? The British MPs who sit on the foreign affairs select committee appear to think we should give this novel idea a try. Their remarkable report on whether the United Kingdom should join the military campaign against Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) in Syria demands a “coherent” strategy, while being blissfully incoherent itself. Thus on page 17, the MPs say the “conventional military defeat and elimination” of Daesh “in Syria and Iraq” amounts to a “necessary goal for the UK”.
In the very next sentence, the report goes on to say that Britain should not use force in Syria unless various conditions are met — and the MPs are “persuaded” that the Government will not meet them. So they find themselves all in favour of eliminating Daesh in Syria, but against dropping bombs in, well, Syria. Perhaps they are also in favour of divorce within marriage. Anyone who actually reads their work might be driven to ask whether the authors have indeed lost their logical bearings. A more charitable explanation, however, is that these honourable members are prepared to will the end, but not the means. They would like to see Daesh defeated in Syria, yet they want someone — anyone — other than Britain to share the costs and risks of military action.
So don’t be fooled by the use of grandiose words like “strategy” and “realism”: The 21 pages of this report amount to a manifesto for hand-wringing and drift. And treat with caution the seven points they want the British government to “explain” before asking parliament to allow military action in Syria. Some of these are plainly designed to lend a cloak of respectability to the case for leaving the job to everyone else. Take, for example, the helpful suggestion that Britain should ask Iran for its “agreement” before sending the Royal Air Force over Syria. Oddly enough, Iran’s leaders did not ask Britain before they sent thousands of Hezbollah fighters into Bashar Al Assad’s domain to strengthen his regime’s onslaught against a largely Sunni population, which, incidentally, gave Daesh its great opportunity. The Iranians would be astonished if Britain asked for their kind permission to act in Syria. There is, of course, a perfectly legitimate case for saying that Britain should have as little to do with the outside world as possible. If others are prepared to fight Daesh in Syria — even though it poses a direct threat to Britain’s national security — then all well and good. Why not leave them to it? Why not, in fact, become another Italy?
If the foreign affairs committee thinks that Britain should emulate Italy and relegate itself to the status of a bystander, then it should come out and say so. Instead of hiding behind lists of vague or impossible conditions for military action, it should simply issue a report titled: ‘Why the military campaign against [Daesh] in Syria is far too difficult and we should leave it to everyone else’. Instead, it demands certainty where there can be none and powers of foresight that no one can possess. The judgement of Crispin Blunt, the British Conservative MP who chairs the committee, has not always been impeccable on these matters. In Kosovo, Britain helped to marshal every Nato country behind an air offensive that forced Slobodan Milosevic to halt a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing and allow 800,000 refugees to return to their homes. All of this was achieved in about 10 weeks without any Nato power suffering any losses in combat. And Blunt spent much of that time predicting disaster. On May 18, 1999, he gave a speech that must rank among the most ill-judged in parliamentary history.
“We do not have an objective that we know that we will achieve,” he declared. “We are committed to a strategy of endless bombing and Serbia is committed to a strategy of the endless absorption of punishment. What a policy to pursue against a country with a myth of heroic sacrifice at the core of its national identity!” Blunt added: “We are stuck with a strategy as creditable as that pursued at Passchendaele.” Precisely 16 days later, Milosevic surrendered and the strategy that Blunt had condemned in such overwrought terms was vindicated. As for his historical comparison, the Battle of Passchendaele claimed 200,000 British lives and ended in stalemate; Kosovo claimed none and ended in victory. If there was a prize for the most ludicrous parallel ever drawn, I would nominate Blunt. With its pessimism dressed up as realism, the impossible demand for certainty — and the adamantine belief that failure is inevitable — Blunt’s critique of the Kosovo campaign has the same tone as his committee’s report on Syria. If his MPs think that Britain should no longer trouble to defend its interests with force, they should say so. Otherwise they serve only to discredit the whole idea of parliament delivering its verdict on military action.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2015
