Isis in Syria: We can't win a war without taking sides

[Jefferson23]

Patrick Cockburn

Saturday 4 July 2015

World View: The UK must realise that a deal with Assad's army may be unavoidable


A sense of unreality and lack of seriousness flavours the British Government’s approach to bombing Isis in Syria in retaliation for the murder of British citizens in Tunisia. Give due allowance for the British tradition of procrastination and there is still something strangely languid about our lead-up to the moment when we try to kill members of the most dangerous organisation in the world.

The delay to adding Syria to Iraq as a target for RAF airstrikes is being explained as a laudable attempt to win cross-party agreement on the decision to bomb. In practice, it reflects the contradictory nature of British – and American – policy towards the war in Syria. Of course, the Government tries to give the impression of seamless continuity between its wish to bomb Syria in 2015, in the wake of the Sousse massacre, and a supposedly similar intention in 2013, after the use of poison gas in Damascus, which was rejected by the House of Commons. The one little detail not mentioned in this self-serving narrative is that, on the first occasion, we were intending to attack the Syrian army and, on the second, some two years later if it goes ahead, we will be attacking Isis, the Syrian army’s main opponent.

The changed identity of our enemy did not come across in a Downing Street briefing to correspondents last week. The briefer said: “The PM has long thought that Isil [Isis] poses a threat to Britain and Isil needs to be destroyed in Syria as well as in Iraq. That’s exactly what he said in the debate in the Commons last September. He set out in the debate that there was a strong case for the UK to do more in Syria and that remains his view. But he also said he wanted consensus in the House.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/isis-in-syria-we-cant-win-a-war-without-taking-sides-10366142.html