Hansard links

For those readers who want to know what was actually said in those debates yesterday here are the links to the Commons and the Lords.

While we are on the subject, here is the link to the Third Reading of the EU Referendum Bill, which is now through the House of Lords and has gone back, in an amended form, to the Commons where it will be debated on December 8. As I have mentioned earlier, most of the amendments are government ones (another one or two have been passed in the Third Reading) and will be passed in the Commons. The one amendment that will cause problems is Baroness Morgan's that extends the electorate for the referendum to those who will be 16 and 17 by the time it is taking place. Presumably, the Commons will hold out on that and repeal the amendment, sending the Bill back to the Lords again. There is a strong possibility that there will be no Royal Assent before Christmas.

Well, that's that

We are going to send the RAF to Syria and strike ISIS territory. The House of Commons debated the issue for most of the day and voted 397 to 223 to authorize those airstrikes. The majority was bigger than many expected. The House of Lords also debated it but, as in 2013, did not divide, merely expressed its mood, which was supportive of the government.

I find myself in a quandary. As I made it clear yesterday, I do not think this is a very good idea. There is no need to go through the arguments again as they are all here. At the moment I prefer not to think about what will happen when the first pictures, helpfully produced by ISIS, of children killed by allied bombs are published.

On the other hand, there is the opposition to the air strikes: the Stop The War Coalition, the people who earnestly assure me that war has never solved anything (I usually suggest that they have a word with people who remember being liberated from the Nazis), the dopy academics one of whom shared a programme on the BBC Russian Service earlier today and whose idea was to try to get a global consensus through the UN, and the screaming, ullulating mob outside Parliament today. As I was leaving the Palace of Westminster about half an hour before the vote was due I saw resigned looks on the faces of the police officers. Whichever way the vote goes, one of them said, there will be trouble. Added to that we have the stories published in various media outlets, even left-wing ones of threats against Labour MPs who had voiced their intentions to vote with the government on the subject and abuse against their staff (a particularly despicable kind of behaviour) and one's convictions begin to waver.

For what it is worth, I still think that we are making a mistake but I can understand that we have placed ourselves in an almost impossible position - we need to solve the Syrian crisis if for no other reason than to stem the flood of migrants but we have no idea how to do it. Getting rid of ISIS, if we can do it, may be the first step towards a solution but my doubts remains.

Perversely though, I am glad that the holier-than-thou rabble did not win.

Back to the question of intervention in Syria

We have been here before, only last time the question was about intervening in order to overthrow Assad. This time the discussion is about intervening against ISIL from which Assad may benefit. The debate is set for tomorrow and it would be a foolhardy person who could predict its outcome. To me these debates show the futility of running a foreign policy according to popular opinion, which tends to change in response to media stories and pictures, something I discussed on the blog not so long ago.

Back at the time of people demanding that we go in to unseat Assad, who has remained considerably more tenacious in his grasp on some power than people predicted and who is still responsible for more deaths than ISIL (though that is probably merely because he has been there for much longer), I wrote this:

However, ladies and gentlemen who demand that we intervene in Syria, could you answer at least some of the following questions?

When you say you want us to intervene what kind of intervention do you have in mind and who, do you think, should carry it out? What precisely is a limited military intervention, as suggested by Senator McCain?

What sort of timetable do you have in mind? Weeks? Months? Years? A long occupation with no foreseeable end and if so, who would be doing it?

What would be the agreed aim of the intervention? Simply no more pictures of dead bodies? How can we ensure that? Regime change? I have no problems with that in principle (think Germany, Japan and Italy in 1945) but what sort of regime should we install and how long will it survive?

Do we have any identifiable allies?

And last but very much not least: what is the exit strategy?

With a few changes those questions are still relevant. Obviously, if we are talking only about extended bombing (people seem not to have noticed that we are already involved in it to some extent) then the urgency of those questions is not so great. Even bombing, as was carried out in Libya, now a completely dysfunctional state, carries with it certain consequences. What if we actually put boots on the ground in a civil war, which has many sides, all of them nasty and few potential allies?

And here we are again

This week-end saw a wave of protests in Russia against the war with Ukraine and some support for them in the West. I shall blog about it in due course and about the fact that President Putin with his Chekists seem unexpectedly nervous. I am not sure that the news of him signing a "decree restoring the title "Dzerzhinsky Division" to an elite police unit that was previously named after the founder of the Bolshevik secret police" is a sign of defiance or just whistling in the dark. Interesting, nonetheless, but hardly surprising. Perhaps, he, a mid-ranking KGB/FSB officer would like to see himself as a latter day version of Iron Felix.

