This is a letter I sent to 'The Herald' today following an article by their columnist David Torrance on the prospect of UK air strikes on ISIL in Syria
David Torrance is correct to highlight the glaring flaws in David Cameron's case for UK air strikes in Syria ‘ …the intellectual side of the balance sheet seems to me insubstantial’ in today's Herald [‘Corbyn’s style may be inept, but his argument is correct’ 30/11/15].
The Prime Minister’s plea that ‘we need to do something’ after the Paris massacre is not god enough. In fact it is no better than the case Parliament rejected two years ago. On that occasion David Cameron insisted we should bomb the Assad Government after it used chemical weapons against civilians in the escalating civil war. Had MPs taken his advice ISIL would be sitting in Damascus today running the country and the political consequences of that don’t bear thinking about.
The British Governments claim that ‘there are 70,000 moderate fighters in the Free Syrian Army’ ready and waiting to play the crucial role of ‘ground forces’ in the war against ISIL is nonsense. It ranks alongside Tony Blair’s ‘dodgy dossier’ which insisted Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003. Robert Fisk, the widely respected Middle East correspondent, ridicules Cameron's suggestion and insists the FSA is lucky if it has 100 ‘moderate Sunni soldiers’ and points out that this largely fictional ‘army’ is referred to only by Western leaders who refuse to recognise that the only forces [beyond the Kurds in their northern enclaves] capable of defeating ISIL are the Syrian Army of Bashir al-Asaad backed as he is by the Russians, Iran and Hezbollah.
David Cameron’s proposition to launch immediate UK air strikes on ISIL also undermines his oft repeated and equally reprehensible objective which is oust Assad and organise a complete ‘regime change’ in Syria. There is a brutal civil war taking place in Syria where the only force capable of defeating ISIL is the Syrian army.
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