Against Western Military Involvement in Syria

Pouring petrol onto a fire tends to make matters worse, and also risks burning those who do the pouring. In terms of the likely consequences, in the history of bad ideas, Western military involvement with the civil war in Syria, however well-intentioned, would be very high up in the charts.

It is, of course, possible that, as with any war, there are vested interests, like crows around a battlefield, eager for the financial rewards of a military conflict.

It is the job of military leaders to think about military involvement in any situation (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq), whereas there can only be political resolutions (Northern Ireland, South Africa). Without a political resolution, there is no resolution: the First World War begat the Second World War begat the Cold War, usw.

Military spokespeople tend to talk earnestly about ‘surgical strikes’. Yet In Afghanistan there have been many civilian causalities, as well as so-called ‘friendly-fire’ incidents. I suspect that the explosions in Baghdad that we watched on television at the start of the Bush (junior) administration military adventure in Iraq, however well-targeted, killed many people who themselves had been victims of the regime of Saddam Hussein. Explosions do not discriminate who they kill – best not to use them. And besides, soldiers are people, too. Just because they have got caught up, some of them probably fairly arbitrarily, on one side or the other, does not mean that they deserve to die violently.

I may be quite wrong, but I suspect that some of the Syrian anti-government soldiers are not polite, liberal-minded people fighting because the Syrian government is a jolly rotten lot. I suspect that a proportion of the anti-government soldiers are motivated by an ideology that is as implacably opposed to western liberality as it is to the current Syrian regime. In supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Russian ‘occupation’ in the 1980s, the CIA inadvertently spawned the subsequent wave of international terrorism through which we are still living. Giving military assistance to such people sounds like a seriously bad idea.

I am as terrified of weapons of mass destruction as anyone else. However, I believe that Western politicians are responding with their hearts not their heads about the suspected / likely use of chemical weapons in Syria. 

Although it goes against the grain for many people, non-interference by the West could be the best course of action. Western electorates generally appear to support the idea that almost any action carried out by Western states must be experienced as desirable and beneficial for the people on whom it is inflicted. I suspect that the Islamic world, post-colonial Africa, and parts of Asia think somewhat differently.

If the West wishes to do something constructive, then giving significant humanitarian aid, both for the direct benefit of the casualties in the conflict, and also to the neighbouring countries to accommodate the huge number of Syrian refugees, would be a good start. At the diplomatic level, trying harder to build bridges with the Putin regime in Russia (with which the Assad regime in Syria has some kind of ongoing relationship), and trying even harder to broker a rapprochement between Israel and a Palestinian state, could, in the long-term, be of much greater benefit to the people of Syria and of countries surrounding Syria, than simply firing missiles into Damascus.