Meanwhile, President Obama has announced new airstrikes against the "Islamic State" in Syria and the war in the Middle East that he was going to end successfully as it had been entirely President Bush's fault is spiralling out of anybody's control.

Also meanwhile, and unsurprisingly given the situation in eastern Europe, Poland is buying missiles from the US. I have no doubt our Nige will be wagging his finger at them any minute now and telling them that they should stop annoying the Bear. Or some such foolishness.

This time even the BBC noticed

There is a reasonable argument that this time round Hamas has overplayed its hand. Not that we don't see the usual fanatical and usually quite ignorant anti-Israeli comments but, as this piece on Bloomberg points out, the voices that usually pressurize that country have been mooted somewhat. It also places the blame for this round of fighting firmly on the Hamas leadership, who have stirred up Israeli reprisals without endangering themselves very much. Well, perhaps, the day will come when the Palestinians will finally realize who their real enemy is and go after the leaders.

It seems that Hamas is being blamed by the Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas, as well. Then there is this curious clip that indicates a certain dissatisfaction with Hamas on the part of Arab states and, above all, leaders. The speaker is the Egyptian journalist, Abdel Bari Atwan. More on the Egyptian media here. There have been other similar pronouncements and a certain lack of enthusiasm for Hamas and its fight.

That has not prevented a number of very violent demonstrations in the West, which degenerated into torchings and riots (a picture from Paris but there are many more) and were accompanied by vicious anti-Semitic and Judaeophobic slogans that invoked positively Hitler and the Holocaust, expressing the wish that it will now be completed by Islamists. (One can't help laughing at the thought of these losers, for what else have the Palestinians been all this time, completing what Hitler did not manage but the intentions and slogans are nasty enough.)

Naturally enough, we have seen many pictures of dead Palestinian children, something that we are used to though some of us have been asking questions about those pictures for some time. Remember Green Helmet Guy? Similar stories were uncovered by other bloggers but these were left severely alone by the MSM though little by little some acknowledged the word Pallywood. Come to think of it, remember the whole saga of Mohammed Al-Dura?

So what of the various pictures of the children and the "innocent civilians" of Gaza? Well, something odd has been happening. As the Blaze points out, no less than the BBC found that a number of them have been recycled from previous wars in Gaza, from Iraq and from another war of which we hear next to nothing from these angry twitters and Facebook posters, and that is the far more ferocious one in Syria.

Here is the BBC's report on the subject. If these people have lost the BBC they are in a bad state.

So let me end this posting with a picture of a singularly unfortunate lady who seems to have been wounded in Syria and in Gaza in precisely the same way, in the company of the same old lady. Some people have no luck. (Ignore the comment on the green strip, which is superfluous in my opinion.)

A few additional points ...

... and then I turn my attention to some other work. One or two of these points I have made before but they seem to bear repetition:

1.      President Assad is not like Hitler, though he is a very nasty bloodthirsty dictator. For one thing, he has not invaded Austria, Czechoslovakia or Poland. It is not rational to compare every international crisis with 1938 - 39. They are different and we have to think about them differently. (NB. Let us not forget that highly respectable historians think that Britain made a mistake in declaring war on September 3, 1939 but that is another story.)

2.      Following on from that: Syria is not in the Balkans and the situation there is not the same as it was in former Yugoslavia throughout the nineties. Therefore, any comparison in required action is invalid. Or, in other words, everything is not just like everything else in international affairs and each situation has to be judged separately. 

3.     The argument of "no meddling" is meaningless in that it also says that every situation is just like every other. Sometimes we have to meddle and sometimes not. It is not the fact that this is meddling that is the problem, as I see it, but that we have no clear idea why we should do so, on whose side we want to meddle and what we hope to achieve as well as what our meddling should consist of. If those who want us to go in could answer those questions in a satisfactory fashion instead of wringing their hands and crying that we cannot just do nothing, then meddling might become an acceptable option to many more people. Certainly, it would to me, for whatever that might be worth [very little] as I do not oppose necessary intervention in principle.

4.     Those who are calling for another vote "to erase the shame" are clearly not people who approve of parliamentary democracy and consider that the EU's way of running political affairs - make them vote over and over again until we get the result we want - is far better. I hope none of those people will ever present themselves as eurosceptics again.

5.     Britain's position in the world does not depend on us rushing into every war and civil war that happens to have better photographers though, as we know, not all of those photographs are completely kosher, if I may use that word. It did not, for instance, benefit in the end from us going into Iraq as we were thrown out of there ignominiously and Basra had to be taken back by the Iraqi army with American support. [See numerous postings by the Boss over on EURef.]

