By Michael Glackin
The Daily Star
Tuesday, May 17 2016
George Bernard Shaw wittily remarked that “the English are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.” If he were alive today, Shaw might have used the U.K. government’s long-running inquiry into why the United Kingdom went to war in Iraq in 2003 to make the same point.
Almost seven years after the start of the inquiry, led by career civil servant Sir John Chilcot, and more than five years after it finished taking evidence, it was revealed last week that its findings will finally be published on July 6.
The date is significant, but we will come to that in a moment.
Chilcot has said the principal reason for the delay was the U.K. government’s refusal to declassify secret documents which included the all-important 25 letters the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair sent to U.S. President George W. Bush, along with the transcripts of 130 telephone calls between the two men, in the run-up to the invasion.
Further delays were caused by allowing those criticized in the report the right to respond before publication. This has led to claims that some, including Blair, former U.K. foreign secretary, Jack Straw, the former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove, and senior defense chiefs were able to dilute criticism of their roles by challenging details and demanding changes.
But at long last Chilcot’s report, which cost $16 million and runs to more than 2.5 million words – or if you prefer four times the length of Tolstoy’s War and Peace – is now complete and was handed to ministers earlier this month. Many had expected it to be published immediately. Indeed Cameron had previously insisted he wanted to publish the report within two weeks of receiving it.
The reason it won’t see the light of day until July is because the government doesn’t want it published until after the U.K. has voted in the upcoming referendum on whether it should remain in the European Union, which takes place on June 23.
Cameron has been accused of delaying the report’s publication to avoid embarrassing key “In” campaigners in the European Union debate – not least of whom is Blair. Just as the political establishment supported the Iraq War in 2003, it is also supporting the U.K. to remain in the EU. One politician told me Chilcot’s inevitable criticism of senior political figures has the potential to “significantly undermine” public trust of the political establishment and therefore “it’s unsafe to publish Chilcot until after the vote.”
The stakes are high for Cameron. With just five weeks to go before voting opinion polls show the public is evenly split between those who wish to leave the EU and those who wish to remain in the world’s biggest trade bloc.
Defending the U.K.’s membership of the EU Cameron has gone as far to suggest that “Brexit” – the term coined to describe a U.K. exit from the EU – could result in Europe descending into World War III.
In response, the leader of the Brexit campaign, former Mayor of London Boris Johnson – who many believe will succeed Cameron as Prime Minister – compared the EU to Hitler, insisting both sought to unify Europe under a single “authority.”
Suddenly Lebanese politics looks quite sane.
While opponents of the EU argue about its impact on national sovereignty and the unaccountability of its powerful unelected officials, immigration is the issue that will decide the outcome of next month’s vote.
Brexit campaigners consistently cite the U.K.’s inability to “control its own borders” as the primary reason for leaving the EU. The EU principle of free movement across its borders has seen a sharp increase in people from the bloc’s poorer member states coming to the U.K. to find jobs – often accepting lower wages than U.K. nationals – and in the view of many voters has put pressure on public services and the U.K.’s welfare state.
For this reason, the potential for a flare up of the Middle East refugee crisis as the referendum approaches threatens to deliver the result Cameron fears most.
It is bizarre that the issue of refugees, largely from Syria and fleeing a conflagration caused in no small part by decisions taken in the West, should be the dominant issue. For a start, few of those escaping the violence have got as far as the U.K. Indeed the government has steadfastly refused to accept even a token number for settlement in stark contrast to Germany and Sweden.
But Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since the end of World War II, which saw an influx of more than 1 million refugees from the Middle East last year, has led to a sharp increase in anti-immigrant sentiment in the EU and the rise of far right populist parties. This has also happened in the U.K. despite the fact that few of the refugees that crossed the Aegean have reached its shores.
The EU’s hapless response to the issue has also increased fears among Britons that thousands of well-trained Daesh (ISIS) terrorists have used the refugee crisis as cover to slip undetected into Europe and then across its open borders, complete with freshly issued European passports.
Regardless of the reality, perception is paramount and this narrative fits into a growing fear that Islamist terrorists will eventually be able to enter the U.K. (joining incidentally a number of existing home-grown wanna-be extremists) and carry out similar atrocities to those that have taken place in Brussels and Paris.
Brexit campaigners are capitalizing on these fears and hoping to turn them into votes. This explains why Cameron is one of the loudest cheerleaders for the distinctly dodgy deal the EU brokered with Turkey – effectively a bribe to Ankara to lock Middle East refugees outside Europe’s borders.
Since the deal was agreed the number of refugees crossing the Aegean to Greece has fallen sharply despite the fact that few have so far been returned to Turkey.
However, the deal has been on borrowed time since the recent sacking of Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, its principal architect, by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a man who does not appear overly concerned about stemming the flow of refugees from a conflict he has played no small part in escalating.
The deal’s unravelling looks set to lead to a fresh surge of asylum-seekers arriving on Europe’s shores in the final weeks before the U.K. referendum takes place.
There is perhaps some poetic justice in this. Erdogan increasingly resembles the kind of autocrat the West was not so long ago keen to remove in the Arab world.
Turkish prosecutors have opened more than 1,800 cases against people for insulting Erdogan since he became president two years ago. These include journalists, cartoonists, playwrights, actors and teenagers. Earlier this year his government seized control of the popular daily newspaper Zaman and removed its editor-in-chief.
Germany’s desperation to appease Turkey has even resulted in a largely unfunny German comedian facing prosecution in his own country after mocking Erdogan on television.
If getting into bed with this kind of regime is the future of the EU maybe we are better off out of it.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR. This article first appeared in the print edition of The DAILY STAR on Tuesday, May 17 2016, on page 7.
Monday, 23 May 2016
Thursday, 7 April 2016
U.K. and Islam's paranoia in dealing with extremists
By Michael Glackin
The Daily Star
Thursday, April 7 2016.
More than a decade ago, just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, novelist Salman Rushdie warned that Islam was being hijacked by political fanatics.
The religion whose scholars had preserved and built on the intellectual heritage of ancient Greece while Europe slept through the dark ages, was in danger from what Rushdie called: “This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, ‘infidels,’ for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.”
Derided as alarmist by many of the liberal intelligentsia at the time, Rushdie’s warning has been vindicated, not just by the rise of Daesh (ISIS) and other extremists in the Middle East, but by a succession of terror attacks in the years since he made his comments, from Bali to London, and more recently in Garissa, Ankara, Beirut, Paris and Brussels.
The alarming frequency of the attacks reveals that the growth of “this paranoid Islam” shows no signs of abating and is garnering an increasing number of recruits across the globe.
