The West must respond to the use of chemical weapons in Syria

Alexander Pannett 1.15pm

There are growing reports that the Syrian regime of President Assad has been using chemical weapons against his own people. If true, it would herald the crossing of a “red line” for the US and may lead to military intervention from Western forces.

The use of chemical weapons currently appears to be small-scale, tactical deployments. A few chemical shells targeted at rebel bunkers. The danger is that the use of chemical weapons reveals the growing desperation and determination of the Assad regime to resort to any methods necessary to survive. Now that a precedent has been set, it is no longer unthinkable that Assad’s forces would use chemical weapons against civilians on a larger scale. They have certainly shown no compunction in causing mass civilian casualties with more conventional weaponry.   

Assad has shown his disdain for threatened international reprisals if he uses chemical weapons. He has gambled that there will be no direct Western intervention in retaliation and that as Western intelligence agencies are already indirectly aiding rebel groups, there will not be any major escalation in the rebellion. He is correct that the West is reticent.

Considering the quagmire that Syria has descended into, with its kaleidoscope of factions and interests, the West should be cautious about getting directly involved. Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated the cost and strategic dangers of being drawn into wars in the Middle East. Previous Western intervention has exacerbated regional rivalries and sectarian divisions, raising the threat of terrorism, not diminishing it.

However, the wider issue is that the West must demonstrate to the world that it is serious in its stance against the use of chemical and biological weapons. It must also make it clear to Assad that any escalation in the use of such weapons against civilians would herald direct intervention. Otherwise Assad may believe he can act with impunity, which would have tragic consequences for the Syrian people.

Despite understandable reservations, the West should announce that it is now directly aiding secular rebel groups and it should also impose a no-fly zone. With air assets deployed to enforce the no-fly zone, the West can more easily resort to a direct air war if Assad escalates his use of chemical and biological weapons. If direct intervention is required, use of ground forces should be limited to special forces working in tandem with rebel forces as in Afghanistan in 2001. Their main priority would be to secure all biological and chemical weapon sites to stop such weapons from falling into the hands of extremists.

Obama is right to be cautious and will be loathe to commit American forces to an area of the world that is a distraction from the much more strategically important Pacific. But a leader does not choose the events that he or she faces. For now the West should limit its actions to aid and a no-fly zone. But it must do all it can to dissuade Assad from deploying chemical and biological weapons against the civilian population. Only the imminent threat of force will do this.

Follow Alexander on Twitter @alpannett

My Open Letter to Westminster

Henry Hopwood-Phillips 10.53am

There is a caustic and remarkably resilient strain of liberalism that is proving intransigent in spite of an unravelling of the trends that caused it. We live in a post-white, post-Christian society; however, an entrenched elite refuses to yield political ground to the sincere viewpoints of Islam and other minority faith groups on a range of vital issues from dress to diet, from war to homosexuality.

These vested interests are manifestly preventing many ethnic minorities from flourishing. I therefore call upon all liberals - a political class that is almost exclusively white - to resign immediately so that a new political order, perhaps one that can reflect the new demography of the country somewhat better, can take root; and liberalism - that relic of an old order - be extinguished alongside the late imperialism that devised it.

This late imperialism may come with extra servings of hand-wringing but its first principles remain the same. Countless Islamic countries are invaded on an almost annual basis in the name of foreign ideals Muslims never subscribed to.

When Muslims do manage to escape their homelands (countries that have become war-torn thanks to western well-wishers whose enthusiasm for demolishing our governments has never quite been matched by their zeal to replace them), they have been exposed to the unrelenting judgement of “the English” (a misnomer surely, for m’learned academics tell us that no such people exist), who no less unremittingly chime to the high heavens panegyrics about their levels of tolerance.

It is this “tolerance” that informs Muslims that the ideals they teach to their children are wrong. It is this tolerance that tells Muslims that protecting their women’s dignity is oppressive. It is this tolerance that tells Muslims that eating their meat in the Qur’an-honoured way of their forefathers is a disgraceful way to treat livestock.

Historically speaking, we can all understand why this uppity and entitled elite think they have the whip-hand over us. But we are no longer living in an occidental hegemony circa 1945, and we call on Westminster to reflect this.

————————————- Spoiler Alert ~ May contain satire ———————————-

Follow Henry on Twitter @byzantinepower

Is our fear of dirty bombs leading us to disaster in Mali?

Alexander Pannett 11.50am

The crisis in Mali has reached new heights with the announcement that the UK will be sending 350 troops to the region.