6.      It would be good to think that as a result of this fiasco we are going to start that long-delayed discussion and debate as to what our national interests are, what our position in the world should be and what our foreign policy is going to be. I have no great hopes of that happening.

I wish I could leave the subject alone

There was this vague hope that I might be able to write about something that is not Syria today but that will have to wait. There were too many articles, blogs and columns as well as cartoons in the media for me to link to them all or even most but one or two stand out in interest.

First of all, however, I should like to express some surprise and annoyance with the hacks, both as writers and as cartoonists, who appear to think that being voted down by the House of Commons is a shameful thing for David Cameron to have to endure. From being Obama's poodle (untrue) he is being described as going on to being the Commons' poodle. That is a curious view of what representative democracy and a balance of power between the legislative and the executive might be. In fact, we do not have proper balance of power but last week's vote made a tiny step towards creating one, a tiny step in the centuries' long struggle that our media hacks do not seem to have heard of.

I am even less impressed by the suggestion that once Congress has voted (I am coming to that) and voted the "right" way, the Commons should be asked to vote again. Perhaps they would have changed their minds by then. Ahem. Isn't there a political construct that does just that: makes people vote again and again until they come up with the required answer? Is that what representative parliamentary democracy is in these people's opinion?

In yesterday's posting I wrote at length that I do not think our position in the world requires us or depends on us rushing into every war or civil war that happens to have good photographers around (even if the photos sometimes get muddled like those of the bodies in Syria .... ahem ... Iraq did), adding that, despite John Kerry's posturings and President Obama's obvious dislike of this country, the Anglo-American special relationship is likely to survive and flourish in the future.

Which brings me to a curious development. It would appear that President Obama is following in the Boy-King's footsteps, possibly hoping for the same outcome. Although it is not required by the US Constitution and although the President has stated that the US was about to launch an attack on Syria, he is, nevertheless, going to seek Congress's approval on September 9. Apparently, this last-minute decision surprised his advisers, who told him that he can go ahead without consulting Congress. How will this affect the forthcoming fiscal negotiations with Congress? There was a suggestion in The Hill that the strike on Syria would help the President "to reverse the automatic spending cuts to the Pentagon known as sequestration". That, however, was written before the decision to seek Congress's approval for military intervention of whatever kind.

Fraser Nelson says that President Obama's decision to consult Congress is a compliment to David Cameron who went to Parliament. Possibly. It could easily be the action of a desperate man who simply cannot make up his mind what to do.

There are only two other links I want to put up. One to a somewhat unimpressive article by Charles Moore, who thinks the world has not become a better place because of Thursday's vote, a ridiculous and meaningless statement. The world is never a good place and rarely becomes better as a result of political decisions by a country. But then, he also says

Yesterday morning, Britain woke up and found it no longer had a functioning foreign policy. “We might as well turn all our embassies into car showrooms,” one Cabinet minister told me bitterly.

Dear Mr Moore, we have not had a functioning foreign policy for quite a long time and, as long as we stay in the EU, we do not need or require embassies. If there were not so many people in the FCO who need appointments abroad we could have closed them down long ago with nobody noticing the difference. In the end, Mr Moore seems to come to no obvious conclusion as to whether the vote and the control it exerted over the Prime Minister and the Royal Prerogative was a good thing or a bad.

Finally, there is a well argued though very angry piece by Caroline Glick, with whom I do not always agree but whose thoughts in this case are very well worth reading. Interestingly, she along with numerous Israeli commentators, does not think that an American strike would be a good idea. Supporting the rebel groups is not in anyone's interests and one cannot strike at Assad without doing that.

Which brings me very neatly to my last point. This afternoon I took part in a programme on the BBC Russian Service, a large part of which was a discussion of Syria and the various reactions to the crisis, including that vote. I had a good deal of fun explaining that to Russian listeners.

There was also a long discussion with a Syrian journalist who lives and works in Beirut but keeps in close contact with his home country and who could speak good Russian as well as an Israeli journalist who spoke excellent Russian.

Neither of them could explain clearly the various groups and divisions in Syria, especially as far as the rebels were concerned. The Syrian expressed the view that Assad's rule was highly unpopular and people served in his forces only for financial reasons. Nevertheless, he repeated several times, nobody wants Western intervention either. This has been echoed by other Syrian commentators as well.