Having written a great deal about the U.K. government's paranoia in dealing with the threat posed by Islamic extremists, from the use of secret trials to increasing inroads to civil liberties, it is perhaps time to confront the paranoid Islam that Rushdie identified 15 years ago.
Last week, in the United Kingdom, Junead Khan, a Daesh sympathizer from Luton who planned to attack U.S. military personnel stationed in England, was convicted of terrorism offenses. His uncle, Shazib Khan, also from Luton, was convicted of the lesser offense of planning to travel to Syria to join Daesh.
Khan’s trial was held under certain security and reporting restrictions and some information was withheld from the jury. Some of the evidence used to convict the pair still cannot be revealed for legal reasons.
However, it can now be disclosed that the case provided ample evidence on how Daesh is orchestrating attacks in Europe and just how rapidly Rushdie’s “fastest growing version of Islam in the world” is growing in the U.K.
It emerged during the trial that Junaid Hussain, Daesh's Syria-based Birmingham-born hacking expert, who went by the nom de guerre of Abu Hussain al-Britani, was in contact with a number of U.K.-based extremists, including Khan. Hussain had promised to give Khan the U.K. addresses of British soldiers that he had obtained through hacking and encouraged Khan to attack them.
Hussain’s activities placed him high on a list of British targets for assassination and he was duly killed in a U.S. drone strike last August, just weeks after security services had arrested Khan.
Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament at the time that Hussain was involved in “actively recruiting IS [Daesh] sympathizers and seeking to orchestrate specific and barbaric attacks against the West.”
However, the details of such plots could not be reported until Khan’s conviction last week. Hussain was one of a number of key Daesh members whose personal details were listed in documents released in the media last month after apparently being stolen by a disillusioned Daesh fighter. The jury was not told this, nor of his senior role in the group, only that he was in Syria and had been killed in a drone strike.
The reporting restrictions surrounding the six-and-a-half week court case were not as severe as those imposed on the trial of Erol Incedal, a British national of Turkish-Alawite descent, who was cleared in two trials in 2014 and 2015 of planning a terrorist attack in London, but convicted of being in possession of a bomb-making manual. In a first for the British judicial system, the trials were largely held in secret for reasons of “national security.” Despite several High Court challenges by media groups, citing the principle of open justice, the reasons for the secrecy have still not been publicly revealed.
By the look of things, we will have to get used to this sort of trial, because the number of young Muslims willing to embrace “paranoid Islam” is still growing. It is worth pointing out that at least 1,000 U.K. nationals have been attracted enough by it to travel to Syria and Iraq and join Daesh – though paradoxically, in between making plans to join the group, Shazib Khan also scoured the Internet for prostitutes and adult movies.
Khan’s desire to procure prostitutes is illustrative of the contradiction at the heart of the question of what makes young, often educated, westernized men, and women, accept a violent narrowly defined interpretation of Islam, one that is incapable of accepting the liberal ideal of free speech. Worryingly, a report from MI5 in 2011 revealed that two-thirds of British Islamist terror suspects were from affluent middle-class backgrounds.
The answer must surely lie within. It emerged this week that the Sunni sect Deobandi, which controls almost half of the U.K.’s mosques, allowed the Al-Qaeda-linked extremist Sheikh Masood Azhar to speak at a number of its mosques in what amounted to a jihadist recruitment drive in the mid 1990s.
A report in The Times (of London) said among those radicalized and recruited during his visit were Rashid Rauf, one of the coordinators of the July 2005 London suicide bombings and Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was later convicted of beheading the American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.
Azhar, a former associate of Osama bin Laden, was the nominal head of Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Pakistani terror group prohibited in India and the West, which has been linked to attacks in Kashmir, Afghanistan and India.
Last month, Scotland’s largest mosque was rocked by allegations that its head of religious events, Sabir Ali, had held senior positions in Sipah-e-Sahaba, a terrorist group banned in the U.K. and Pakistan. The mosque has condemned Sipah-e-Sahaba as “sectarian killers” but Ali has not been suspended from his post.
The mosque allegations came hard on the heels of the killing of Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah, who was allegedly murdered by a fellow Muslim after he posted a message wishing a happy Easter to his “beloved Christian nation.” Police have confirmed the attack was “religiously prejudiced.”
Yet, a number of Muslim groups condemned recent U.K. government proposals to combat extremism as “McCarthyist.” Under the wide-ranging proposals, groups deemed extremist by promoting hatred will be banned and places where known extremists meet, including mosques, could be closed. Parents worried that their 16- and 17-year-old children might travel to join Daesh could apply to have their passports removed, while anyone with a conviction for terrorist offenses or extremist activity would be banned from working with children.
Civil liberties underpin the freedoms that make the U.K. an agreeable place to live. There is an argument that the government’s proposals risk undermining the very values it seeks to protect. It is an argument I have often made. In that case, the remedy to Islamic extremism can only come from within Islam. Hamza Yusuf, the charismatic American Islamic scholar, has consistently attacked Daesh’s claim to be the “authentic representative” of the Sunni Islam. More, particularly in the U.K., need to follow his lead.
Michael Glackin. a former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR, is a writer in the United Kingdom. A version of this article appeared on page 7 of The Daily Star on April 7 2016.
Wednesday, 3 February 2016
The West’s tango with Putin is misguided
The Daily Star
Friday, January 29 يناير 2016
By Michael Glackin
Fact really is stranger than fiction. What novelist could have penned the tale of the 10-year-old Muslim boy in the north of England who was quizzed by police after mistakenly writing in a school essay that he lived in a “terrorist house” rather than a “terraced house”? Following a tipoff from teachers, police were dispatched to the boy’s home to interview him and his family the following day. Not even the Jesuits were that strict about spelling. Police even took away the family laptop computer for examination.
Following criticism of heavy-handedness, the police insisted other “worrying issues,” beyond the boy’s inability to spell “terraced,” had been raised by teachers. Apparently he had also written that his uncle beat him – which the boy’s parents insisted was untrue.
Following their investigation police admitted “no concerns were identified, and no further action was required by any agency.” As Mark Twain remarked: “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
There was even less sense on display during Prime Minister David Cameron’s laughable performance in front of a parliamentary committee earlier this month. Cameron was asked to explain precisely who were the 70,000 moderate Syrian fighters whom he mentioned when seeking Parliament’s approval to launch British air strikes in Syria last year. He refused to answer. The prime minister explained to the committee that if he told them who the moderates were, Syrian President Bashar Assad and Daesh (ISIS) would also “know who they were and could target them.”
You could be forgiven for thinking that Assad and Daesh already had a good idea of who they are fighting, bombing and torturing to death on a daily basis, without relying on Cameron to tell them.
