The vote last night in the House of Commons isn't a glorious success for an insurgent anti-war movement, that has stopped Britain's imperial pretensions 4evah. Miliband was on the TV this morning, saying that this will force the government to go down the diplomatic route. What does that mean? Going to the Russians to agree an imperial imposition on the Syrian people, if not retaining Assad at the top, retaining his state of torturers. To impose such a settlement, more force will be needed, a hundred thousand dead will turn into hundreds of thousands dead, and what is left of Syria will be a battleground for al-Qaida.
But we have to stop Cameron's drive to war, we're told. What drive to war? Cameron says he will respect the will of the House of Commons, and there will be no British involvement in military action against Syria. That doesn't sound like a juggernaut driver to me. That sounds like someone who really wants to be seen to be doing something effective, perhaps to impress his wife. But it is nowhere on Cameron's list of priorities, and so it is dropped. When there are further massacres, Cameron may rhetorically attack Miliband for not letting him attack now, but that's all it will be rhetoric.
There aren't a lot of people in this country who want to help to go to Syrians (they may be a larger number who would like to help, but have been bamboozled by all the talk of "we don't know who we'd be helping" into believing that nothing can help). Nick Griffin of the BNP went to Damascus and praised the government for fighting Islamists. Nigel Farage doesn't want to know. Across the political spectrum there is virtual unanimity in the West that military strikes are a bad thing. I think they are a much worse idea than arming the rebels. I've explained before that there aren't many people in favour of them except Bashar al-Assad, who would hope they would give his government some badly-needed credibility. I know that there are many in Damascus who really would mind Assad being given a taste of his own medicine. They probably know where Iraq is, and what a mess the Americans made of it, as they live in the adjoining country. Good luck with explaining to them that you have stopped the airstrikes that might have killed them with imperialist bombs, and that the Russian missiles fired by their own government shouldn't hurt so much.
One advantage Marxism considers it has over other systems of thought is that it views events as a changing process, not as series of isolated snapshots. Viewed in isolation, there was a chemical attack, there was a vote on a Western response, and the vote went for peace. But I think there is a broader context. People are dying in Syria every day, because a government that fired on peaceful protesters is still maintained by the force of Russian arms against the insurgency that arose to defend those protesters. There have been UN monitoring missions, Arab League missions, UN peace plans, and all they have served to do is give the régime time to do more killing, to try to spread the war, to invite sectarian killing, and it is the lack of support for the mainstream Free Syrian Army that has enabled al-Qaida types any influence whatsoever, though once the war is over, they are not going to impose anything on millions of Syrians. What this vote in the House of Commons last night was was a distraction, a placing of the debate about what Britain should do on behalf of Syrians, what the Americans should do on behalf of Syrians. No it would not have helped if they had voted the other way. But those playing up the significance of the vote as a great success insult Syrians. There was never going to be carpet-bombing of Syria, there was never going to be the mass killing of civilians by the USAF (there are reports the Syrian air force has been dropping napalm, which might be a sick tribute to the US war on Vietnam). If you are fooled by a reasonable belief that US intervention is always wrong into believing that anything they do is the worst thing that could happen, more fool you. If you want Syrians to hate you, because you promote the fantasy that the Americans are a more serious threat to them than Assad's forces, that's the way to go about it.
I might get back to this subject later, with reference to other events in Iraq. The drive to war in 2003 stemmed from the position that leaving Saddam in power in 1991 had left unfinished business, by talking up the prospect of US intervention while offering no hope to Syrians, those who think of themselves as anti-war may be a similar construction of justification for ruling class belligerence in the future. It might also be noted that it was the sanctions that really killed in Iraq, which nobody protested so much about.
Somebody put up a link to the West's failure to send gas masks to Syria (there was obviously a worry they would fall around the heads of salafis). Given that what is going on in Syria is an armed rebellion against a capitalist government with support from its imperial patron Russia, the position of international socialists should be to demand that the people of Syria be given the arms they need to topple the government, notably anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. And demanding the withdrawal of the foreign forces from Iran and Lebanon probably won't make a blind bit of difference, but is probably the right thing to do too. Any concentration on the airstrikes Obama might authorise is at best a distraction, a talk of hypotheticals in an imperial Great Game while Syria burns, at worst an endorsement of Bashar al-Assad's right to kill hundreds of kids with sarin gas.
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