The Israeli journalist talked of the situation in her country, which is not, she maintained, nearly as difficult as the media makes out. The mobilization has been on a very small scale and, while there are queues in shops and for gas masks, the atmosphere was no longer one of panic. To the question of whether the Israeli government preferred Assad to stay as many of the rebels were Islamists and linked to Al-Qaeda she said two interesting things, one of which I have heard before.

As has been said in various places, people with wounds of various kinds have been crossing the Israeli border to be treated in their far superior hospitals by their far superior doctors. Treatment is given to all and no questions are asked as to where the particular fighters had come from. I would like to think that, while doctors ask no questions, other people in different uniforms also turn up to find out one or two things about what really goes on in Syria.

Secondly, she said that it is well known that the Israeli government has been making contact with one or two of the bigger rebel groups' leaders. That is hardly surprising. Unlike Western governments and commentators the Israelis will have to live with the outcome of the present crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. They can have no exit strategy.

Too much emotion

There are times when emotion is appropriate. I am certain that I shall feel very emotional when I attend Professor Minogue's Memorial Service towards the end of September and so will everybody else there. In fact, I shall fill my bag and pockets with tissues just in case I tear up more than once. But that is what funerals and memorial services are for. Politics, on the other hand, ought to dispense with emotionalism as far as possible. Yet it was clear on Thursday,  in the wake of the Parliamentary debates about possible military intervention in Syria and the close vote [scroll down for Main Question] in the House of Commons against it that there is just too much emotion about the whole subject on both sides and for reasons I cannot quite understand. (Here is the full text of the debate in the House of Commons and here of the one in the House of Lords, where no vote was taken but the sense of the House was very clear.)

Almost immediately after the result was announced one started seeing and hearing weeping and gnashing of teeth among those who thought we should intervene though they were still unable to specify how and for what purpose we should do so and equally insane rejoicing among those who were against it, not to mention those who thought that this would signal the end of Cameron's leadership for reasons I fail to understand. I am, of course, glad that we are not going to be engaged in this open-ended, badly defined, ill-thought out military adventure but I see no particular reason for jumping up and down with joy. (A reminder of what I wrote about it a couple of days ago.)

A couple of days ago Brendan O'Neill put up a piece on Spiked in which he argued that

War used to be the pursuit of politics by other means. Today, if the statements made by the Western politicos and observers who want to bomb Syria are anything to go by, it’s the pursuit of therapy by other means. The most startling and unsettling thing about the clamour among some Westerners for a quick, violent punishment of the Assad regime is its nakedly narcissistic nature. Gone is realpolitik and geostrategy, gone is the PC gloss that was smeared over other recent disastrous Western interventions to make them seem substantial, from claims about spreading human rights to declarations about facing down terrorism, and all we’re left with is the essence of modern-day Western interventionism: a desire to offset moral disarray at home by staging a fleeting, bombastic moral showdown with ‘evil’ in a far-off field.

I could not help agreeing with him and thought of the article again as I waded through the acres of sticky emotionalism last night and today or tried to engage in some rational discussion. The reasons as to why the MPs betrayed us all, betrayed the people of Syria and of every other country you could name and created a world-wide desolation were various but all displayed a "nakedly narcissistic nature". All arguments about the nature of the rebels, the lack of British interest, the lack of clear understanding as to what is going on or what we might achieve were swept aside in a general cry of "Assad is such a terrible man" or, in one case (I kid you not) "MPs can now watch the Syrian children suffer". (I did say rather coolly that if it was about the children we should go in against both sides since there is good evidence of children being maltreated by the rebels. There was no response.)

The whole discussion reminds me of the endless arguments about foreign aid in which all rational objections of any kind are brushed aside with an highly emotional and at the same time self-centred cry of "but we cannot just sit back". It is all about us not about them.

So where are we now? First of all, that vote was not, in my opinion, catastrophic for David Cameron. Intervention in Syria is not core government policy and there is no particular reason why a government should not be defeated from time to time. It used to happen in the past and can happen again. In fact, it has just happened. The defeat was not exactly surprising (and neither were the arguments expressed in the House of Lords). It does not take a great deal of political nous to realize that the proposed military adventure is highly unpopular in the country and the arguments for it have not been presented at all cogently.

Then again, wars are never popular but until recently, declaration of them had not needed parliamentary approval (and Blair had it in full over Iraq) because it is issued, as this article explains, under a Royal Prerogative that is now effectively vested in the government of the day. David Cameron did not have to go to Parliament over the Syrian adventure but he could not really avoid it for political reasons. He can now, with some justification, proclaim himself to be a true parliamentarian who does not act in a high-handed fashion but listens to the people and to Parliament. Indeed, he has already done so and the chances are he will play on it in future.