And yet another stranger-than-fiction event occurred last week with the publication of a high-level inquiry into the 2006 killing of KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned in London with polonium from a Russian state nuclear facility. The inquiry found that Litvinenko was “probably” murdered on the personal order of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The 328-page report is extraordinary. It links Russia’s head of state not only to the Litvinenko murder but to a catalogue of assassinations inside and outside Russia. On the eve of the latest round of the so-called Vienna peace process to end the Syrian war, the inquiry’s damning indictment of Putin – accusing the West’s “partner in peace” of a raft of state-sponsored murders – was the last thing Cameron needed.
In fact, the British government spent years blocking any inquiry into Litvinenko’s murder, until Putin, carried away with his own hubris, annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014. Despite allowing the inquiry to go ahead, Cameron is keen to minimize any damage its findings will cause Moscow at a time when diplomatic efforts to resolve the 5-year-old Syria conflict have reached a pivotal moment. Europe’s governments are under intense pressure from the worst refugee crisis the continent has faced since the end of World War II.
Consequently, while Cameron acknowledged the inquiry’s findings and Putin’s guilt, he added: “Do we, at some level, have to go on having some sort of relationship with them because we need a solution to the Syria crisis? Yes we do. But we do it with clear eyes and a very cold heart.” In fairness, Cameron has little choice.
It is interesting that after the Paris attacks last November world leaders were tripping over themselves to present a united front against terrorism. Yet when an act of state-sponsored nuclear terrorism took place in London, which in addition to killing Litvinenko required 700 people to be tested for radioactive poisoning, there was silence from the United Kingdom’s allies.
Indeed, on the day the inquiry published its findings, French President Francois Hollande called for closer cooperation with Russia in the fight against Daesh. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble said Monday that the European Union must forge closer ties with Russia to resolve the Syrian crisis. The desire to court Russia over Syria is also leading to calls in Washington and Europe to abandon the sanctions imposed on Putin’s regime in the aftermath of his military adventure in Ukraine.
The West’s desperate need for Putin’s cooperation in Syria is misguided. Like Assad, Putin is a thug. In recent months Putin’s military intervention has not only successfully strengthened Assad, it has severely weakened the moderate opposition to the regime by focusing as much, if not more, Russian firepower on them as on Daesh. The West has watched while Russia drops cluster bombs on civilian areas, an act Amnesty International has called a war crime.
Putin may well bring pressure on Assad to compromise, or even leave power, but only if it suits his overall strategy of increasing Russian influence. It’s likely that a large slice of the bill for his cooperation will be paid in Ukraine, which the West is poised to abandon to facilitate a deal, any deal, that ends the Syrian conflict and Europe’s panic caused by the refugee crisis.
One hopes the West does not come to rue the day it allowed Putin and Assad’s brutality to take precedent over the principles of international law and justice. Yet the message that looks most likely to come out of the Vienna process is simply that crime does pay. The facts speak for themselves.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article was published in the newspaper edition on page 7, January 29 2016.
Friday, 11 December 2015
Cameron adopts gesture politics in Syria
The Daily Star
Friday, December 11 2015
By Michael Glackin
Within hours of the British parliament voting to expand its bombing mission against ISIS to include Syria, British security forces flew into action. Protection for the queen and other members of the royal family was immediately stepped up. Travel in royal cars, such as the vintage $500,000 Rolls Royce favored by Prince Charles, will be strictly curtailed and royals will have to use more anonymous vehicles, such as armored Range Rovers instead.
So much for Prime Minister David Cameron’s assertion that expanding the United Kingdom’s largely token airstrikes will make the country “safer” from terrorist attacks.
If only that was the sole false assertion Cameron made in his successful appeal to parliament last week. Speaking to me a few days after the vote, Walid Saffour, the president of the U.K.-based Syrian Human Rights Committee, said the decision would “attract further elements to join ISIS and expose London’s streets to further threats.”
The two other things that happened hours after parliament gave the green light was that British Tornado jets took off from a Royal Air Force base in Akrotiri, Cyprus, and dropped seven Paveway IV laser-guided bombs on the ISIS-controlled oil fields in eastern Syria that Cameron said had funded attacks on the West. At the same time, six Typhoon jets and two Tornados deployed from the U.K. to Akrotiri, joining the eight Tornados already there that have been attacking ISIS targets in Iraq for the last year and a half.
Broadly speaking, Cameron’s rationale behind extending the U.K.’s token airstrikes is thus: First, the laudable point that it’s wrong to turn a deaf ear to the U.K.’s closest allies, the United States and France, which have requested British help. Second, the RAF was already bombing ISIS in Iraq and stopping at a border the enemy on the ground doesn’t recognize was clearly ludicrous. Lastly, ISIS is a barbaric death cult that threatens innocent people in all corners of the world.
No one would argue with that. However, the reality is that the addition of a handful of aircraft to the U.K.’s current paltry contribution will make no practical difference. Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee has said only 5 percent of the anti-ISIS missions flown in Iraq are carried out by British aircraft. The British bombing of Syria is a meaningless gesture, a fig leaf to cover for a lack of leadership in the West to tackle either ISIS or the murderous rule of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Cameron is common among modern leaders who believe politics is the art of being seen to do something, rather than facing up to tough decisions and actually doing something. Sir Gerald Kaufman, the U.K.’s longest serving parliamentarian, who voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but voted against extending airstrikes into Syria last week, summed up Cameron’s hypocrisy when he said: “I am not going to be a party to killing innocent civilians for what will simply be a gesture. I’m not interested in gesture politics.”
To defeat ISIS will require “boots on the ground,” but the West wants no part of that battle. Cameron insists the boots are already there in the shape of 70,000 “moderate Sunni forces” – a figure that does not include Kurdish fighters. However, this, as anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the conflict knows, is nonsense.
There are an estimated 100 or more opposition groups fighting within Syria, each pursuing its own agenda. Indeed if Cameron truly believed in this “moderate” force it is surprising that he has consistently rejected their pleas to be supplied with heavy weapons.
Cameron’s duplicity was best summed up by Julian Lewis, chairman of Parliament’s defense committee, who said that after former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “dodgy dossiers” about weapons of mass destruction which led the U.K. into the Iraq war, we now have Cameron’s “bogus battalions.” It emerged at the weekend that military officials had warned Cameron against citing the 70,000 figure, but, not for the first time, gesture won out over substance.
But in the wake of the attacks in Paris and Tunisia one policy is emerging. It is increasingly clear an accommodation will be made with the Baath Party to impose order in Syria. Saffour believes London and Washington are now “waiting for the right moment to rehabilitate the regime, with or without Bashar.”
