The Independent 21 July 2015 Bombing ISIL
Towards the end of the 1960s jungle war Britain fought to protect Sarawak against rebel incursions, I received orders to cross the border and take the fight to the insurgents based on the other side of the Indonesian frontier. It was a controversial policy, but an effective one– the war ended not long afterwards. Britain claimed legality for these operations under the provisions in international law which, in some circumstances, permit a nation to pursue its right to self-defence onto the territory of a second state, where that state harbours or supports those who threaten its security.
It is no doubt this provision which the Prime Minister has in mind when he says that Britain, as part of the “coalition” who has been “invited” by the Iraqi Government to help defend its territory, is now legally justified in joining other coalition air-forces already bombing ISIL in Syria. Whether this is in fact so is a matter for lawyers, not me.
But whether this action, even if legal, is wise, is a different question.
Does it make military sense for Britain to pursue ISIL into Syria? Probably. Is it legal to do so? Possibly. Is this the most effective thing Britain can do to defeat ISIL? Definitely not.
We are not losing the war against ISIL because we do not have enough bombs – we are losing it because we do not have enough diplomacy.
The great military thinker Clausewitz famously said that war was the extension of diplomacy by other means. One of the reasons we in the West have suffered so many defeats in recent years is because we always seem to remember the war, but forget the diplomacy. We see a problem in the world and our first instinct is to bomb it. We have become obsessed with high explosive as an instrument for peace. George Bush senior knew better. He carefully constructed a Middle East Coalition before Gulf War one, making it seem Western forces were the instrument of Arab will – and he won. George Bush Junior ditched diplomacy in favour of Western “shock and awe” – and lost. We repeated the mistake in Afghanistan, using high explosive as a substitute for the kind of patient diplomacy to create a regional framework for peace with the neighbours, as we did in Bosnia – and lost. In Libya we could have created a regional coalition with countries like Turkey to first liberate the country and then rebuild it afterwards. Instead the West chose to blast Gadhafi out of office and then abandoned the country to chaos afterwards.
And now we are doing it all over again. Only this time it is much more dangerous. Some of us have been warning for three years that the real event taking place in the Middle East is a widening Sunni/Shia war which threatens to engulf the region. ISIL is only part of this. But we have become so obsessed with the small picture and the short-term threat to the West, that we cannot see the bigger threat to peace on a wider scale.
There is now a real danger that we become the unwitting handmaidens of that wider conflict by creating a so called “coalition” to fight ISIL which is too military, too Western, too small and far, far too Sunni. It is not just the West or the Sunnis Arabs who are threatened by ISIL. Turkey is too. And Tehran. And Moscow, struggling with Sunni Jihaddism in its Muslim republics. For us in the West the threat comes from Jihaddis returning from the battlefield. The Russian republics of Chechnya and Dagestan are the battlefield.
There is a real opportunity here, if only our obsession with high explosive would let us see it. We will not destroy ISIL just by killing more Muslim Arabs with Western bombs. And a few more British bombs will not change that. As Clausewitz knew, military action only makes sense where it is part of a wider diplomatic strategy. Our action against ISIL isn’t and that is why it is failing.
The new rapprochement with Tehran (achieved, please note, through patient long term diplomacy – no high explosive required) gives us a real opportunity. The best thing Britain could do to defeat ISIL is not to add a tiny quantum to the more than sufficient pile of high explosive already falling on Iraq and Syria, but to use its diplomatic skills, through the EU to begin to assemble a wide diplomatic coalition aimed at smothering ISIL. This should include the moderate Sunni states, Turkey and Tehran. And yes, why not Russia too? We have no choice but to play hard-ball with Moscow over Ukraine. But offering Putin a partnership on defeating the Sunni Jihad which threatens us both, would add huge weight too our ability to succeed and avoid the mistake of pushing Russia into a corner from which she has no route for escape.
Our mistake these last decades has been to believe that this is the age of high explosive, when in fact it is the age of diplomacy. If we want to make Britain safer, we will do it better by using our skills to help create the wider diplomatic coalition to smother ISIL which will enable military action to succeed, rather than contributing our tiny portion of bombs to a policy that won’t.
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