The task of the soldiers is to train the Malian army and their deployment is seen as signaling a more long-term commitment to the region by the UK.

The use of soldiers is an escalation of the UK’s support for France, which had previously been solely logistical with the provision of two RAF transport planes. It inevitably raises fears of mission creep at a time of severe cutbacks to the UK defence budget.

However, there is a contradiction between the direct intervention in Mali and the less overt anti-terrorist approach taken in Yemen and Somalia. Why the sudden urgency and build up of Western troops?

The main issue which has not been widely reported in the Western press is the uranium mining area of north Niger, which borders Mali.

According to a 2008 report by a French parliamentary committee, about 18 per cent of the raw material used to power France’s 58 nuclear reactors came from Niger in 2008.

If the uranium mines fell under the control of Islamic fundamentalists then nuclear dirty bombs could become a real terrorist threat to Europe. This is especially worrying considering the relative ease of smuggling illicit goods into Europe from the North African coast.

The mines are also located in an area controlled by the Tauregs, a nomadic tribe that spreads across south-west Sahara and whose alliance with Islamic extremists has formed the backbone of the Malian rebels.  The Tauregs have been fighting for autonomy against a Malian army that has been accused of extrajudicial killings and other human rights abuses against Taureg civilians by Amnesty International.

The Algerian hostage crisis underlined the threat of Islamic extremism in the Saharan region.  It is important to the security and peaceful development of the world that any extremism is countered and exposed for the narrow and cruel bigotry that it is.

However, too often the West has papered over complex local economic and cultural issues with its simple response to extremist views.

The Tauregs appear to be fighting against an unjust Malian government that arose to power after an army coup in 2012. The Tauregs crave self-determination much as Americans, Irish, Polish and other Western peoples have in the past. To ignore their plight is immoral and short-sighted. It could lead to a calamitous strategic blunder as the Malian campaign descends into bitter guerrilla warfare against impoverished but tenacious people fighting for their freedom.

It would be folly to let the ideological fight against religious extremism force the West against uprisings that cloak their vocabulary with Sharia law but are nationalistic in their ambitions not religious. The analogy of Vietnam is disturbing.

After Afghanistan and Iraq, the West should be careful that it is not entering a hornet’s nest of complex secular and tribal divisions.  Whilst concern over the security of uranium mines in the region is rational, Britain and France should not predicate such concern with the vicarious brutalization of persecuted peoples to further the distasteful ends of corrupt and illegitimate regimes.

In a campaign that lacks specific goals, ensuring autonomy for the Tauregs would do more to bring peace and stability to the region than the re-conquest of isolated desert towns. A political and cultural solution is preferable to a military reaction.

Follow Alex on Twitter @alpannett

By attacking David Cameron the EU federalists are shooting themselves in the foot

Miguel Nunes Silva 2.12pm

David Cameron’s much awaited speech on Europe was met with profound disappointment on the side of those who currently push for greater integration in the European Union.

By making a potential referendum on British membership conditional on a Conservative party re-election, Mr Cameron was criticised of pandering to populism.

Allowing structural state policy to be determined by the masses could be said to be populism of the most irresponsible kind. Foreign policy, like defence policy, is a strategic domain of public governance. If no one asks the British people their opinion before Britain goes to war, it would only stand to reason that they are not inquired about UK membership in an international organisation. David Cameron deserves criticism on the referendum conditionality proposed but double the amount on the decision to hold the referendum to begin with.

That said, his continental detractors are a breed of their own.

To call the referendum on European Union membership a foreign policy decision is a mere assumption, because not everyone agrees that EU member-states are/should be sovereign. Most experts on EU politics only agree on one definition of its institutions: that they are a “UPO,” an unidentified political object – euphemism for agreeing to disagree.

Whereas some see the European Union as a mere technical international institution, others believe it to be a supranational entity that will eventually supersede the nation state as the sovereign political representative of the European peoples. One such step was the creation of the European Parliament, whose members are elected by direct suffrage.

Opinions vary according to the nature of the nationhood in question. Germans, Belgians and Italians, due to their short history as independent nations, their traumatic experience with nationalism and them being accustomed to working within a federal system, tend to harbour more federalist feelings. French, Portuguese or Poles, owing to an ancient nationhood, a proud export of such national culture to other peoples and a fundamentally unitary state system, are for the most part more zealous of Gaullist nation state pluralism and sovereignty.