As if Syrians had not paid a high enough for this conflict already.
Cameron insists ISIS is a threat to Western “values and way of life” but is only prepared to do the bare minimum to combat its poisonous ideology.
The U.K. is set to spend more than $200 billion over the next 20 years on a nuclear “deterrent” it will never use, yet cannot summon up the money or will to defeat ISIS in its heartland.
Almost two years of bombing has achieved remarkably little. ISIS still controls vast swaths of Iraq and Syria and its affiliates appear able to launch attacks against the West at will. Air power can contain ISIS, but it cannot take or hold territory. Yes, Kurds in northern Iraq have successfully captured territory after bombing, but ground troops in other areas have been much less effective.
Western boots on the ground, if possible under the aegis of the United Nations and alongside Arab troops, still remains the best potential solution to eradicating the murderous nihilism of ISIS.
It is a solution fraught with difficulties. But what we have stood by and watched take place in Syria over the last four and a half years demands a meaningful response, one capable of resolving the problem. Something more than gesture politics.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article was published in the newspaper edition on page 7, December 11 2015.
Friday, December 11 2015
By Michael Glackin
Within hours of the British parliament voting to expand its bombing mission against ISIS to include Syria, British security forces flew into action. Protection for the queen and other members of the royal family was immediately stepped up. Travel in royal cars, such as the vintage $500,000 Rolls Royce favored by Prince Charles, will be strictly curtailed and royals will have to use more anonymous vehicles, such as armored Range Rovers instead.
So much for Prime Minister David Cameron’s assertion that expanding the United Kingdom’s largely token airstrikes will make the country “safer” from terrorist attacks.
If only that was the sole false assertion Cameron made in his successful appeal to parliament last week. Speaking to me a few days after the vote, Walid Saffour, the president of the U.K.-based Syrian Human Rights Committee, said the decision would “attract further elements to join ISIS and expose London’s streets to further threats.”
The two other things that happened hours after parliament gave the green light was that British Tornado jets took off from a Royal Air Force base in Akrotiri, Cyprus, and dropped seven Paveway IV laser-guided bombs on the ISIS-controlled oil fields in eastern Syria that Cameron said had funded attacks on the West. At the same time, six Typhoon jets and two Tornados deployed from the U.K. to Akrotiri, joining the eight Tornados already there that have been attacking ISIS targets in Iraq for the last year and a half.
Broadly speaking, Cameron’s rationale behind extending the U.K.’s token airstrikes is thus: First, the laudable point that it’s wrong to turn a deaf ear to the U.K.’s closest allies, the United States and France, which have requested British help. Second, the RAF was already bombing ISIS in Iraq and stopping at a border the enemy on the ground doesn’t recognize was clearly ludicrous. Lastly, ISIS is a barbaric death cult that threatens innocent people in all corners of the world.
No one would argue with that. However, the reality is that the addition of a handful of aircraft to the U.K.’s current paltry contribution will make no practical difference. Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee has said only 5 percent of the anti-ISIS missions flown in Iraq are carried out by British aircraft. The British bombing of Syria is a meaningless gesture, a fig leaf to cover for a lack of leadership in the West to tackle either ISIS or the murderous rule of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Cameron is common among modern leaders who believe politics is the art of being seen to do something, rather than facing up to tough decisions and actually doing something. Sir Gerald Kaufman, the U.K.’s longest serving parliamentarian, who voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but voted against extending airstrikes into Syria last week, summed up Cameron’s hypocrisy when he said: “I am not going to be a party to killing innocent civilians for what will simply be a gesture. I’m not interested in gesture politics.”
To defeat ISIS will require “boots on the ground,” but the West wants no part of that battle. Cameron insists the boots are already there in the shape of 70,000 “moderate Sunni forces” – a figure that does not include Kurdish fighters. However, this, as anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the conflict knows, is nonsense.
There are an estimated 100 or more opposition groups fighting within Syria, each pursuing its own agenda. Indeed if Cameron truly believed in this “moderate” force it is surprising that he has consistently rejected their pleas to be supplied with heavy weapons.
Cameron’s duplicity was best summed up by Julian Lewis, chairman of Parliament’s defense committee, who said that after former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “dodgy dossiers” about weapons of mass destruction which led the U.K. into the Iraq war, we now have Cameron’s “bogus battalions.” It emerged at the weekend that military officials had warned Cameron against citing the 70,000 figure, but, not for the first time, gesture won out over substance.
But in the wake of the attacks in Paris and Tunisia one policy is emerging. It is increasingly clear an accommodation will be made with the Baath Party to impose order in Syria. Saffour believes London and Washington are now “waiting for the right moment to rehabilitate the regime, with or without Bashar.”
As if Syrians had not paid a high enough for this conflict already.
Cameron insists ISIS is a threat to Western “values and way of life” but is only prepared to do the bare minimum to combat its poisonous ideology.
The U.K. is set to spend more than $200 billion over the next 20 years on a nuclear “deterrent” it will never use, yet cannot summon up the money or will to defeat ISIS in its heartland.
Almost two years of bombing has achieved remarkably little. ISIS still controls vast swaths of Iraq and Syria and its affiliates appear able to launch attacks against the West at will. Air power can contain ISIS, but it cannot take or hold territory. Yes, Kurds in northern Iraq have successfully captured territory after bombing, but ground troops in other areas have been much less effective.
Western boots on the ground, if possible under the aegis of the United Nations and alongside Arab troops, still remains the best potential solution to eradicating the murderous nihilism of ISIS.
It is a solution fraught with difficulties. But what we have stood by and watched take place in Syria over the last four and a half years demands a meaningful response, one capable of resolving the problem. Something more than gesture politics.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article was published in the newspaper edition on page 7, December 11 2015.
Monday, 16 November 2015
Paris and the end of the beginning
The Daily Star
Monday, November 16 2015
By Michael Glackin
Shortly after a combined British and American intelligence operation killed Mohammed Emwazi – the infamous “Jihadi John” – U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron stood outside Downing Street and issued a stark warning to ISIS: “We have a long reach, we have unwavering determination, and we never forget about our citizens.”
A few hours later in Paris, ISIS, or more accurately yet another of its numerous offshoots, issued its own more deadly warning: that it too has the capability to reach far beyond its self proclaimed caliphate and bring its terror and barbarism directly to the West’s doorstep.
Friday night’s attack on Paris, in which 129 people were killed, comes hard on the heels of an ISIS affiliate blowing a Russian airliner out of the sky over Sinai, killing 224 people, and just two days after the group bombed Beirut, killing 43.
