The heading says it all'This comes from the LSE.
Date: Fri, 4 Dec 2015 09:10:14 +0000
To: johntimbrell@xxxxxxxxxx
From: donotreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [New post] If bombing the Middle East was the way to peace, it would
be the most peaceful place on Earth
WordPress.com
Blog Admin posted: "On Wednesday 2 December,
British MPs voted to deploy bomb attacks against ISIS/Daesh strongholds in
Syria, in response to their attack on Paris earlier this month. Here, Sean Swan
argues that this is misguided; despite the understandable yearning to be se"
New post on EUROPP
If bombing the Middle East was the way to peace, it would be the most peaceful
place on Earth
by Blog Admin
On Wednesday 2 December, British MPs
voted to deploy bomb attacks against ISIS/Daesh strongholds in Syria, in
response to their attack on Paris earlier this month. Here, Sean Swan argues
that this is misguided; despite the understandable yearning to be seen to ‘do
something’, the Middle East has been bombed by the West before without
achieving the desired results, and there is nothing to suggest this time would
be different.
Syria in the pre-war days (Credit: Christophe, CC BY 2.0)
Mr Cameron wants to bomb ISIS in Syria. The trouble is it will not work.
Firstly, there are no targets. The only significant ISIS infrastructure, the
oil storage facilities and refineries, have already been destroyed by the
Russians. ISIS forces themselves are invisible. As one uniquely informed
observer, Jürgen Todenhöfet put it “Isis fighters only march in tight orderly
lines or drive in convoys in their propaganda videos. Off camera, they avoid
hanging around in large groups and spend their time among the local population,
preferably in apartment blocks that house families. That’s the very first
chapter in the dummies’ guide to terrorism”. So there are no good targets, just
the possibility of killing civilians or of ISIS capturing a downed RAF pilot
and burning him to death as they did previously with a Jordanian pilot.
Equally, bombing ISIS will unquestioningly have the immediate effect of making
a Paris style attack in Britain more likely. These are the truly bleak
scenarios that must be considered. And their potentially serious impact on
community relations in Britain itself must also be borne in mind.
Secondly, as Mr Cameron himself admits, airstrikes alone cannot defeat ISIS
without ground forces. He seems to pin his hopes on “the Iraqi security forces
and the Kurdish peshmerga. In Syria, […] we believe that there are around
70,000 Syrian opposition fighters, principally of the Free Syrian Army, who do
not belong to extremist groups, and with whom we can co-ordinate attacks”. This
claim did not convince the more informed. Julian Lewis, the Conservative chair
of the Commons defence committee, was sceptical: “[T]he suggestion that there
are 70,000 non-Islamist, moderate, credible ground forces is a revelation to me
and, I suspect, to most other Members in this House”. In a similar vein Peter
Lilley, a former Conservative cabinet minister bluntly asked Mr Cameron, “to
convince me that what you refer to as the Free Syrian Army actually exists
rather than is a label we apply to a rag-bag group of clans and tribal forces
with no coherent force”.
The scepticism as to the existence of non-Islamist anti-ISIS forces would seem
justified given the events surrounding ‘Division 30’, an outfit drawn mainly
from the Syrian Turkmen community on which the US was prepared to spend $500
million in the hope of training 5,400 anti-ISIS fighters a year. A ‘Division
30’ unit was deployed inside Syria in July, only to be promptly abducted by the
Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. A second ‘Division 30’ unit was
deployed in September – they apparently immediately handed their US supplied
weapons over to the Nusra Front. The true insubstantiality of ‘Division 30’ was
revealed in testimony before the US Senate Armed Services Committee on 16
September. General Lloyd Austin, the head of U.S. Central Command, admitted
that ‘Division 30’ now only consisted of “a small number […] we’re talking four
or five.”
The Kurds have performed well, but the Kurds are fighting for Kurdistan, not
Syria. They have little interest in fighting outside their own areas – and even
less interest in cooperating with any coalition involving Turkey, a country
which appears more fixated on bombing Kurds than fighting ISIS. Nor is it
certain that Kurdish forces would be welcome in Arab areas. As for the Iraqi
security forces, it is the accepted wisdom that the Sunni discontent in Iraq
(on which ISIS feeds) springs from the sectarianism of the Shia dominated Iraqi
government. Iraqi government troops are thus likely to be as much part of the
problem as part of the solution. But what, barring more ‘regime change’, can be
done about that?
