Cameron's Dodgy Dossier

Yesterday, David Cameron gave one of the lamest arguments for taking the country to war there has probably been seen in Parliament. This is the man who only two years ago wanted to bomb Assad, which would have resulted in ISIS now being in charge in Damascus, and who now wants to bomb ISIS instead. Even more ridiculously, he believes that there is no reason for the UK or the US to put boots on the ground, in Syria, because those boots will miraculously appear from somewhere else. He wants us to believe that there are 70,000 “moderate” rebels, ready and able to fulfil that function. No serious analyst, in fact, no one with a brain can, or does, believe this rubbish. It is Cameron's equivalent of Blair's “dodgy dossier”.

Not even many backbench Tories believe any of this boloney, including the Tory Chair of the defence Select Committee, Julian Lewis. Many of the Tories who opposed the bombing of Syria two years ago, if truth be told, are only backing Cameron now, because they don't want him to lose a second vote on the issue, and are more concerned to drive to maximise divisions in the Labour Party, and to embarrass Corbyn, than they are about the lives of the soldiers and airmen that will be lost, as a result of their decisions.

The idea that there are 70,000 “moderate” forces in Syria waiting to provide the basis not just for defeating ISIS, but of providing the basis for a stable democratic government in Syria, is just more of the same chaff that has been thrown out in the past, in such situations. For example, we were told prior to the invasion of Afghanistan that such forces would be able to establish a stable democracy, if given the necessary backing. Even, when billions of dollars of military backing for the government in Afghanistan was provided, it did not result in a stable democratic government, but only in an unstable government, that even the US admitted was thoroughly corrupt, and which as we speak is being gradually undermined and replaced, as the Taliban prepare to take over once more.

The same thing was said in Iraq, where we were told that moderate bourgeois politicians like Chalabi, were ready to establish a stable democratic government. In fact, he was a non-starter, as were all the others put up as alternatives, because they actually lacked any real social support within the country. So, we have again a corrupt, sectarian Shia government in Baghdad, which in part has provided the basis for the growth of ISIS amongst disenfranchised and oppressed Sunnis, in the country.

Then we were told that such forces were there in Libya to do the same job. That never even got started, because it was obvious once more that democracy requires more than just holding elections. The so called Libyan National Council was a mirage, that had no real existence outside the imagination of the liberal interventionists. Having removed the only sort of secular, sort of modernising power in society, that of Gaddafi's regime, the door was thrown wide open to all sorts of reactionary forces to be unleashed, which as could have been, and indeed I did predict, at the time, would lead to a descent into chaos.

Einstein said that the definition of madness was doing the same thing over and over again, and each time expecting a different result. That sums up the madness of the position of the liberal interventionists, and of Cameron in once again proposing such an intervention in Syria. The Blair-rights, who seem incapable of having any independent thought processes whatsoever, appear set to make the same mistakes they made in Serbia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in Libya. Corbyn, and the rest of the Labour Party must make it absolutely clear that we have nothing to do with their decisions, which are clearly against the Labour Party conference decision of just a couple of months ago, and against the views of more than 60% of party members, according to recent polls.

If those Blair-right MP's, see the party, and the party members in their constituencies, who are the reason they are in parliament in the first place, as irrelevant to their decisions, if they think they have an obligation to all the voters in their constituency, be they Tories, Liberals, or whatever, rather than to the party and its members, then they should do the decent thing and go. They should leave the Labour Party and stand as independents able to act freely as merely mouthpieces of the electorate. Then they would see how little their position is down to them, and how much is down to all those party members they currently seek to ignore! They should remember how all those who went before them in that venture fared.