Or Not…

Well. Did I speak to soon or has the House of Commons voting against action in Syria come as a genuine surprise? I think the latter but either way, it’s a great disappointment. If you were happy with this outcome know that such humanitarian luminaries as Vladimir Putin, and Bashar al Assad for that matter, support your position. It would be imprudent to get to carried away with what the UK’s lack of a role in whatever action does now take place would mean, as any interventionist campaign was going to limited in the first place, but I still believe this was the wrong decision.

Labour, under the worthless guidance of their leader Ed Miliband voted en masse against the military option. Perhaps I have a set of hate-tinted glasses on for this man by now but discussions with folk about his role in this passage have concluded very unfavourably for him. While it’s parliament’s job to reflect the will of the people, and opinion was not weighing in favourably on this issue, I would argue that on Syria broader public opinion is lamentably misaligned. As Philip Hammond phrased it, Iraq has poisoned the well.

There were and are lessons to be taken away from the last ten years of the UK’s military activity, primarily that we shouldn’t get into the wrong conflicts in the wrong manner. What we shouldn’t have told ourselves was that we should avoid all conflict because we can only get into the wrong conflicts in the wrong manner. To throw some platitudes at you, conflict can’t always be avoided and sometimes force does need to be met with force. Clearly Ed, Labour and a handful of Tories and Lib Dems disagree.

Painfully short-sighted, and although that’s an accusation easily levelled against someone of my position who wants intervention, I think my accusation carries more weight. As mentioned in the previous article, the Syrian crisis has been raging for over two years, utterly unchecked by diplomacy or any hint of concern for the well-being of the Syrian people. As things are going, this is a fight that won’t end until Assad kills everyone he needs to kill and likely many thousands more. His father taught him well.

Despite the brewing talk of intervention in the last week, there cannot possibly be a legitimate argument to say the West is warmongering or hasty. Our lack of action to this point is proof of that, as much as so many Syrians enduring prolonged, inhuman suffering. Before this conflict ends it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to see parliament brought back to the question of intervention, with the added weight of more needless dead and the guilt of not having acted emphatically sooner. Whatever the US and France do at this point is likely only round one.

As mentioned, the lack of UK involvement won’t shake the very foundations of hope for the average Syrian and I doubt Assad is cracking open the champagne but it’s a sad indictment of the political cynicism in this country that we couldn’t get behind a limited campaign in pursuit of a worthy aim. Too good an opportunity for Miliband to ignore, as indeed Cameron has suffered an embarrassment after more than a little bold rhetoric. To quote No.10 and Foreign Office sources, “Miliband is a fucking cunt and a copper-bottomed shit.”

After leading the charge against Cameron’s intent, the man even had the gall to remind the government that it had a duty not to wash its hands of Syria. In case you’ve already forgotten that quote, “Miliband is a fucking cunt and a copper-bottomed shit.” Certain individuals like Simon Jenkins have indicated their belief that the suggested form of intervention, limited air strikes, serves only to massage the egos of the politicians who order them. They aren’t effective apparently. A hideous and reductive perspective.

Right now Assad continues his war against his own people, while essentially the world does precisely f@*k all and I’m sick to death of it. Something is better than nothing, looking at what nothing achieves, and if something starts with limited air strikes then the massaged ego of a few politicians is absolutely acceptable collateral.  With regards to war, we’re simply making a cowardly value judgement in favour of the collateral of inaction.

Again the Eve of Conflict

It’s looking more than likely that the USA, UK and France will once again be shipping out forces to fight a battle far removed from home. The Assad regime of Syria seems to have finally pushed too hard, with the chemical gassing of a Damascus neighbourhood resulting in dozens of deaths and hundreds of other casualties. Not the first hint of this civil war crossing into more vicious territory, and it was already more than vicious enough. As governments and militaries are this very moment drawing up plans, prompted further by the Arab League’s recognition of Assad’s clear and unacceptable crimes, the British public are already beginning to react.

The tone does not seem overly favourable to the idea of intervention. A quick flick through the comments section of any media site will prove this. Whether it’s outrage over another Middle Eastern intervention before we’ve even brushed off the sand from the last three, the fact that living standards don’t seem to be faltering enough for the government to drop probably millions of pounds worth of munitions in the coming weeks or more overt brands of cynicism (oil, power conspiracies, interests etc.), you could even say there’s a fair dose of pre-emptive anger. Whether you’re Obama, Cameron, Hollande or associated foreign secretary, you can guarantee this action isn’t being taken lightly.