The Opposition could now call for a vote of no confidence but I doubt if they will as they might win, in which case there will be an election, which they have not a chance of winning at the moment. Actually, the government would win that vote. Governments usually do.

The Lib-Dims came out rather poorly. Having consistently opposed the war in Iraq they (like a number of leftie luvvies in this country and in the US) have suddenly become bellicose and anxious to see a nasty tyrant punished though, presumably, not toppled. Nick Clegg is now of even less importance than he has been until now.

The other losers are UKIP and, for once, it is not their fault. Nigel Farage has made it clear that their policy was strong and absolute opposition to any intervention in Syria. A number of UKIPers then produced the usual statist, socialist mantra about the money spent on any foreign adventure and how it is needed to build more hospitals, schools and so on. Even the Labour Party stopped saying that.

A number of analysts (not all of them UKIP members) said before the debate that if the Commons vote for military action, UKIP's popularity would go up. That would not necessarily be true as the Lib-Dims had not benefited from their opposition to the Iraq war even when that became unpopular. As it happens, the vote went against military intervention and UKIP is once again on the sidelines, calling for a confidence vote, resignations and assuring anyone who will listen that they were the ones who achieved this result.

While Mr Cameron is reported to be contemplating a few enforced resignations in his Cabinet and a general reshuffle, we are getting an emotional chorus of people in and around politics, led by the Lord Ashdown, about Britain's diminished role in the world and the death of the special relationship with the United States. All absolute piffle. If Britain has any sort of a role to play in international politics it is not likely to be enhanced by a Pavlovian need to get embroiled in any war and civil war that happens to have good photographers around.

At the height of Britain's power and influence it managed to keep out of numerous wars and even more civil wars, not considering it necessary to become embroiled unless there was some interest in doing so. The man who is generally thought of being the strongest imperialist among political leaders and one who always had his eye on promoting Britain's role and interests, Benjamin Disraeli, the Earl of Beaconsfield, can be said to have had his finest hour when he refused to involve the country  in a Balkan war but negotiated a peace to its advantage. When Bismarck was congratulated on achieving agreement after days of difficult negotiations in 1878 in Berlin, he insisted that the achievement was Disraeli's, famously and admiringly saying: "Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann."

In fact, all those rather over-wrought individuals who are comparing Assad with Hitler and saying that we should go to war as we did in 1939 as well as those who displaying fears that this might another 1914, should study the events of 1876 to 1878 when, in the wake of atrocious behaviour by the Turks in response to an uprising in the Balkans Mr Gladstone, the Leader of the Opposition, published his highly influential Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. Even then there were pictures and reports from some parts of the world and many people became angry.

However, the situation was different. For one thing, those massacred were Christians and Gladstone, himself a devout man, could appeal to feelings of solidarity for co-religionists. If there is any of that around in the discussions about Syria, they cannot be on the side that is calling for the punishment of Assad as it is the far more Islamist rebels who seem to have attacked, murdered and generally abused the Syrian Christians.

Secondly, Gladstone could point to the British government as being partially at fault. Disraeli was determined to retain the alliance with the Ottoman Empire against the Russians and Gladstone, whose campaign was considerably more popular than any calls for intervention in Syria are now, called for a change in policy. He did not call for direct military intervention (which Russia was supplying in any case) but for a change in foreign policy. Even in 1876, at the height of Britain's strength and power, it was not considered to be necessary to become militarily involved in every war going, not even for a good cause. In the end, as we have seen, Disraeli won and the Treaty of Berlin stabilized the region but did not precisely punish any wrongdoers.

In the meantime, President Obama, unlike his much maligned predecessor seems unable to build a coalition of the willing and may decide to go it alone, largely because he, foolishly in most people's opinion, drew those lines in the sand or red lines or whatever lines and can now either bomb Syria with no-one to back him or climb down on his threats. Neither is a good option for him or for the United States.

To be fair, it looks like France is ready to support any action and even become involved in it though not for the purpose of overthrowing Assad, merely to punish him (and to ensure that some Raffaele Rafale planes are bought by somebody in the regions).

Secretary of State John Kerry, who, in the not too distant past voted for the Iraqi war before he voted against it, made a speech in which he called France America's oldest ally, which is technically correct, as France helped the winning side in the War of Independence. Not sure it means anything really as the special relationship whose death is once again proclaimed by all and sundry is a somewhat more complicated affair and exists on many more levels than politicians can grasp. If it survived Harold Wilson's government, it will survive President Obama's posturing.

