Since they went on their murderous rampage through the streets of Paris, there have been a lot of voices describing Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) as an “existential threat”. No, they are not. That description flatters them and tends to infer that we are so powerless to deal with this menace that we should not even bother to try. The Soviet Union was an existential threat during the Cold War. The Kremlin had the capacity to wipe out everyone in the West — and the West the capacity to annihilate them.
The Nazis were an existential threat. While Daesh is unquestionably ambitious to spread as much as it can of its especially psychotic brand of death and havoc, and principally does so against Muslims in the territory it controls in Syria and Iraq, it cannot and will not defeat liberal democracies. The question facing British Prime Minister David Cameron and his counterparts is whether they have the resources, the will and a plausible plan to quell Daesh. The arguments about that have not really changed, but they have been clarified by the Paris massacres and other recent atrocities in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Choices that were being delayed, avoided or fudged are now in sharp focus. Those choices haven’t got any easier — some are truly hideous — but reaching conclusions about them has been made more urgent. Before we get to the big choice, let us deal with some of the lesser dilemmas facing world leaders.
For Europe, one is whether to persist with the idealism of a continent sans frontiers. I don’t think it can survive the challenge of dealing with this kind of menace at this level of intensity. France has declared that it will maintain border controls “until the terrorist threat is over”, a day that is a long way into the future. The pressure to take that stance increased when it emerged that the Belgian terrorist suspected of being the ring leader of the Paris attacks had travelled into and through the European Union (EU) from Syria at least twice this year.
The Schengen agreement, already under incredible strain from the refugee and migration crisis, is surely history. It is moot how much safer Europeans will be for the reintroduction of internal border controls, but when asked to choose between open frontiers and being offered some potential additional protection from the form of urban guerrilla warfare inflicted on Paris, Europe’s voters are going to choose security. That will not, as some have had it, be the end of Europe. It will be the demise, and a sad one, of a dream — a dream born in a more peaceful period that subsequent events have made look naive.
For Cameron, there is a choice to be made about priorities. In his recent speech to the Mansion House, he twinned national security with economic security. But his definition of the one — which involves a lot more austerity — is now in contention with the demands of the other. The greater emphasis on security in the national conversation has changed the atmospherics around last week’s financial statement from Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, and made it even harder for the chancellor to make his sums add up. Several well-placed government sources confirm that Theresa May has been immensely strengthened in her fierce battle against the Treasury’s desire to take large lumps out of the Home Office budget.
No chancellor, certainly not a Tory chancellor, and even less so a Tory chancellor with ambitions to lead his party, wants to be attacked as weak on security and especially not at a time like this. Which brings us to the big choice about Syria confronting western policy-makers. They have been ducking this choice because it is such a horribly unpalatable one. That choice is whether to continue to make the removal of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad the priority or to put aside the West’s differences with his Russian sponsors in order to focus on Daesh. That choice is clearly in the process of being made. France, accompanied by a warier United States and Britain, is edging towards an understanding with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the basis that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ — even if this new “friend” was the enemy only yesterday.
Cameron has already hinted at this when he suggested that there would be a “need for compromise” between the previous western insistence that Al Assad has to go now and the Russian refusal to contemplate his departure at all. There have been some signs of a reciprocating shift in the Kremlin, one influenced by the confirmation that a Daesh-affiliated group planted the bomb that destroyed the Russian airbus over the Sinai. This new position will tolerate Al Assad staying in power, at least for a transitional period, and selling that idea will require some dexterity from Cameron.
When he sought, and failed to secure, parliamentary approval for air strikes in 2013, the stated purpose then was to punish the Syrian dictator for his use of chemical weapons. It now looks almost certain that the prime minister will go back to the Commons to ask the question again, but this time for a different purpose. He will be asking MPs to sanction the extension of British military action against the principal combatant against the Syrian dictator.
This is quite a volte face and he will be told so by his critics, including the small but important minority on the Tory benches still opposed to air strikes in Syria. I guess he could give them the reply of John Maynard Keynes when he was taunted for being inconsistent and say that when the facts change, it is sensible to change your mind.
Cameron’s chances of winning a parliamentary vote have been dramatically improved in the wake of Paris. If the price of dealing with Daesh is cooperation with Russia, and by extension Al Assad, then I find most Tory MPs and a significant number of Labour MPs willing to pay it. Conservatives will follow Winston Churchill’s example when he justified the wart-ime alliance with Stalin by saying that he would make an ally of the devil if that was what it took to defeat Hitler.
Crispin Blunt, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, has made an important intervention by suggesting that the Tories on the committee will now reverse their opposition to air strikes because their pre-conditions have largely been met.
Last Friday night’s unanimous support at the United Nations Security Council for a French resolution calling for “all necessary measures” to beat Daesh has further strengthened Cameron’s hand. Even the Scottish Nationalists are now suggesting that there could be circumstances in which they would back the prime minister. “Things are coming into alignment,” says one of his inner circle. Number 10 will not yet absolutely commit him to bringing the question back to parliament. His aides say that he has to be sure that he will win because a second defeat would be a propaganda gift to Daesh, hugely damaging to Britain in the eyes of its allies and, as they don’t quite say, a personal humiliation for the prime minister.
That makes what is happening in the Labour party pivotal to the outcome. The last week had been a clarifying week for Labour — and not in a good way. The hostility between Jeremy Corbyn and his MPs has been greatly escalated. They were horrified by his equivocations about whether the police should be able to shoot terrorists even as they went about killing. They didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when he made the fatuous suggestion that it would have been better to take Mohammad Emwazi, the serial killer known as ‘Jihadi John’, into custody.
The next time a murderous terrorist is located in Raqqa, perhaps the Labour leader will volunteer to parachute there and perform a citizen’s arrest. He has hardened his opposition to taking military action against Daesh on the grounds that it would make the situation “far worse”.
The tartest retort to that came from Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, when he said: “To those who say that taking action in Syria will make things worse, I say things are pretty bad for those in Syria and our citizens too.” The Labour leader has even publicly fallen out with his closest ally in the shadow cabinet, John McDonnell, about whether Labour MPs should be given a free vote on air strikes.
For the official opposition to respond to terrorist atrocities of such gravity by feuding with itself has presented a terrible spectacle — and despairing Labour MPs know it. This makes it more likely that a considerable number of them will vote for Cameron, provided he frames his case in a persuasive way and argues for air strikes as a component of a broader and plausible plan of political, diplomatic and humanitarian action. They will back the prime minister over their own leader even if Jeremy Corbyn tries to whip them. Some of them will be frontbenchers and they will vote against him on this even if they have to resign.
All of which means that Cameron can now get a “yes” from MPs to Britain sharing more of the risks and burdens of the struggle against Daesh. My guess is that, as things stand today, he already has a majority in the Commons for taking the fight to the head of the snake.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
