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IT DOES not bode well for the direction of new Labour MP Jo Cox’s parliamentary career that one of her first acts is to join arch-Tory Andrew Mitchell in demanding the drowning of the Syrian nation in blood.
The nightmarish Syrian civil war, they write, is “so horrific and so inhumane that new thinking and bold leadership are required to address it.”
But their “new thinking” turns out to be the old favourite of self-interested military intervention, which only ever increases the stock of human misery.
Mitchell has for years supported this “new thinking” — backing the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, reducing that country to rubble and piling up hundreds of thousands of corpses, and Nato bombing of Libya in 2011, creating a terrorists’ playground where the brutal Islamic State (Isis) death cult can behead innocents with impunity.
No — we should not be taken in by their cynical pleas that appeal to history only to ignore its lessons.
The list of falsehoods duct-taped together to prop up their rotten facade of humanitarianism is astounding — but one tired claim in particular requires debunking.
The pair say that Russia’s actions make “a political settlement … more complicated” yet they ignore years of Russian calls for peace talks, beginning in 2012 when the West was confident that its favourite so-called “moderate” rebels could topple the Syrian government.
It is hard to disagree that “the protection of civilians must be at the centre” of any British action. But their proposal for “safe havens” clear of Isis and Syrian forces will likely destroy the government’s ability to fight, handing the initiative to other extreme terror groups as happened in Libya.
Isis are not the only terrorists fighting in the country. Groups such as the Nusra Front are just as vicious.
And no-fly zones would bring British personnel into conflict with the Russians and kill yet more civilians.
Also counterproductive is their claim that “we cannot focus on Isis without an equal focus on Assad” — whose government’s abuses the West was happy to ignore when the US was sending kidnapped people to be tortured in Syria — despite him heading the fight against Isis terror.
The only correct course of action is multilateral support for Damascus’s campaign against the extremists, to be followed by the Syrian people deciding their future peacefully and democratically without outside interference.
Green naivety
CAROLINE LUCAS’S involvement with the official In campaign for the referendum on European Union membership is deeply unfortunate. This paper agrees with the Green MP on very many issues but her support for the EU — as with many on the left — betrays a wishful thinking about the bloc which cannot be backed up.
To borrow a phrase from Greece, we all want a “Europe of solidarity” but the idea that the EU can be reformed to achieve this is a fantasy.
The structures of the bloc enforce neoliberalism on member states and preclude the democracy and accountability that Lucas yearns for.
This is demonstrated quite clearly by the TTIP trade deal between the EU and US, which Lucas herself opposes, along with the hundreds of thousands who took to Europe’s streets at the weekend. It was drawn up in secret to privilege big business at the expense of working people, who don’t get any kind of say on it.
Another Europe is possible, but not within the straitjacket of the EU and not by begging for crumbs from the master’s table.