Overall, however, continentals are less eurosceptic than the British and it was no surprise to learn of negative feedback in Europe: the French foreign minister Laurent Fabius called the referendum “dangerous” and criticised the possibility of a European Union “à la carte”. In a poorly chosen allegory, he also mentioned that a football team cannot decide instead to play rugby.

But it was the German socialist Martin Schultz, recently elected president of the European Parliament, who went the farthest in echoing the categorisation of the speech as “dangerous” and painting the announced referendum as the product of a “sorcerer’s apprentice” manipulating forces that he does not understand.

Schultz’s own Austrian parliamentary leader described the speech as “tragicomic”. Belgian Guy Verhofstadt and Franco-German Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leaders of the progressive liberals and Green parties respectively, characterised the speech as dishonest, “ignorant” and the referendum as “hokey-cokey.”

Such attitudes are despicable, disrespectful and unstatesman like. Mr Cameron may be accused of hurting the British national interest but he is at least the legitimate leader of the United Kingdom. The reactions of those who criticize him, on the other hand, are hypocritical and contradictory. These are, after all, those who advocate the European Union as more than a technical international organisation and cannot therefore be perceived as a mere instrument of foreign policy.

If that is so, and what happens in Europe is not “international” but actually “domestic,” why then not allow a referendum? Is that not the very logic behind the creation of a European Parliament, an institution that is already superfluously parallel to the national parliaments, in much the same way that the referendum would be superfluously parallel to a governmental decision to ratify the Lisbon Treaty?

One cannot have it both ways. Either Europe is a proto-state or it is an international organisation. The legitimacy that these politicians might possess to criticise Mr Cameron rests on the very principle involved in the scheduling of the referendum: that European Union member-states are sub-national entities in relation to the union and that any European politician is entitled to criticise a head of government without interfering in sovereign internal affairs, since they do so horizontally.

However, if the referendum is truly a foreign policy matter and a popular vote is purposeless, then not only is it not the place of functionaries of an international institution to interfere in the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation; David Cameron now has the legitimacy to tell them, in turn, how to do their jobs.

The “Europe à la carte” rather seems to be a product of European federalism: the only pick-and-choosing happening at the moment pertains to Europe’s federalists who invoke one logic or another, according to how it suits their own political interests. It was not after all the British footballers who decided to play rugby but rather some of the other players who decided to go cycling instead and self awarded themselves a yellow shirt…

After decades of accusations of democratically deficient integration, if the federalists seriously wish to avoid the image of promoters of a top-down federalisation by stealth, they would do well to not enter into the paradox of calling for a Europe of the peoples without existential referendums and most of all would do well not to call thirty million of their ‘fellow citizens’ “hokey cokey”.

Miguel Nunes Silva is an analyst for the geostrategy consultancy Wikistrat and has been published in a number of foreign policy media. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Lisbon and a Master’s in European Studies from the College of Europe.

Think twice Mr Cameron before arming Syria’s rebels

Aaron Ellis 11.03am

During a statement to the House of Commons yesterday about last week’s European Council, the Prime Minister warned that the Syrian crisis was “attracting and empowering a new cohort of Al Qaeda-linked extremists.” The only way to check their malign influence is if the West arms those “parts of the Syrian opposition that want a proper transition to a free and democratic Syria.”

“My concern is that if the UK with others is not helping the opposition, and helping to shape and work with it, it is much more difficult to get the transition we all want”, said Mr Cameron.

To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, practical men are usually the slaves of some bad pundit. In this case, the Prime Minister is the slave of pro-interventionist commentators like Anne-Marie Slaughter, who have been arguing this for months.

“Sooner or later some combination of the opposition groups will indeed control Syria,” she wrote in July.

“The eventual winners…will matter a great deal to the health, wealth and stability of what is still the most geo-strategically important region in the world. Syrians will remember those who remember them, those who cared enough to help save their lives.” Neither history nor recent events substantiate her argument.

As Micah Zenko wrote in response to Slaughter, it assumes a number of things:

First, that the post-Assad political leaders of Syria will be the same individuals who received U.S. weapons…Second, any country not arming the Syrian rebels will be remembered for their lack of enthusiasm, and suffer the wrath of Damascus for some period of time. Third, Syria’s political leaders will closely align their policy preferences with the United States, because the Obama administration armed them – rather than say the preferences of the Qataris or Saudis, who are providing weapons to Syrian rebel groups.