These atrocities are a stark reminder that liquidating “Jihadi John,” or even destroying ISIS in Iraq and Syria, will not extinguish the group’s ability to terrorize and kill, in the West or elsewhere, anymore than driving Al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan stopped its affiliates carrying out murder across the globe.
Lest we forget, Al-Qaeda offshoots were behind the Madrid bombings in 2004 which killed 191 people, and the London bombings in 2007 in which 52 died. In 2008 the Al-Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Talibi killed 164 people in Mumbai.
The Paris attack was meticulously organized and, though claimed by ISIS, is likely to have been planned inside France rather than in Raqqa or Mosul. ISIS has a ready pool of volunteers, born and living within France, ready to murder on its behalf. Indeed, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, when brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi killed 11 people, and another four died at the hands of Amedy Coulibaly, French President Francois Hollande warned it was just a matter of time before home-grown militants carried out another atrocity.
The attack comes at the same time as ISIS has suffered a number of setbacks in its own backyard, most notably the recapture of Sinjar in northern Iraq by the Kurdish peshmerga. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is thought to have been seriously injured in an airstrike in Iraq last month. Then there is Emwazi’s largely symbolic killing, which intelligence sources have linked to the Paris attack.
Raffaello Pantucci, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute, said: “This was planned long before Jihadi John’s death but it’s possible that they thought this was a good trigger.”
France’s conduct toward Islamic terrorism has been far more proactive than its European allies. Hollande has been an active interventionist in Africa, battling Islamist militants across the Sahel region. Unlike the U.K., France has joined U.S.-led airstrikes against ISIS within Syria, albeit on a limited scale.
ISIS’ claim of responsibility for the Paris attacks specifically mentioned French air attacks “striking Muslims in the lands of the caliphate.” The terrorists that attacked the Bataclan concert hall shouted “This is for Syria” as they emptied their machine guns on the crowd.
The French president’s pledge of “pitiless” vengeance toward ISIS in response to the atrocity is likely to be more than just hyperbole. Unlike the Spanish government in 2004, which withdrew its troops from Iraq following the Madrid train bombings, France will almost certainly step up its attacks on Islamic extremists, both abroad and at home.
In the U.K., Cameron will seek to use the Paris attack to win parliamentary support for what would be largely token U.K. airstrikes against ISIS in Syria. But unless he can get Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree a political process to replace President Bashar Assad, he is unlikely to succeed.
Putin and Cameron are scheduled to discuss Syria Monday at the G-20 summit in Turkey. But last weekend’s Syrian talks in Vienna, aimed at ending a war in which a larger number than those killed last week in Paris are being murdered on a daily basis, further exposed that Russia, Iran and the West cannot agree on who exactly qualifies as a terrorist.
However, the real impact of last Friday’s events is likely to be in Europe itself. It is now certain that at least two of the gunmen who carried out the Paris attack were among the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees who entered Europe through Greece in the last four months.
Amid a Europe-wide political crisis over migrant flows from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and increasing calls for tighter border controls, anti-immigration political parties are rapidly gaining support. Earlier this month German police detained a man who managed to drive across Europe from the Balkans with a carload of weapons destined for Paris.
Writing in the Sunday Times of London, the respected, though avowedly right-wing, historian Niall Ferguson said Europe had “opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith” and whose views are “not easily reconciled with the principles of our liberal democracies.”
But tougher border controls, abandoning the European Union Schengen Agreement, ignores the fact that there are an estimated 250 French militants who have returned from Syria, capable of radicalizing and recruiting hundreds more from the dismal immigrant banlieues of Paris.
Of course, Paris doesn’t have a monopoly on home grown militants. They exist in the U.K. too. They are a reminder that the poisonous ideology of ISIS, and its potential to attract militants across the globe, is not dependent on its capacity to capture land and impose its caliphate faraway from Europe’s shores.
The West sat on its hands for too long in Syria, haunted by its failures in Iraq and later, in Libya. This week Beirut and Paris paid the price for the West’s laconic response to terror. Other cities will pay in future, regardless of whether Europe closes its borders or the fate of Syria. In the words of Churchill: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on 16 November 2016.
Monday, November 16 2015
By Michael Glackin
Shortly after a combined British and American intelligence operation killed Mohammed Emwazi – the infamous “Jihadi John” – U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron stood outside Downing Street and issued a stark warning to ISIS: “We have a long reach, we have unwavering determination, and we never forget about our citizens.”
A few hours later in Paris, ISIS, or more accurately yet another of its numerous offshoots, issued its own more deadly warning: that it too has the capability to reach far beyond its self proclaimed caliphate and bring its terror and barbarism directly to the West’s doorstep.
Friday night’s attack on Paris, in which 129 people were killed, comes hard on the heels of an ISIS affiliate blowing a Russian airliner out of the sky over Sinai, killing 224 people, and just two days after the group bombed Beirut, killing 43.
These atrocities are a stark reminder that liquidating “Jihadi John,” or even destroying ISIS in Iraq and Syria, will not extinguish the group’s ability to terrorize and kill, in the West or elsewhere, anymore than driving Al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan stopped its affiliates carrying out murder across the globe.
Lest we forget, Al-Qaeda offshoots were behind the Madrid bombings in 2004 which killed 191 people, and the London bombings in 2007 in which 52 died. In 2008 the Al-Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Talibi killed 164 people in Mumbai.
The Paris attack was meticulously organized and, though claimed by ISIS, is likely to have been planned inside France rather than in Raqqa or Mosul. ISIS has a ready pool of volunteers, born and living within France, ready to murder on its behalf. Indeed, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, when brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi killed 11 people, and another four died at the hands of Amedy Coulibaly, French President Francois Hollande warned it was just a matter of time before home-grown militants carried out another atrocity.
The attack comes at the same time as ISIS has suffered a number of setbacks in its own backyard, most notably the recapture of Sinjar in northern Iraq by the Kurdish peshmerga. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is thought to have been seriously injured in an airstrike in Iraq last month. Then there is Emwazi’s largely symbolic killing, which intelligence sources have linked to the Paris attack.
Raffaello Pantucci, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute, said: “This was planned long before Jihadi John’s death but it’s possible that they thought this was a good trigger.”
France’s conduct toward Islamic terrorism has been far more proactive than its European allies. Hollande has been an active interventionist in Africa, battling Islamist militants across the Sahel region. Unlike the U.K., France has joined U.S.-led airstrikes against ISIS within Syria, albeit on a limited scale.
ISIS’ claim of responsibility for the Paris attacks specifically mentioned French air attacks “striking Muslims in the lands of the caliphate.” The terrorists that attacked the Bataclan concert hall shouted “This is for Syria” as they emptied their machine guns on the crowd.