How could it be? It’s been over two years since Assad’s forces started shooting his own people for peacefully protesting for more democratic controls, sparking the backlash against his government that quickly devolved into a civil war, no matter how cautious global commentators were in labelling it so. Throughout this time over 100,000 people have died in Syria, despite the repeated and impotent protestations of the international community. When the red line was drawn a few months ago over the use of chemical weapons, we even had to considerably thicken that line to the tune of blatant and callous use before we would act.

I’m no hawk. Not that you need to be to view things like the mismanagement of Afghanistan, the outright disaster of Iraq and the as yet unresolved troubles of Libya as stark indictments of Western government attitudes towards intervention and more importantly, reconstruction. But it still sickens to me read comments that are simply heartless to the plight of the Syrian people, and I hope beyond hope that this now almost unavoidable intervention will somehow get it right. I can’t even suggest what the character of that would realistically look like, given that this conflict is now beyond protracted and deeply convoluted.

Here’s what I’d say to the average dick who thinks the Syrians should just sort their own mess out. They were trying to and more or less just received indiscriminate gunfire for their troubles. Would you riot and rebel if the Cameron government let blood on the Mall like this because we wanted to have more freedoms? Too f@*king right you would, and you’d be crying across the Channel and the Atlantic for help all the while. This isn’t even the most pertinent point though. For nine out of ten Syrians, this was never their fight to lose and regardless their country is now largely reduced to rubble and graveyards because of a sick, megalomaniacal despot in Assad.

I don’t much care if the Syrian opposition has added their own share of controversy to this mess, as it seems as perfectly clear who landed the first and most overtly unjust blow, as who is responsible for continuing and escalating the conflict. There is no such thing as rulers. Leaders like Obama, Cameron and Hollande are all on borrowed time, graciously lent to them by democratic peoples. The moment Syria didn’t want the Assad regime was the moment he should have gone, not that they ever had a tenable mechanism with which to remove him. He never had any legitimacy to lead his people in the first place, inheriting all that he had from his father.

Not our problem? That’s a perspective for spineless hypocrites in my opinion. Like any instance where the world has twiddled its thumbs while thousands upon thousands of innocent people have perished in a war completely beyond their control, Syria deserves help. Whether you like it not or it’s around the corner, just maybe remember your objections the next time you go to peacefully vote out Cameron because you didn’t like him. I support the intent. Just pray it isn’t another failure.

The In Amenas Crisis

The In Amenas hostage crisis appears to be over, and now we can await the deluge of analysis and retelling as we scramble to fully understand the events that took place. There’s not much for me to say on the details yet, as all I fully know is that it happened and has ended. The news delivered to me the same information as it did to you.

Members of a relatively recent terrorist group, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, attacked an Algerian gas facility, taking a number of foreign and domestic hostages, arguably in response to French intervention in Mali. The hostage situation ended after several days with the Algerian military storming the facility and killing the terrorists to the cost of a number of hostages’ lives.

Actually, the news, by which I mean the myriad news organisations who attempted to cover this crisis, told us a lot more than that. What I just offered was a broad but reliable summary of what we can say almost definitely took place. What the ‘news’ gave us was a torturous bed of quicksand, an ever changing barrage of suggestions and figures that utterly betrayed the sensitivities of a fluid, ongoing situation.

I cannot stand this aspect of modern news media culture. They were all in such a goddamned hurry to report every fractional change, or put forward any suggested account of the numbers of terrorists, hostages or survivors, that about two days ago I was beginning to feel dizzyingly unwell. It is not the job of the news to vomit out the first scrap of information on the gamble it might be right, and that they might have been the first network to get it right.

Coverage of the In Amenas crisis was frankly appalling in this regard. I’m already a fairly seasoned interpreter of the news and I didn’t have clue, even to the point that I decided to fully check out of the affair until someone could offer a definitive impression of reality. I think today we can reasonably well state that it has drawn to a conclusion, although I still wouldn’t say it’s fully understood yet.

Not one of the many resources I look to for decent information to fuel my own writing was able to resist the temptation to bandy about unconfirmed information. Thank heavens I didn’t actually know anyone who was involved in the crisis, as by now I would think they are all emotionally run ragged. This is a major problem for the modern news machine.

Just because we have the ability to report on these events in real time, and with total coverage, does not mean we should. And even if we can’t resist the urge to indulge in our unprecedented capabilities, we should still remember the overarching rules of good journalism. I am thus far, being frank, only a blogger, and yet I still seemed able not to react to this crisis as if I was myself also in crisis. Publishing every figure, comment or interpretation before one can reliably do so, is just bad journalism.