The situation in Syria is appalling, but it truly isn’t in Britain’s interests to intervene

Aaron Ellis 10.38am

Britain should help topple brutal regimes only where it is in our interests to help and our help ought to be proportionate to those interests.

I thought up the ‘Ellis Doctrine’ for humanitarian intervention in response to David Cameron’s justification for intervening in Libya, oft repeated by the war’s supporters.

“Just because you can’t do the right thing everywhere doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do the right thing somewhere”, argued the Prime Minister.

But by what criteria had he judged Libya to be “somewhere”? Why was intervention the “right thing” for us to do, as opposed to other forms of help? For years, the Conservatives had said that British foreign policy under them would be “strategic”, yet Mr Cameron’s justification for the Libyan campaign was extraordinarily non-strategic. The Ellis Doctrine offered a framework with which to think about a future crisis.

Given the crisis in Syria is far more complex than the one that confronted us in Libya, British policy needs to be appropriately nuanced. There are many reasons why Britain should help the Syrian people topple Bashar al-Assad, but we ought to limit our involvement as much as possible. The risks of too big an investment outweigh the rewards. We must limit ourselves to containing the spillover from the conflict into neighbouring countries.

Yet our policy is trending in the other direction. The Prime Minister has suggested arming the rebels. The Chief of the Defence Staff warned recently that troops may intervene if the humanitarian crisis worsened. And the ‘National Coalition of the Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces’ (NCSROF) has been prematurely recognised as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Syrian people.

If Britain is to surmount the challenges of the twenty-first century and re-climb the greasy pole of international affairs, we need a prudent foreign policy. The country must sort out its finances, build up its resources, and think carefully about where in the world it gets involved in and how.

David Cameron used to recognise this, and, in recent months, seems to have rediscovered his ‘grand strategic’ ambitions. At the Conservative party conference, he declared that “[e]very battle we fight, every plan we make, every decision we take” was designed to help the United Kingdom “rise” amidst the decline and fall of other Great Powers. “I am not going to stand here as Prime Minister and allow [us] to join the slide.”

As welcome as his rediscovery of ‘the vision thing’ is, he has also consistently fallen short of realising it whenever put to the test. Unless Mr Cameron wants Britain to become a hegemonic power in the eastern Mediterranean, then our deepening involvement in Syria is part of this disappointing trend. Involving us in a fourth conflict in a decade – with little at stake and with no coherent political-military strategy – will hasten our fall, not reverse it.

British policy must focus on stopping the civil war from spreading into the lands of close allies like Jordan. There are nearly 200,000 refugees there. Speaking in August, when the number was around 140,000, King Abdullah said: “We can’t afford anymore Syrians coming through because of the load it is on the system here.”

In October, the New York Times reported that the United States had sent military personnel to the country to help the Jordanians handle the crisis. Given our long history with the Hashemite dynasty, this is what we ought to be doing.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

From our own correspondent… with William Hague at the Foreign Office

Aaron Ellis 10.30am

I felt a bit ashamed when I joined Twitter a couple of years ago. It felt like I was Winston Smith at the end of George Orwell’s 1984, finally giving in to oppressive forces. Yet the social networking site has furnished me with opportunities I would not otherwise have had - such as meeting William Hague.

Last month, the Foreign Secretary asked his Twitter followers to say what they think should be the United Kingdom’s top foreign policy priority. The best five would then meet him to discuss their suggestions.

Last week, the winners of this competition – Katie Jamieson (@kejamieson), Antonia King (@antoniaking), Jack McCann (@Jack_Mc_Cann), James Willby (@JamesWillby), and I – met Mr Hague and enjoyed a long, interesting talk on a wide range of issues, including trade promotion and the war in Afghanistan.

A chunk of the discussion was about British foreign policy and the ‘Pacific Century’, which had been the topic of my winning suggestion. I argued that the United Kingdom had to define its role (or non-role) in a world where power was concentrated in Asia-Pacific, as it would impact on all our other defence and foreign policies. The Foreign Secretary emphasised to me that we had to be in the region, but he didn’t show that he appreciated how big an effort would be needed by the British to become real players there. ‘It would represent the most judicious, and audacious, use of the hard/soft power combination yet seen in contemporary politics,’ one expert has warned.

Mr Hague agreed with me that a potential role for the United Kingdom would be to “fill in” for the Americans as they retrench to the Pacific, which was what I argued in these pages in the summer. He used the Libyan intervention as an example of this “filling in”, ironic perhaps given my opposition to the campaign. I was too polite (as well as awed) to point out that the United States enabled 90 per cent of the military operations there, which implies we don’t yet have the capacity to take up Washington’s mantle in many areas of the world.