John Kerry's speech (analyzed here and published in full here) appears to be using language and arguments that are very familiar. I was not the only one who was transported back to 2003 when similar arguments were given by President Bush and Secretary of State Powell for an attack on Iraq (which I still think was the right thing to do but that is for another time) and which was later furiously attacked by Democrats and their left-wing supporters, some of whom are now finding time to attack Parliament for that vote. Well, if you lost Mia Farrow, you have really lost your position in the world. Or so she thinks, I have no doubt.

Could John Kerry suddenly be against the military adventure (it is hard to know what to call it after all the chopping and changing) after he is for it?

Tomorrow will bring new developments, I've no doubt. At least, I hope so as I am due to discuss them on the BBC Russian Service in the afternoon. But as things stand, President Obama has not built his coalition of the willing and has found himself in a pickle as a result of his more than confused policy in the Middle East. Britain is not going to be bombing Syria and that is not a bad thing as open-ended, ill-defined military adventures whose purpose is unclear and which are likely to help someone equally nasty are a bad idea. This does not mean that Britain's position in the world will change or that the special relationship with the US is over. Maybe it will mean that there will be an effort to define what that position might be but I do not have high hopes of that. However, the rather emotional rejoicing about the vote is equally insane. The situation in Syria and the Middle East is not such as to bring joy to anyone. In fact, it has become considerably worse than it was in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected and promised to sort out all the nasty problems that his predecessor had allegedly created. And the moral of that story is that no politician should ever believe the hype produced by the media.

Here are a few questions that need answers

This is going to be a rant, I am afraid. Readers who dislike rants should stop right now. And it is going to be about people who are demanding that we should immediately and even sooner than that intervene in Syria. Readers who find the subject unpalatable should stop right now or read this letter that cogently explains the Middle East.

So, Syria, where the most appalling things have been happening as they tend to in a confusing civil war and where President Assad, who was confidently predicted to be on his way out a couple of years ago, is still in place, more or less, still as nasty as ever faced by opponents who are just as nasty. I am not going to discuss the recent gas attack, whether it happened (probably though not certainly) and who might have been responsible (almost anyone). I am, however, going to have a go at the people who are confidently demanding that we should intervene.

Yesterday I noted two tweets that annoyed me more than anything else. One said that if we had not intervened in Libya we would have had pictures from Benghazi like the ones we had from Damascus. Possibly, then again, maybe not. For sure, the pictures we had from Benghazi last autumn and since have not exactly filled one with joy at the thought that we helped to create the situation.

Another tweet was retweeted by someone who is a journalist on the Times and ought to know better. (Whom am I kidding?) It said something to the effect that if Obama did not want to be known as the Chamberlain of the 21st century, he should intervene in Syria within hours, thus showing breathtaking ignorance of history, geography and politics.

I am a newcomer to Twitter and use it little, mostly to promote postings on this and other blogs as well as some articles I liked. Occasionally I express some opinion. On the whole I have no strong feelings about the medium but I do see one enormous disadvantage (or advantage, depending on whose side you are on): people can express firm opinions on any subject whatsoever and cannot be questioned about those opinions. Or, at least, they can ignore questions and challenges, leaving those opinions out there in the public domain, in 140 characters.

Of course, I have noted that there have been longer articles and postings on the subject, with many demands that we, the West, Britain, the US, NATO and sundry others should intervene in Syria. There seems to be a complete amnesia about the fact that we have intervened in several countries in that region recently with lamentable results.

However, ladies and gentlemen who demand that we intervene in Syria, could you answer at least some of the following questions?

When you say you want us to intervene what kind of intervention do you have in mind and who, do you think, should carry it out? What precisely is a limited military intervention, as suggested by Senator McCain? 

What sort of timetable do you have in mind? Weeks? Months? Years? A long occupation with no foreseeable end and if so, who would be doing it?

What would be the agreed aim of the intervention? Simply no more pictures of dead bodies? How can we ensure that? Regime change? I have no problems with that in principle (think Germany, Japan and Italy in 1945) but what sort of regime should we install and how long will it survive?

Do we have any identifiable allies? 

And last but very much not least: what is the exit strategy?

It is possible that some of those who are advocating intervention can answer some if not all of those questions. May I suggest, ever so humbly, that those who cannot answer any apart from pointing vaguely to some nebulous "democrats" that we have to find and help, try to remember what Prime Minister Attlee said to Professor Harold Laski: "a period of silence on your part would be welcome". The last thing we or the United States or NATO needs is another open-ended, ill-defined military engagement in a country whose politics is barely understood in the West.

Not that we are likely to get that period of silence.