The French president’s pledge of “pitiless” vengeance toward ISIS in response to the atrocity is likely to be more than just hyperbole. Unlike the Spanish government in 2004, which withdrew its troops from Iraq following the Madrid train bombings, France will almost certainly step up its attacks on Islamic extremists, both abroad and at home.
In the U.K., Cameron will seek to use the Paris attack to win parliamentary support for what would be largely token U.K. airstrikes against ISIS in Syria. But unless he can get Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree a political process to replace President Bashar Assad, he is unlikely to succeed.
Putin and Cameron are scheduled to discuss Syria Monday at the G-20 summit in Turkey. But last weekend’s Syrian talks in Vienna, aimed at ending a war in which a larger number than those killed last week in Paris are being murdered on a daily basis, further exposed that Russia, Iran and the West cannot agree on who exactly qualifies as a terrorist.
However, the real impact of last Friday’s events is likely to be in Europe itself. It is now certain that at least two of the gunmen who carried out the Paris attack were among the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees who entered Europe through Greece in the last four months.
Amid a Europe-wide political crisis over migrant flows from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and increasing calls for tighter border controls, anti-immigration political parties are rapidly gaining support. Earlier this month German police detained a man who managed to drive across Europe from the Balkans with a carload of weapons destined for Paris.
Writing in the Sunday Times of London, the respected, though avowedly right-wing, historian Niall Ferguson said Europe had “opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith” and whose views are “not easily reconciled with the principles of our liberal democracies.”
But tougher border controls, abandoning the European Union Schengen Agreement, ignores the fact that there are an estimated 250 French militants who have returned from Syria, capable of radicalizing and recruiting hundreds more from the dismal immigrant banlieues of Paris.
Of course, Paris doesn’t have a monopoly on home grown militants. They exist in the U.K. too. They are a reminder that the poisonous ideology of ISIS, and its potential to attract militants across the globe, is not dependent on its capacity to capture land and impose its caliphate faraway from Europe’s shores.
The West sat on its hands for too long in Syria, haunted by its failures in Iraq and later, in Libya. This week Beirut and Paris paid the price for the West’s laconic response to terror. Other cities will pay in future, regardless of whether Europe closes its borders or the fate of Syria. In the words of Churchill: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on 16 November 2016.
Monday, 26 October 2015
Why does Lockerbie rhyme with irony?
The Daily Star
Monday, October 26 2015
By Michael Glackin
Oh the irony. What are we to make of news last week that Scottish prosecutors suddenly want to interview two Libyans they have identified as “new suspects” in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, in which 270 people were killed?
The short answer is not much.
One reason is that the suspects are hardly new. Both men were of interest to the original investigation in 1991. Abdullah al-Senussi, a former Libyan intelligence chief and brother in law of Moammar Gadhafi, was convicted in absentia by a French court in 1999 after having been found guilty of involvement in the bombing of a French UTA airliner over Niger in 1989. How ironic is that? He is currently on death row in Tripoli for crimes committed by the Gadhafi regime.
The other suspect, Mohammed Abouajela Masud, is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Tripoli for bomb-making. Masud was almost indicted for the Pan Am bombing in 1991, alongside Abdelbaset Ali Megrahi, the former head of security at Libyan Arab Airlines and the only person convicted of the atrocity.
Masud is also thought to have been involved in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in 1986 frequented by American military personnel. The attack led to U.S. airstrikes against Libya soon thereafter. Ironically, and depending on your point of view, this is what led to the bombing of Pan Am 103.
But the chances of either man appearing in a Scottish court are slim. The Tripoli-based General National Congress, backed by Islamist extremists and not recognized by the West, controls the fate of both men. It’s unlikely they will be extradited, and hard to see anyone volunteering to travel to Tripoli to interview them.
The conviction of Megrahi, who died in 2012, three years after he was released from a life sentence “on compassionate grounds,” was based on the theory that Gadhafi had ordered the bombing in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes against Libya.
Gadhafi admitted responsibility in 2003, but this was always seen as an economically pragmatic move, rather than an admission of guilt. A former Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, said as far back as 2005 that the decision to accept responsibility was to “buy peace and move forward.”
Another irony is that while the authorities insist the investigation into the bombing remains “ongoing,” the Scottish judiciary recently refused a request from some of the relatives of victims to hear an appeal against Megrahi’s conviction that would have allowed new evidence to be presented in court.
The legal case against Megrahi had more holes in it than Swiss cheese. His early release from jail in 2009, after being convicted of the biggest mass murders in British history, only added to the bad smell around the entire case.
The key witness against Megrahi, Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, was given a $2 million reward for his evidence by the CIA and a place in a witness-protection program. Gauci, who even the Scottish prosecutor who indicted Megrahi described as being “an apple short of a picnic,” is now understood to be living in Australia.
It’s worth remembering that in October 1988, two months before the Pan Am bombing, German police raided an apartment in Frankfurt and arrested several Palestinians. The raid unearthed explosives, weapons and, crucially, a number of radio cassette recorders similar to the one used to detonate the Pan Am 103 bomb. Most of the Palestinians were members of the Syrian-controlled Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, headed by Ahmad Jibril, a Palestinian former Syrian Army officer. Jibril has spent recent years defending the regime of President Bashar Assad. He was reported to have been killed in August although this has since been denied.
Much of the evidence indicates Jibril and the PFLP-GC carried out the bombing on behalf of Iran and Syria to avenge the July 1988 accidental downing of an Iranian commercial airliner by a U.S. warship, killing 290 people. This is backed up by evidence from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency showing that the PFLP-GC was paid $1 million to carry out the bombing. The DIA also claimed that Jibril was given a down payment of $100,000 in Damascus by Iran’s then-ambassador to Syria, Mohammad Hussan Akhari.
Many believe then-Syrian President Hafez Assad’s support for the U.S.-led alliance to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 meant Syria’s role in the bombing was swept under the carpet. It is worth pointing out that Megrahi was not formally indicted by the United States and the United Kingdom until November 1991.
But the PFLP-GC is not the only non-Libyan suspect. The Frankfurt raid also revealed compelling evidence against Muhammad Abu Talib, a former leader of the Palestine People’s Struggle Front. Oddly enough Talib was released from a life sentence he was serving in Sweden for involvement in bomb attacks weeks after Megrahi’s release in 2009.
Finally, given that the authorities remain keen to pursue the Libyan angle, it is odd they spent so little time interviewing Gadhafi’s former spymaster Moussa Koussa when he fled to London as the regime was collapsing in 2011. Koussa, who in the words of one British government official was “up to his neck” in the bombing, spent just three days in London and then flew on to Qatar, where he remains, living on assets that were quietly unfrozen by the West around the same time. Oh the irony.
Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this articles appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on October 26 2015.
Monday, October 26 2015
By Michael Glackin
Oh the irony. What are we to make of news last week that Scottish prosecutors suddenly want to interview two Libyans they have identified as “new suspects” in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, in which 270 people were killed?
The short answer is not much.
One reason is that the suspects are hardly new. Both men were of interest to the original investigation in 1991. Abdullah al-Senussi, a former Libyan intelligence chief and brother in law of Moammar Gadhafi, was convicted in absentia by a French court in 1999 after having been found guilty of involvement in the bombing of a French UTA airliner over Niger in 1989. How ironic is that? He is currently on death row in Tripoli for crimes committed by the Gadhafi regime.
The other suspect, Mohammed Abouajela Masud, is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Tripoli for bomb-making. Masud was almost indicted for the Pan Am bombing in 1991, alongside Abdelbaset Ali Megrahi, the former head of security at Libyan Arab Airlines and the only person convicted of the atrocity.
Masud is also thought to have been involved in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in 1986 frequented by American military personnel. The attack led to U.S. airstrikes against Libya soon thereafter. Ironically, and depending on your point of view, this is what led to the bombing of Pan Am 103.
But the chances of either man appearing in a Scottish court are slim. The Tripoli-based General National Congress, backed by Islamist extremists and not recognized by the West, controls the fate of both men. It’s unlikely they will be extradited, and hard to see anyone volunteering to travel to Tripoli to interview them.
The conviction of Megrahi, who died in 2012, three years after he was released from a life sentence “on compassionate grounds,” was based on the theory that Gadhafi had ordered the bombing in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes against Libya.
Gadhafi admitted responsibility in 2003, but this was always seen as an economically pragmatic move, rather than an admission of guilt. A former Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, said as far back as 2005 that the decision to accept responsibility was to “buy peace and move forward.”
Another irony is that while the authorities insist the investigation into the bombing remains “ongoing,” the Scottish judiciary recently refused a request from some of the relatives of victims to hear an appeal against Megrahi’s conviction that would have allowed new evidence to be presented in court.
The legal case against Megrahi had more holes in it than Swiss cheese. His early release from jail in 2009, after being convicted of the biggest mass murders in British history, only added to the bad smell around the entire case.
The key witness against Megrahi, Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, was given a $2 million reward for his evidence by the CIA and a place in a witness-protection program. Gauci, who even the Scottish prosecutor who indicted Megrahi described as being “an apple short of a picnic,” is now understood to be living in Australia.
It’s worth remembering that in October 1988, two months before the Pan Am bombing, German police raided an apartment in Frankfurt and arrested several Palestinians. The raid unearthed explosives, weapons and, crucially, a number of radio cassette recorders similar to the one used to detonate the Pan Am 103 bomb. Most of the Palestinians were members of the Syrian-controlled Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, headed by Ahmad Jibril, a Palestinian former Syrian Army officer. Jibril has spent recent years defending the regime of President Bashar Assad. He was reported to have been killed in August although this has since been denied.
Much of the evidence indicates Jibril and the PFLP-GC carried out the bombing on behalf of Iran and Syria to avenge the July 1988 accidental downing of an Iranian commercial airliner by a U.S. warship, killing 290 people. This is backed up by evidence from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency showing that the PFLP-GC was paid $1 million to carry out the bombing. The DIA also claimed that Jibril was given a down payment of $100,000 in Damascus by Iran’s then-ambassador to Syria, Mohammad Hussan Akhari.
Many believe then-Syrian President Hafez Assad’s support for the U.S.-led alliance to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 meant Syria’s role in the bombing was swept under the carpet. It is worth pointing out that Megrahi was not formally indicted by the United States and the United Kingdom until November 1991.
But the PFLP-GC is not the only non-Libyan suspect. The Frankfurt raid also revealed compelling evidence against Muhammad Abu Talib, a former leader of the Palestine People’s Struggle Front. Oddly enough Talib was released from a life sentence he was serving in Sweden for involvement in bomb attacks weeks after Megrahi’s release in 2009.
Finally, given that the authorities remain keen to pursue the Libyan angle, it is odd they spent so little time interviewing Gadhafi’s former spymaster Moussa Koussa when he fled to London as the regime was collapsing in 2011. Koussa, who in the words of one British government official was “up to his neck” in the bombing, spent just three days in London and then flew on to Qatar, where he remains, living on assets that were quietly unfrozen by the West around the same time. Oh the irony.
Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this articles appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on October 26 2015.
Friday, 18 September 2015
Britain adds to the anti-ISIS futility
The Daily Star
Friday,September 18 2015
By Michael Glackin
A recent biography of British Prime Minister David Cameron revealed that the United Kingdom’s top soldier complained that discussing Syria with Cameron and his government in 2012 was rather like talking to children.
In colorful language, Gen. Sir David Richards, who was chief of defense staff at the time, said Cameron lacked “the balls” to put “boots on the ground” in Syria. He added that if Cameron had listened to him back then, ISIS would have effectively been strangled at birth.
On one level you can’t blame Cameron for not taking the general’s advice. Richards is one of those tipped to be heavily criticized when, and if, the long-delayed report of the Chilcot inquiry into British involvement in the Iraq war is ever published. And let’s face it, the British military made plenty of mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the general also has a point. While it’s impossible to say with any certainty that earlier intervention in Syria would have prevented the spread of ISIS, or the wider bloodbath of the last four years, standing on the sidelines has hardly proved a success.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed by the regime of President Bashar Assad in the last four years, while thousands more have perished at the hands of ISIS. Its affiliates have terrorized Europe, and the entire Middle East, from Tunisia to Yemen, has been destabilized. Western European unity is creaking under the weight of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the turmoil and the human carnage.
Cameron’s “child-like” understanding of the Syrian crisis has been sorely tested in recent weeks as he faced intense scrutiny in the wake of the refugee crisis and following his announcement this month that a Royal Air Force drone had targeted and killed two British ISIS fighters near Raqqa in August. A third British extremist was killed in a U.S. airstrike at around the same time.
The U.K. has used killer drones in Afghanistan, a declared conflict zone. However, the attack in Syria was the first time it has deployed them in a country with which, and in which, the U.K. was not at war.
Cameron said the strikes were designed to foil terror attacks planned by the two men in the U.K. He insisted the action did not mark wider British involvement in coalition airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria, a step that would require parliamentary approval. However, Cameron is poised to call a vote in Parliament within weeks in a bid to gain authorization to launch such airstrikes. He also warned last week that removing ISIS would require “not just spending money, not just aid, not just diplomacy, but will on occasion require hard military force.”
There is nothing really new in this. Cameron has been keen to expand British airstrikes to Syria for some time. Along with the killing of the two British ISIS fighters, Royal Air Force personnel have already taken part in bombing raids over the country while embedded with U.S. and Canadian forces.
This partly marks a belief within the intelligence services that terror attacks, such as the one that took place in Sousse in Tunisia in June in which 30 Britons were killed, are being planned in Raqqa – although the Tunisian shooting clearly owes more to Libyan instability than to events in Syria.
But the sudden step-up in rhetoric is also a knee-jerk reaction to the refugee crisis engulfing Western Europe. The British chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, Cameron’s effective deputy, said the only way to stop the flow of refugees was to end the Syrian conflict. Though his comment avoided the war in Iraq and the terrible state of Libya and Afghanistan, it was belated recognition that the Syrian civil war has reached a stalemate.
In a move to break the stalemate, and amid what is clearly a buildup of Russian troops in Syria, Cameron’s big idea is centered on the U.K.’s extending its military strikes against the “controlling brains” of ISIS, alongside a diplomatic push with Iran and Russia that would see Assad remain in power for a transitional period of six months while some form of national government can be formed to take power.
Whether Iran and Russia are ready to consign Assad to the dustbin of history remains questionable. Both are deeply suspicious that the West could use military action against ISIS as cover for removing Assad. Hence British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond’s bizarre comment that RAF airstrikes in Syria would be prohibited from targeting areas where the civil war is raging.
The caveats are fast diluting an already watered-down strategy that looks as ill conceived as Cameron’s last failed attempt to get parliamentary approval for British airstrikes in Syria two years ago. That time Assad was the target, this time he looks set to be the beneficiary.
But the real question is whether the military action being considered against ISIS will have any practical impact. The largely token U.S.-led airstrikes against ISIS, supported by a handful of RAF Tornados and even smaller contingents from other Western and Arab nations, have contained some ISIS activities, but have had little real impact on its murderous acts.
ISIS may now control marginally less territory, but despite the airstrikes it has still been able to capture key cities, most notably Palmyra in Syria and Ramadi in Iraq. Dropping a few more bombs on ISIS in Syria is no substitute for a military strategy to eradicate its evil. To paraphrase General Richards, despite the tough talk, Cameron is still lacking in the cojones department.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on September 18, 2015.
Friday,September 18 2015
By Michael Glackin
A recent biography of British Prime Minister David Cameron revealed that the United Kingdom’s top soldier complained that discussing Syria with Cameron and his government in 2012 was rather like talking to children.
In colorful language, Gen. Sir David Richards, who was chief of defense staff at the time, said Cameron lacked “the balls” to put “boots on the ground” in Syria. He added that if Cameron had listened to him back then, ISIS would have effectively been strangled at birth.
On one level you can’t blame Cameron for not taking the general’s advice. Richards is one of those tipped to be heavily criticized when, and if, the long-delayed report of the Chilcot inquiry into British involvement in the Iraq war is ever published. And let’s face it, the British military made plenty of mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the general also has a point. While it’s impossible to say with any certainty that earlier intervention in Syria would have prevented the spread of ISIS, or the wider bloodbath of the last four years, standing on the sidelines has hardly proved a success.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed by the regime of President Bashar Assad in the last four years, while thousands more have perished at the hands of ISIS. Its affiliates have terrorized Europe, and the entire Middle East, from Tunisia to Yemen, has been destabilized. Western European unity is creaking under the weight of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the turmoil and the human carnage.
Cameron’s “child-like” understanding of the Syrian crisis has been sorely tested in recent weeks as he faced intense scrutiny in the wake of the refugee crisis and following his announcement this month that a Royal Air Force drone had targeted and killed two British ISIS fighters near Raqqa in August. A third British extremist was killed in a U.S. airstrike at around the same time.
The U.K. has used killer drones in Afghanistan, a declared conflict zone. However, the attack in Syria was the first time it has deployed them in a country with which, and in which, the U.K. was not at war.
Cameron said the strikes were designed to foil terror attacks planned by the two men in the U.K. He insisted the action did not mark wider British involvement in coalition airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria, a step that would require parliamentary approval. However, Cameron is poised to call a vote in Parliament within weeks in a bid to gain authorization to launch such airstrikes. He also warned last week that removing ISIS would require “not just spending money, not just aid, not just diplomacy, but will on occasion require hard military force.”
There is nothing really new in this. Cameron has been keen to expand British airstrikes to Syria for some time. Along with the killing of the two British ISIS fighters, Royal Air Force personnel have already taken part in bombing raids over the country while embedded with U.S. and Canadian forces.
This partly marks a belief within the intelligence services that terror attacks, such as the one that took place in Sousse in Tunisia in June in which 30 Britons were killed, are being planned in Raqqa – although the Tunisian shooting clearly owes more to Libyan instability than to events in Syria.
But the sudden step-up in rhetoric is also a knee-jerk reaction to the refugee crisis engulfing Western Europe. The British chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, Cameron’s effective deputy, said the only way to stop the flow of refugees was to end the Syrian conflict. Though his comment avoided the war in Iraq and the terrible state of Libya and Afghanistan, it was belated recognition that the Syrian civil war has reached a stalemate.
In a move to break the stalemate, and amid what is clearly a buildup of Russian troops in Syria, Cameron’s big idea is centered on the U.K.’s extending its military strikes against the “controlling brains” of ISIS, alongside a diplomatic push with Iran and Russia that would see Assad remain in power for a transitional period of six months while some form of national government can be formed to take power.
Whether Iran and Russia are ready to consign Assad to the dustbin of history remains questionable. Both are deeply suspicious that the West could use military action against ISIS as cover for removing Assad. Hence British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond’s bizarre comment that RAF airstrikes in Syria would be prohibited from targeting areas where the civil war is raging.
The caveats are fast diluting an already watered-down strategy that looks as ill conceived as Cameron’s last failed attempt to get parliamentary approval for British airstrikes in Syria two years ago. That time Assad was the target, this time he looks set to be the beneficiary.
But the real question is whether the military action being considered against ISIS will have any practical impact. The largely token U.S.-led airstrikes against ISIS, supported by a handful of RAF Tornados and even smaller contingents from other Western and Arab nations, have contained some ISIS activities, but have had little real impact on its murderous acts.
ISIS may now control marginally less territory, but despite the airstrikes it has still been able to capture key cities, most notably Palmyra in Syria and Ramadi in Iraq. Dropping a few more bombs on ISIS in Syria is no substitute for a military strategy to eradicate its evil. To paraphrase General Richards, despite the tough talk, Cameron is still lacking in the cojones department.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on September 18, 2015.
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