The #SyriaVote took place in The House Of Commons earlier today and the motion was approved by British lawmakers to proceed with airstrikes against ISIS in Syria. Merely hours after the House voted in favour of bombing ISIS stronghold, British RAF Tornado fighter jets were deployed to conduct strikes, as confirmed by Britain's Ministry Of Defence. In light of recent events in Paris, once again the West has taken steps that incur backlash and proves the link between Western military intervention in the Middle East and terror attacks in the West. It is glaringly evident to anyone with open eyes that violence begets violence, yet somehow for the last decade most of us decided not to see.
Often we forget the irrefutable fact that Western intervention in Iraq post-9/11 was what fuelled extremism and radicalisation and hence, the birth of ISIS (formerly knows as AQI). Think about 9/11. Al-Qaeda said vaguely in the propaganda how the West "are the crusaders, and we want to get you out of here". But the real strategy behind the attacks wasn't revealed for a few years, and they came from internal al-Qaeda memoranda that surfaced. In the aftermath of 9/11, they didn't understand then that Al-Qaeda was dearly hoping for a large military war deployment so that it could bog them down and win the propaganda war. The challenge, here, for any government responding to this kind of stuff is to wait until you know exactly what your enemy is trying to provoke you to do. They don't know yet why ISIS are doing these atrocities, and now they risk of making some major blunders that play straight into their enemy's hands. The geopolitical situation entangled in the Middle East is a vastly complicated, delicate matter than needs light threading for effective efforts to bear fruitful.
The case has not been adequately made that extending air strikes will defeat ISIS. A strategy for the defeat of ISIS depends crucially on ground troops and a political settlement, or the path towards a political settlement. That is because ISIS cannot be defeated from the air alone, as even supporters of air strikes acknowledge, and because ISIS’s success depends on the vacuum created from a multi-sided civil war (which again, was a direct effect of Western occupation). Neither an explanation of who the ground troops will be, nor the political settlement they are seeking in Syria, has been provided by any Western government. They are going ahead without an adequate road-map or a clear strategy. ISIS is a network, not simply an organisation with a headquarters. What is more, nearly 3000 coalition air strikes have already been aimed at Syria and the case for what British air strikes will add is weak. ISIS can only be defeated in Syria with an effective and comprehensive plan. That is what is required and the proposition fails to meet that test. Whats even more disgraceful of supporting airstrikes with no clear plan is systematically ignoring the calls of the innocents that are going to be bombed. Terrorists bombed innocent civilians in Paris, now the West retaliates by bombing innocent civilians in Syria. Two sides of a coin? They purposely avoid the main killer that have slaughtered far greater number of people than ISIS have -- Bashar Assad. There is absolutely no evidence of any kind that bombing ISIS will result in an upsurge of other people in the region to get rid of them. The only stance taken by the West has been cowardly, gesture politics. Sending drones and fighter jets conducting airstrikes only result in collateral damage; murdering countless innocent people including women and children.
Its a bit outrageous how hypocritical the British government is acting in fighting ISIS. Any public utterance of "foreign policy" has and will evoke outrage from politicians and pundits. The rise of the Islamic State is from the deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies. The West's disastrous wars have bred and increased, not diminished, the threats to international security. British government officials were quick to comment that Putin has incited terrorist incident on Russian civilians following the downing of Russian MetroJet airliner in Egypt on 31 October, killing 224 civilians. Now compare and contrast their remarks about Flight 9268 with their reaction to the Paris attacks. Rather than accusing President Hollande of inciting terrorism against the people of France, or calling the atrocious attack as a direct consequence of French involvement in Syria, they have taken aim at anyone who draws attention to the country's military intervention in Muslim-majority countries.
If ISIS did bring down the airliner, then of course it would be madness to pretend it wasn't linked to Putin's military campaign on behalf of the dictator in Damascus. Yet it would be equally insane to pretend the horror in Paris had nothing at all to do with France's military involvement in the Middle East and west Africa. Blaming terrorism solely on religious ideology or medieval mindset is intellectually lazy, short sighted, self serving, and plainly wrong. Generalising the entire instability and conflict of the region is down to the Sunni-Shia divide is equally ridiculous and factually wrong. Countless worldwide Muslim scholars of every denomination have condemned violence against civilians, citing Quranic verses and Hadith from the Prophet. Scripture reading, of any faith, must be done with proper commentary and background study from scholars and learned people of the said faith. But ISIS does not do this. Its members search for text snippets that support their argument, claim that these fragments are reliable even if they are not, and disregard all contrary evidence -- not to mention Islam's vast and varied intellectual and legal tradition. Their so called prophetic methodology is nothing more than cherry-picking what they like and ignoring what they don't.
The reality is, understanding political violence requires the understanding of political grievance. The inconvenient truth is that geopolitics is governed as much as physics is by Newton's Third Law of Motion: "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." The CIA, back in the 1950s, coined a term "blowback" to describe the unintended negative consequences for US civilians of US military operations abroad. Today, when it comes to Russia, their official enemy, the British government somehow understand and embraces the concept of blowback. When it comes to their own country, the cries of innocent women and children begging for the bombings to be stopped has fallen upon deaf ears. Yes there is no grievance on earth that can alleviate and justify the slaughtering of people in Paris, Syria, or anywhere else in the world. And yes the savagery of ISIS is perhaps unparalleled in modern history. But it did not emerge out of nowhere, as the US President Barack Obama said himself, ISIS "grew out of our invasion" of Iraq.
Stupidly, the United States and its allies have averted their gaze from the glaringly evident and pretend that their enemies (Russians, Iranians, Chinese) are attacked for their policies while themselves, the liberal democracies (US, Britain, France) are attacked solely for their principles. This is the simplistic geopolitical fantasy that the likes of David Cameron tell themselves. It gives them solace during times of weakness and vulnerability, but it does nothing to stop the next terror attack.
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