Who’d be a politician? Not me because I am usually on the wrong side of every major decision parliament and the electorate haver taken since I was able to vote. Apart from in 1997, 2001 and 2015, when Tony Blair won three successive Labour victories, my vote has been on the losing side. General elections, the referendum last year – I backed the wrong horses, but did I also get it wrong in 2003 when we invaded Iraq and in 2013 when we didn’t intervene in Syria?
I left the Labour Party straight after the Iraq war and it was only in recent years that I realised that at some point military action would be needed, WMDs or not. Saddam was a genocidal tyrant who was becoming a threat to all places east and eventually west. My argument, refined and shaped by the benefit of hindsight, was that we jumped the gun. Blair has been cleared of any suggestion of war crimes and of lying to the public. He got it wrong, but not as badly wrong as one might have expected. I’m wondering if, in 2013, David Cameron was right about taking action against President Assad and Ed Miliband and I were wrong? The harrowing destruction of Aleppo, with the mass murders of innocent men, women and children suggest we were.
Doing nothing is an option but only if you don’t care about the consequences. The dead and injured, the displacement of thousands, maybe millions, will affect us, especially the latter, as people flee to safe countries. That means more refugees. The catastrophe that is unfolding in Syria will have massive consequences for the world.
Boris Johnson decided to make political capital out of the siege of Aleppo, pinning the historical blame for the mess on Labour created by opposing action in 2013. If only we had intervened then, things might not be so bad today. Much as I have come to despise Johnson, he may have a point.
Like Blair in Iraq, Cameron did what he thought was right in deposing Libya’s President Gaddafi and the same applies to his failed attempt to restrain Assad. Into the void we created strode Russia and Iran. Emboldened by their support and our inertia, we end up where we are tonight. Another humanitarian disaster. We could have worked far harder to ensure aid reached the innocent people of Aleppo. If we had engaged earlier perhaps we could have engaged in military deterrence. But we did nothing.
And politicians. Who and what are they? With a few exceptions, they have no more qualifications that you or I to run the country and in reality they don’t, relying on political advisors and civil servants. Theresa May seems as clueless as any prime minister in my lifetime, Corbyn unquestionably is the worst leader of the opposition in my lifetime. Yet the decisions they make are beyond serious. And many decisions they make will be unacceptable to at least one group of people. Impossible.
Blair with Iraq, Cameron with Libya and later Syria, where parliament didn’t back him and now Syria with May – it all went wrong.
It could be that I was wrong in opposing action in Syria, but only time will tell. Either way, it ended badly, just like Iraq and Libya, where we actually did something.
I feel deep shame for Aleppo. Our leaders and leaders from all over the world, on all sides, have presided over a terrible tragedy. Their motives barely matter. When unaccompanied children are in a building being pounded by mortars and missiles, you must know something went badly strong. And still we stand by.