It’s rather counter-intuitive. You would think being able to inject a legion of reporters almost directly into any situation would aid the reporting of accurate news. Instead we end up with a clusterf@#k. If any paid journalists are reading this, I make a genuine plea – I’m happy to wait an extra few hours if it means I can be told the correct thing once. The news should not be an informational roller-coaster.

There is more than enough going on in the world to talk about, even during a high-profile thing like In Amenas. Perhaps if the news was completely liberated from concerns of viewership and was instead judged on its ability to impart the highest quality interpretation of unimpeachable facts, we would be much better off.

The Malian Conflict

Ah world. Coming on two years of the Syrian conflict where the West has seen fit to hide behind the bloodied garb of many a dramatically out-gunned baker-turned-freedom fighter, we see a variety of nations, primarily the French, whetting their blades on the desert stones of Mali. Or in the case of France, unleashing murderous hellfire from the skies on droves of unwitting and largely indoctrinated soldiers of misfortune.

I don’t think for a second that more than a small proportion of either Ansar Dine or the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa are clerical madmen, bent on a totalitarian future of oppressive sharia law. Most are likely woefully ill-educated young men emanating from the inhospitable parts of their world where nothing better was ever offered to them other than the corrupt promises of a few manipulators.

So stifle that triumphant cry when you read about the next few scores of rebels being incinerated in half a blink of the eye. It’s ultimately just as tragic as the horrors unleashed upon the people of northern Mali under the influence of sharia law in this past year, the circumstances leading to which were equally tragic. This whole thing simply has tragedy written all over it.

Wresting free of nearly a hundred years of French colonialism in 1960, Mali has endured as unsteady a time as most formally colonial African countries. Coups, corruption and the search for a nation state identity, despite the nation state being a wholly unnatural and imposed system in Africa, prevent the kind of polite stability we rather easily criticise them for not possessing. Indeed, how very dare they force us to suppress our own guilt reflex for not fixing the deep problems we laid down.

The present conflict is entirely rooted in Western imposition upon the continent. Ever wondered how a vast and vastly ethnically diverse land ended up having so many neat and geometric borders? That would be the result of so many politicians and cartographers, wanting a pretty picture and clear lines for the new imperial order, paying not a jot of attention to the specific matters of tribal distribution, conflicting cultures and historic regions.

Thus the nomadic Tuareg people end up being the dispossessed and unwelcome feature of these new states where once they mastered there own lives in the huge expanses of the Sahara. And it so happens that a major area of their inhabitance was the historical territory of Azawad, now perhaps more commonly known as more than half of the modern Malian state. There have been multiple rebellions in the past century for a degree of autonomy for these distinct peoples.

The current uprising is the result of the existing domestic sentiment for independence, combined with the fallout of the end of the Gadaffi regime, from which Tuareg fighters returned with arms to their home regions. Certainly by October 2011, these elements had combined to form the secular National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad and by March 2012 had made significant gains across northern Mali.

Exactly at what point Ansar Dine splintered from the NMLA, or became an entity in its own right, is unclear. But also in March 2012 they were making separate claims of territorial expansion in the name of imposing sharia law, and were soon joined in this mission by the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MOJWA). By April these Islamist factions, initially with the NMLA, had driven government forces from northern Mali but shortly after were in open conflict against the NMLA as well. The secular independence movement has taken a back foot.

Enter the French. At this point, it is probably a good thing that they have intervened, as the Islamist factions were becoming rampant and their system of rule could best be described as barbaric. The lurching UN-backed intervention could have come to fruition too late, but let’s not hail the French as selfless defenders of Malian peace and prosperity against some monolithic cloud of tyranny. They carry a responsibility to act and have enough interests in their former colony worth protecting.

Hollande does deserve a mention. Disdain for his economic policies aside, he has been curiously willing to get stuck into the variety of spats that have developed around Africa and the Mediterranean since coming to power. Perhaps after Sarkozy was so quick to jump on the arguably successful Libyan intervention, he doesn’t want to appear hesitant. France under Hollande was one of the first nations to recognise the formal opposition in Syria and we have also seen some dramatic activity by French forces in Somalia.

Swings and roundabouts. But after a decade of highly unsuccessful American bravado it is more than peculiar to see a far smaller European nation unilaterally flaunting its stuff. I suspect that, under Obama, America has been considerably less willing to stick its neck out and the door has been opened for others to be “heroic”. Or rather, others must now deal with the type of mess these smaller nations have typically gone pleading to America to deal with.

Bon chance.