Things are hotting up

On the other side of the Pond the Republicans are celebrating the outcome of the first Presidential debate that left Obama (minus TOTUS) in tatters even according to his warmest supporters in the media (i.e. most of the media). There are far too many links to put up as the opinion seems to be unanimous.

The rest of the world, meanwhile, is ... well, not exactly celebrating the fact that four years of Obama's presidency have not produced a better and more peaceful or free situation. A war between Syria and Turkey is looming. Make that was looming and is now almost in full flow.

At present it is impossible to tell ...

... how good a journalist Marie Colvin really was (and we really don't care about the French photographer, Remi Ochlik or the other 58 people who were killed at Homs). At the moment she is proclaimed by one and all to have been the greatest reporter since newspapers have existed, the woman who told the truth and went wherever the story was, regardless of danger. All of that is true, though there are other reporters of that kind and fortunately they do not get killed. Also, before her beatification by President Assad's forces I heard various accounts of her. As I don't read the Sunday Times, I have to rely on other people's accounts.

One thing, however, is clear to me: Britain is no longer in the position of being able to "avenge" the death of a journalist (not that she ever was and in the old days did not even try - journalists took their chances) and the Americans are unlikely to provide the necessary fire power. We have no real idea who is fighting Assad and whether we want to support them, wonderful though it would be to get rid of that particular mass murderer. Until we know what we want to see in Syria and, on the whole, the experience of Libya and the Arab Spring does not fill one with feelings of hopefulness, until we know that the people we support are the ones we want to support, until we can explain that this is in Britain's interests, we must not get involved in Syria militarily even after the (possibly targeted) killing of a Sunday Times reporter.

Dixi. I have spoken. Will anyone listen?

Springs come, springs go ...

... but the UN and its institutions do not change. Daily do we read of appalling crimes perpetrated by the Assad regime on Syria's people and what else do we find?

UNESCO’s executive board, which includes the US, France, the UK and other Western democracies, unanimously elected Syria to a pair of committees – one dealing directly with human rights issues – even as the Bashar al-Assad regime maintains its campaign of violence against its own citizens.

The Arab group at UNESCO nominated Syria for the spots, and though the 58-member board approved the pick by consensus on Nov. 11, the agency has not yet posted the results on its website.

Syria’s election came just a day before the League of Arab States moved to suspend Syrian membership of that body.

I wonder when they will post the result on the website. What are they waiting for?

This and that

Why, readers might ask, does she not write more about the European Union? Is that not the most important issue around? Well, yes and no. There are many issues and I have been a little remiss in handling most of them. As for the EU, well, the more I see soi-disant eurosceptics and the more I listen to their bleating, the more I think that maybe it is time either to retire from the fight or join the other side. Probably I shan't do either but it is very tempting, particularly when I see those ridiculous campaigns for an In/Out referendum, which we are bound to lose or listen to vacuous MPs.

Enough already. Let us turn to some other issues. It is summer so the Gaza flotillas are about to set off. Everything we said last year can be said this year, with additional references to the Arab spring that seems not to be resolving into high summer but has caused a great many casualties in various Arab countries as tyrannical dictators (no, it is not a tautology) cling on to power by slaughtering as many of their people as they can manage.

Syria is a particularly good example, as the Irish Examiner points out.

If the Assad regime were deposed, it would represent a major setback to both the Iranian regime and Hezbollah. Conversely, Lebanon’s March 14 democracy campaign and the Iranian Green Movement would be emboldened by the overthrow. Since March, 1,400 demonstrators have been killed by the Syrian security forces. Assad says his people love him and promises change but the reality is bullets in the backs of women mourning their sons.

The Assads have, successfully, put down dissent before. In Hama, upwards of 10,000 people were massacred on Daddy Assad’s orders in 1982, many times more than infamously died in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps the same year.

Following in his father’s footsteps, the current Assad deployed his air force against the Kurdish minority in 2004. Scores were killed and thousands were arrested and tortured. Nevertheless, somehow Assad – like the younger Gaddafi — has managed to create an image for himself as a good guy in bad guy’s clothing. He behaves like another Gaddafi but Hillary Clinton calls him "a reformer".

The fear is, of course, that if Assad went, the Muslim Brotherhood would take over. But in the Syrian case, unlike Egypt’s, is that necessarily a step backwards? It’s tempting to think it would be a good thing if Assad were allowed to cling precariously to power. But history suggests dictators like Assad become externally aggressive in response as they try to earn legitimacy in their citizens’ eyes. Right now, compelled to devote his energies to staying in power, Assad has little time to stir up fires elsewhere. But for how long?

