Dropping Bombs on Syria to Combat Islamist Extremism. Have We Learned Nothing?
Here we are again, poised to bomb some laser-guided Democracy into a country far away.
Last week, the British Prime Minister David Cameron laid out his case for sending war-planes to Syria to take on the human cancer of ISIS. The rationale is simple: after Paris, “we have to do something.”
The politicians tell us they have considered all the options; the mood music from Westminster suggests that the vote, scheduled for Wednesday, is a fait accompli. Cameron says that the bombs we are about to drop on ISIS-held territory around their stronghold in Raqqa will make us safer, and I want to believe him. I want to believe him because, like everyone, the growing scourge of nihilistic Islamist terrorism scares me witless. I want to assume that my government has access to all manner of compelling intelligence that I do not. I want to trust my government to do the right thing in my name.
But then I pause to consider some uncomfortable truths.
I think about Cameron’s history with the conflict in Syria — about how he originally endorsed arming the rebels that would eventually mutate into ISIS, and about how, only two years ago, he wanted to attack an altogether different side in the country’s complex civil war.
Then I think about the hypocrisy of a government that rejects any prospect of negotiation with Russia and Assad, because some despots are bad, while others (in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, China) are A-ok. Then I read articles claiming that the Free Syrian Army — this phantom band of 70,000 biddable Syrians who will instantly patch up the scorched earth we leave behind — are in reality a figment, suggesting that, as in Iraq, the question of what comes after the bombs has been deemed inconsequential.
Then I consider that the advice Cameron is heeding probably emanates from military men, hawks in epaulettes who are bored of playing Call of Duty 4 in their down-time, and whose raison d’etre is war.
Then I think about us, the British electorate, and how wrong we’ve been before — about how we are a people who condemn a political leader for saying he won’t participate in nuclear Armageddon, and who decimate the one prominent political party (the Liberal Democrats) who stood against the Iraq invasion, the very foreign policy disaster that precipitated today’s Middle East dysfunction.
Then I think about that old axiom: “Those that refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I think about Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya; about seven million tons of ordnance dropped on Vietnam.
And then I remember, because I’m not a fucking idiot, that it simply is not possible to carpet-bomb an ideology out of existence.
Destroying a death-cult by scattering more death? That sounds desperate. Bombing Syria to make us safer? That sounds insane. By engaging militarily with ISIS we are participating in the apocalyptic narrative they have scripted.
Every missile that goes astray, every school we accidentally incinerate, every innocent child we collaterally maim, will mobilize sympathy for the Islamist conviction that we in the West are the planet’s great hypocrites, bent on asserting our moral superiority with indiscriminate mass murder overseas. Disaffected young men throughout the Islamic world will find an outlet for their existential frustration. The gulf will widen. And we will all be less safe, not more.
Cameron and his warmongering cronies are about to pour petrol on the flames.
Not in my name. #DontBombSyria