Thirdly, ISIS are primarily a creature of the Sunni areas of western Iraq and
eastern Syria. They openly aspire to undoing the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot
carve-up of the middle-east. The first issue of ISIS’s magazine Dabiq
celebrated “the demolition of the Sykes-Picot Borders” (Dabiq, issue 1, p. 13).
The fact that ISIS are barbaric and obscurantist should not blind us to the
fact that they obviously resonate to some degree with the Sunni in Iraq and
Syria. Yes, ISIS are in part a pathological product of the brutalizing effect
on Iraqi and Syrian society of years of war, and true too that obscurantism is
a feature of the region, (ISIS differ from Saudi Arabia more in degree than in
type), but ISIS also answer some political need amongst the Sunni population in
those countries. Providing an alternative means of answering those needs would
deprive ISIS of much of its raison d’être not only in the eyes of the Sunni
population, but of many of its own members. We should not let the obscurantism
of ISIS blind us to the fact that it serves a political function for many of
them – former Ba’athist army officers are not attracted to ISIS solely from
misplaced piety.
Mr Cameron acknowledges the need for a political settlement and professed his
“support for the diplomatic and political process” towards a settlement. “We
are now seeing Iran and Saudi Arabia sitting around the same table as America
and Russia, as well as France, Turkey and Britain. All of us are working
towards the transition to a new Government in Syria”.
Yes, a political solution is the only long term solution, and obviously all
these countries are key players, (equally obviously they all have their own
agendas in relation to Syria). But is it not also obvious that no solution is
possible without involving the people of Syria? Without the involvement of the
peoples of Syria, and indeed Iraq, this cannot avoid having the whiff of a new
Sykes-Picot, if not of a new Congo Conference or a new Munich. No lasting
settlement is possible without the involvement of the contesting parties. The
international community’s task is to facilitate a peace agreement; they cannot
create it over the heads of the people there.
In order to produce any lasting settlement three elements are required:
The recognition that what is happening in Syria and Iraq is not simply one
conflict involving ISIS but a series of inter-related conflicts. All of the
groups involved in the conflict must be represented – the Kurds, the Turkmen,
the Sunni tribes, the Druze, the Christians, the Alawites, the Syrian
Government, the Iraqi government…
The negotiators need to be authentically representative, not the
representatives of western approved phantom armies or self-appointed plausible
chancers (like Ahmed Chalabi previously in Iraq). The only way to ensure such
representation is by drawing on religious and tribal leaders in a manner
resembling the old Ottoman Millet system. This is as likely to provide genuine
representation as any election that might be held in the area in the near
future.
Accept that Sykes-Picot is not sacred, Iraq and Syria are not sacred and even
the concept of the nation-state is not sacred. The international community
should accept any form of political arrangement – short of the Caliphate
envisioned by ISIS – that the involved parties can agree upon.
Mr Cameron’s desire to bomb ISIS is emotionally satisfying. It has the
appearance of ‘doing something’ (when everybody agrees ‘something must be
done’) and of ‘striking back’ (when everybody wants to strike ISIS). But he has
a duty to put emotion aside and judge the situation according to the facts on
the ground – the facts as they are, not as he would have them. There is nothing
to indicate that Britain’s joining the ‘bomb Syria’ party will do anything much
to solve the problems there – and much to indicate it will potentially make
matters worse.
Put bluntly, if the west bombing the middle-east was the way to peace, the
middle-east would be the most peaceful place on Earth. It isn’t. No peace is
possible without a political settlement that has been arrived at by and enjoys
the support of, the peoples of the region.
Please read our comments policy before commenting.
Note: This article was first posted on Democratic Audit and it gives the views
of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy,
nor of the London School of Economics.
Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/1OBWlTv
_________________________________
About the author
Sean Swan - Gonzaga University
Sean Swan is Lecturer in Political Science at Gonzaga University, Washington
State, in the USA. He is the author of Official Irish Republicanism, 1962 to
1972.
Blog Admin |
December 4, 2015 at 9:10 am | Tags: Daesh, David Cameron, ISIS, Paris attacks,
Syria, Syrian conflict, Syrian crisis
| Categories: current-affairs, featured
| URL: http://wp.me/p2MmSR-9mU
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