So, we have started bombing. What next? – The Times 30 September 2014
Almost exactly 275 years ago, after the article in question was paraded round Westminster in a pickle jar, the House of Commons voted to go to war over the severed ear of an English sea-captain. The War of Jenkins Ear rewrote the borders of America, killed thousands and convulsed Europe for nine long years.
Egged on by our modern obsession with kinetics, rather than context, it seems we still cannot see a problem without reaching for a rocket or a bomb to solve it. We have forgotten the Clausewitz dictum that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. And so last Fridays’ Commons debate was much more about war and weapons, than the politics and diplomacy that lie behind it – or needs to, if we are to succeed.
In defeating the ISIL convulsion in the Middle East, diplomacy will have a bigger part to play than military action. Western bombs alone will not do it. Indeed, unsupported by strategic diplomacy they may even make ISIL stronger. In this fight our key ally is, not American air power, but Muslim engagement.
Here we have at present, a parson’s nose of good and bad. The good is that an Arab anti-ISIL coalition exists, including some Gulf States who foolishly funded the Jihadism that now threatens them and some of Iraq’s moderate Arab neighbours (such as Jordan). But, as a coalition, this is too small, too narrow and, in a Middle East teetering on the edge of full scale religious conflict, far, far too Sunni.
The crucial backdrop to the ISIL crisis is the Sunni/Shia conflict which now reverberates across the Middle East, down into Africa, up into the Russian Islamic republics and even to Indonesia and the Uighur population of China. This is what makes the barbaric provocations of ISIL so potentially explosive. The danger is that we, the West, will get drawn in to the Sunni side of this divide, while Russia is drawn into the Shia one. Then we would have a regional war with global consequences – think the Balkans in 1913.
Here again, there is good news, and bad. Listening to Shia voices in the last few days, it is possible to discern two coalitions emerging, one in the visible spectrum and the other in the invisible. The silence – or at least restraint – of Tehran and Damascus, perhaps even Russia too, in the face of US bombing in Syria has been deafening. We seem to have a participating Sunni coalition against ISIL. And an acquiescing Shia one prepared, for the moment to wait and see. But how long will this last in the face of the inevitable accidents and stupidities of war?
There is an opportunity here, if grasped quickly, for a wider, more balanced coalition and we should seize it.
Some of this will be subtle, some straightforward, some very difficult.
Turkey should be brought in. We need to decide soon whether the currently faltering nuclear talks with Iran can be allowed to fail, just when there is so much to gain from a deeper engagement with the reformists in Tehran. We should be encouraging recent attempts to improve relations between the two giants of the Shia and Sunni worlds, Iran and Saudi Arabia. And finally, a settlement in the Middle East strong enough to resist the contagion of Sunni Jihadism, of which ISIL is only the latest example, requires a solution to the question of illegal Israeli settlements as the necessary prelude to any Israeli/Palestinian peace based on a two state solution.
Perhaps most difficult of all, the West needs to recognise that Russia too has a dog in this fight – arguably a much bigger one than we have. Sunni Jihadism is roaring away in the Russian Islamic republics of Dagestan and Chechnya, too. We in Europe may be concerned about Jihaddis returning from the battlefield. But Russia is one of the battlefields.
So why are we so reluctant to draw Russia in? Washington friends tell me that the reason is the personal animus between Putin and Obama. If so, get over it. A wider coalition which includes the Russians, actively or passively, could open the way to a Security Council Resolution, provide the best means of limiting the spread of the Middle Eastern crisis and vastly enhance our horse power in resolving it.
We cannot compromise on Ukraine, where Putin invites us to dig up the foundations on which the peace of Europe has been built for fifty years. But, with Russia, the best policy is not isolation, but balance; tough where necessary, partnership where possible. The current Middle East crisis offers us just such an opportunity. We should take it.
The War of Jenkins ear started with a provocation and ended in a catastrophe. It showed that military action is not a substitute for diplomacy, but an adjunct to it. It would be a pity, if 275 years later we have to learn that lesson again.