A nasty, bloody regime with many links to terrorists organizations and a tendency to ... well, not to put too fine a point on it, massacre the people of Syria.

The more immediate question is, why is the MV Saoirse and its assorted passengers heading for Gaza and not the Syrian coast? Surely, if anyone could use some solidarity right now, it is the Syrian opposition forces who are being murdered on a daily basis?

Yes, Israel is maintaining a sea blockade to prevent the smuggling of Iranian weaponry into Gaza. But can we really blame them? Ireland has special reason to understand the need to prevent the entry of weapons by sea for terrorist purposes, having had the experience of the IRA’s attempts to import arms and explosives on ships from Libya in 1973 (the Claudia) and 1987 (the Eksund), and — with Martin Ferris’ help — on the Marita Ann from the US in 1984.

As the deputy director of the Red Cross in Gaza stated in April this year: "There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza." But there most certainly is a humanitarian crisis in Syria. The Gazan economy is clipping along and tonnes of consumer goods and food arrive daily. For sure, life is probably not very pleasant there by our standards but the oppression comes from the ruling Hamas regime, not Israel which pulled out every last settler and soldier years ago.

So how about it, Fintan Lane, Barry Andrews, Sinn Féin, and your far-left buddies? Why not divert a couple of hundred miles north to Latakia where President Assad is mowing down his own people because they dare to demand dignity and democracy? Surely, there is no contest in terms of suffering?

One could and should address the same question to all those who are setting out in their flotillas to demonstrate something or other by sailing to Gaza.

Phyllis Chesler has harsh words:

These self-styled activists and presumed anti-racists are slumming, partying, cruising for cheap thrills and even cheaper publicity. They yearn for cut-rate, no “burn” glory. They are ultimate conformists, careerists, “making their bones,” adding to their activist resumes by sticking it to the Jews. This is meant to prove that they are brave and principled.

In essence, they are engaged in a highly self-destructive form of political theatre: they are concretely manipulating symbols in the same way that Osama bin Laden did on 9/11. In the name of “caring,” these activists are surrendering to the most dangerous totalitarian and misogynist Islamist regime—but in the name of “freedom” and “justice.”

Indeed. And they also have a tendency to whimper when Israel exercises every country's right to defend itself. And, of course, none of them have the slightest idea of what the situation in Gaza is really like or who is really oppressing the people of Gaza. Hint: the Israelis are not there but Hamas is.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah has backed Syrian tyrant Baby Assad (to distinguish him from previous Syrian tyrant, Daddy Assad), naturally enough, since he has been their patron and supporter for many year.

Hezbollah has thrown in its lot with Assad against the Syrian people, supplying gunmen to execute Syrian soldiers who refuse to take part in the killing of Syrian citizens. By siding so unequivocally with the Alawite dictator over his captive, predominantly Sunni population, and in a dispute that has nothing to do with Israel no less, Hezbollah has exploded its carefully constructed image as the standard-bearer for the Muslim common man against the Zionist enemy. Outraged Syrians are now being filmed burning posters of Hezbollah’s chief, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.

The big question is will either Baby Assad or Hezbollah or the two together instigate a war with Israel in order to take away attention from internal dissent of both country and organization?

ADDENDUM: Another excellent piece on the subject, this time by Kevin Myers, one of the sanest journalists around (though he is in Ireland not in Britain). He asks quite rationally "How can do-gooders possibly think that Gaza is the primary centre of injustice in Middle East?". He is, as all decent people must be, stunned by the visceral hatred Israel excites in people who ought to know better (for example Brian Keenan who was held hostage for four years by Arab terrorists).

But how can anyone possibly think that Gaza is the primary centre of injustice in the Middle East? According to Mathilde Redmatn, deputy director of the International Red Cross in Gaza, there is in fact no humanitarian crisis there at all. But by God, there is one in Syria, where possibly thousands have died in the past month.

However, I notice that none of the Irish do-gooders are sending an aid-ship to Latakia. Why? Is it because they know that the Syrians do not deal with dissenting vessels by lads with truncheons abseiling down from helicopters, but with belt-fed machine guns, right from the start?

What about a humanitarian ship to Libya? Surely no-one on the MV Saoirse could possible maintain that life under Gaddafi qualified it as a civilised state. Not merely did it murder opponents by the bucketload at home and abroad, it kept the IRA campaign going for 20 years, and it also -- a minor point, this, I know -- brought down the Pan Am flight at Lockerbie. Yet no Irish boat to Libya. Only the other way round.

One reluctantly assumes that these people are not motivated with feelings of humanitarian charity towards Arabs but something very different and far more pernicious.