The other issue that I raised was British policy in Central and South Asia; as I argued in May, the United Kingdom is pursuing policies in the region that are incompatible with one another. We want a stable Afghanistan, a special relationship with India, and a strategic partnership with Pakistan – the problem is that the latter two countries believe stability in Afghanistan comes at the expense of either one or the other.

Mr Hague recognises the dilemma – in contrast to the Defence Secretary, Phillip Hammond, who denied it exists when I put it to him in December – but he thinks that the British are best placed to mediate a solution. As an example, he pointed to the recent meeting in New York between David Cameron and the Afghan and Pakistani leaders.

Though I am often critical of this Government’s foreign policies, I have always believed that Britain needs William Hague as its Foreign Secretary – a belief reinforced after meeting him. His policies are good for the country, even if I think some of them are strategically discontinuous. Mr Hague is also likeable, charismatic, and he has built up good connections with leaders around the world, which aren’t bad things when it comes to diplomacy.

The meeting also showed his enthusiasm for engaging younger people via new technologies, on the issue of the many challenges facing this country in the early twenty-first century.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

Arab politicians continue to use distant British history as an excuse for their own mistakes

Aaron Ellis 2.31pm

For many in the Arab world, the Sykes-Picot Agreement is what the Yalta conference was for many conservatives in the United States during the Cold War. It is a betrayal of people seeking freedom; a damning indictment of Great Power politics; and the source of all problems in the Middle East.

As with Yalta, all kinds of things are attributed to Sykes-Picot years after the event. For instance, the veteran Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt has said the Syria crisis is “unravelling” a deal that created the countries of the region. This lazy understanding was reinforced by the Guardian’s Martin Chulov writing that the Agreement was adopted by Britain and France in 1919, not 1916…

The Sykes-Picot Agreement divided up the Middle East between the two Great Powers and the Arabs; it did not create the nation states we know today.

France got modern Lebanon and southern Turkey, as well as a sphere of influence over an Arab kingdom in Syria. Britain acquired most of Mesopotamia and exercised influence over a Y-shaped Arab kingdom that stretched from the Egyptian border to northern Iraq and down into the Arabian Peninsula. Though the post-war carve-up vaguely resembled the deal, it actually began to unravel almost as soon as it had been negotiated by Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot.

British officials in Cairo hated the Agreement and worked to undermine it: they wanted Syria to be part of a Greater Egyptian viceroyalty that would rival the Indian Raj.

“I am afraid that swine Monsieur P[icot] has let M. S. badly down,” wrote the Tory politician and diplomat Aubrey Herbert, an intelligence officer in Cairo. “This is what comes of disregarding the ABC of Diplomacy and letting Amateurs have a shy at delicate and important negotiations.”

In 1917, the deal unravelled further when the Bolsheviks leaked its details to embarrass the Allies, prompting a fierce reaction to what was viewed as outdated imperialist thinking, especially in the United States. The Russian Revolution had also removed Britain’s geopolitical reasoning for giving the French such a huge chunk of the Middle East: creating a buffer zone between them and the Russian Empire, which had been promised land in Turkey. Sykes wrote that the sooner the Agreement was scrapped the better, as the world had “marched so far” since it had been negotiated a year before and it could “now only be considered as a reactionary measure”.

His about-turn coincided with one higher up in government when David Lloyd George became Prime Minister in December 1917. Lloyd George wanted to increase Britain’s sphere of influence beyond that which Sykes had negotiated just a few years before. In his book A Line in the Sand, James Baar reports a conversation between Lloyd George and French premiere Georges Clemenceau in which the latter conceded to British demands. “Tell me what you want,” Clemenceau is supposed to have asked him.

“I want Mosul.”

“You shall have it. Anything else?”

“Yes, I want Jerusalem too.”

“You shall have it,” said Clemenceau. These concessions were recognised in the many peace conferences after the First World War, thus by 1922 the Sykes-Picot Agreement had completely unravelled.

The Middle Eastern order that people like Mr Jumblatt fear is disintegrating was created long after this much-maligned deal was a dead letter, and centuries-old problems in the region cannot be blamed on what was even then considered to be old-fashioned thinking about Great Power politics.

Britain can be rightly blamed for many things, but too often Arab politicians use our decades-old faults as an excuse for their own mistakes.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis