Friday 20 April 2018

NS letter on May`s hypocrisy over Syria

Peter Wilby is not alone in wondering why deaths from "US-led military operations" in Syria and Iraq are "more acceptable" than those caused by Assad`s chemical weapons (First Thoughts, 13th April, 2018). Are we supposed to believe that children only suffer terribly cruel deaths when chlorine or sarin gas are employed? Consequently, immediate military responses ordered by western politicians must be viewed with scepticism.
   Bew and Maher rightly suggest that any "credit" Trump gets for having a lower threshold than Obama "for tolerating Assad`s most egregious crimes must be considerably hedged", and that his response to the current crisis has much to do with "mid-term elections looming" (The war without end, 13th April, 2018). What they omitted to mention, however, was that Theresa May`s sudden sympathy for Syrian civilians is also very closely connected to domestic affairs in the UK; the prime minister clearly sees this as her "Falklands" opportunity, moving the headlines away from Brexit, and the crises in health, caring, education and policing, caused by her government`s refusal to abandon disastrous austerity policies. By taking military action while parliament was still in recess, May not only avoided emphasising the weakness of her own position, but also, like Macron in France, appeased right-wingers who fear the decline of their countries as world powers.
    The use of chemical weapons has indeed provided the west, as Bew and Maher say, with a "sense of common purpose", but it has much more to do with political survival than the seizure of a moral high-ground. Intervention on humanitarian grounds is a rather dubious excuse when viewed alongside the selling of arms to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen.

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