by JAMES MEEK
An RAF Typhoon flies above RAF Akrotiri in southern Cyprus December 3, 2015 PHOTO/© Darren Staples/Reuters/Russia Today
People mistrust originality, especially in politicians. The safe political performance is an enactment of the familiar. David Cameron’s statement to Parliament on 23 November in support of Britain attacking Syria from the air gave us two such enactments. One is the voice that accompanies TV adverts from large corporations with millions of customers, like high street banks or big energy firms: smooth, friendly, confident, reassuring, making simple, slogan-like promises that pierce the delicate middle ground between what might plausibly be real and what can only be aspiration. ‘Our pilots can strike the most difficult targets at rapid pace and with extraordinary precision, and provide vital battle-winning close air support to local forces on the ground.’ Imagine it with stirring orchestral music.
The other is the voice of a doctor, spelling out to a patient with a chronic and unpleasant – though not fatal – set of conditions how he is going to treat one of them. It isn’t clear that it’s going to work, or how it’s going to affect treatments for the other conditions. The combination of conviction, detail and sympathy in the doctor’s discourse obscures the fact that his focus on the immediate treatment is being offered as a substitute for acknowledging that the syndrome as a whole is incurable. ‘The initial objective is to damage ISIL and reduce its capacity to do us harm. And I believe that this can, in time, lead to its eradication.’
These aren’t the worst of voices. They’re the voices of modern democracy: corporate power and knowledge reaching out to the individual citizen, offering to take responsibility, simplifying things. We, the individuals, can tell ourselves we hate advertising, that we know the corporate voice is beholden to other, more powerful agents than us; we can tell ourselves we want the doctor to tell us the truth, even if it’s that we shall be wheezy and disfigured for ever. The reality is that few of us are averse to the basic trick of advertising, which is to offer a sweeter, ideal, nobler version of the world we know – a kind of live mythologising. Most of us prefer the doctor, even amid clear uncertainty, to make a reassuring proposal of action. ‘I’m going to prescribe a course of …’ ‘The first thing we’re going to do is …’
The difficulty occurs when in this poignant communion between politician and country, between bank and consumerdom, in this consultation between doctor and patient, leader and electors (and here it’s reasonable to take MPs at face value as voters’ franchisees), a third party is present. A live third party: not a banking product, or an illness, or tax credits for Britons alone, or even the abstract notion of terrorism, but another country. The country is present, but doesn’t have a voice. British air attacks on Syria, before they are an attack on Islamic State, are an attack on Syria, a foreign country, whose citizens have no say in our affairs, and which has not attacked us, or our allies.
The question of Syria’s voice in whether or not it gets to be bombed is important. There can be an assumption among the anti-intervention crowd that Syria’s voice, or Iraq’s voice, or Afghanistan’s, or Libya’s, will always be ‘Don’t!’ But a country’s voice is, of course, many voices, and it’s solipsistic for the British left to take it for granted that the entire collective voice of Syria will oppose the RAF joining other foreign aircraft in a certain amount of partial warfare in their country. Britain’s anti-interventionists – I am one of them – shouldn’t be deluded into thinking there’s something virtuous about the stance.
Demonstrating that Britain is not a tool of neoliberal neoimperialists and wanting to keep foreign blood off Britain’s figurative hands is fine, but it is to Britain’s advantage, not Syria’s. If Britain’s warplanes leave Syria alone, and nothing else changes, the savagery will continue: the cruel fanatics of IS, the other somewhat less gothic jihadi groups, the ruthless Bashar al-Assad and his Russian allies, the Kurds and the disparate local anti-Assad guerrillas will continue to slaughter one another, and the millions of Syrians just trying to keep going will suffer, or flee. Refusing to wade into a fight between a bunch of strangers is sensible, and may be to their benefit in the long term, but it is closer to selfishness than kindness.
Cameron’s case for war came in the form of a response to a report by the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee on the pros and cons of RAF airstrikes. After hearing a series of witnesses, including a number of Syrians, the committee, made up of six Conservative, four Labour and one Scottish Nationalist MP, was unequivocal: we should not bomb. Given that subsequent events have effaced the work of what is a much-ignored body at the best of times, it’s worth quoting the essential conclusion:
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