It's urgent to get stuck into the Syrian War. Or should we think a little first?

It’s fascinating to watch all the noise that’s been generated over whether or not Britain should take part in air strikes against ISIS in Syria. It’s as though this was becoming an acid test of one’s commitment to democratic rights and rejection of terrorism. Back the bombing of Syria or give up any hope to be taken seriously as an opponent of ISIS, that sort of thing.

No one seems to want to stop and think whether adding Britain’s really rather limited punch to what’s already going on would actually make any serious difference. After all, the US, France and some reluctant, on-off allies from the Arab world have been bombing ISIS for months. As the Paris attacks showed, that’s not really degraded its capacity to act, has it?

It’s not surprising that it’s been so ineffective. Take the French effort after the Paris attack: they flew sorties across the weekend after and announced, with pride, that they’d killed 31 militants. Since estimates range up to 200,000 in ISIS, at 31 dead ever two days, it was going to take a terribly long time to reduce its force seriously that way.

In fact, the only serious reverses to ISIS have been in places like Sinjar, where Kurdish forces have retaken the city from ISIS. Air strikes were vital to that victory, but they couldn’t achieve it alone. It took Kurdish ground forces. 

What’s true in Sinjar is true in Raqqa too. Air strikes will cause inconvenience, and will kill innocents (written off as “collateral damage”) but they will not drive ISIS from their unofficial capital.

No one’s calling for British, French or US forces entering ISIS territory on the ground. Rightly. After all, we put forces on the ground into Iraq, and look how that worked out: our actions directly contributed to the rise of ISIS. The last thing we should do now is to try that again. Far better to back local forces to recapture what is, after all, their land.

I say that though I know that even local forces don’t always do the job we want: there have been accusations of ethnic hostility directed against Sunnis in Sinjar since the Kurds took the city.

In any case, the problem is that in Iraq only the Kurds seem to be capable of putting effective forces in the field. The Shia dominated government is unable to build an army able to take on ISIS. As for the Sunni opposition, rather too many of them seem to have decided that their poor treatment by the government can only be met by backing ISIS.

As for Syria, who on earth can we put our trust in? Who can play the role that the Kurds have played in Iraq? That role may be limited, but in Syria, gripped by a three-way civil war, no one can play it at all.

Which brings us back to the question of the air strikes. Because even in the air, the situation is as confused as on the ground.

We have the US and France with occasional allies bombing ISIS positions. We have Russians claiming to bomb ISIS position but, apparently, focusing more of their action on other, non-ISIS opponents of President Assad – indeed on the anti-Assad forces that the US, France and Britain support. 

To the North lies Turkey, ally of the US, France and Britain, in NATO. But it has Kurdish opponents within its own territory – Kurdistan extends into Iraq, Syria and Turkey. So our ally Turkey has little time for the only force that is making progress against ISIS in Iraq. If the enemy of Turkey’s enemy is Turkey’s friend, one has to wonder how they really feel about ISIS.

And that takes us to the latest development, the downing of a Russian fighter on the Turkish-Syrian border. A long way, incidentally, from the nearest ISIS positions. At first Turkey claimed the strike, on the grounds that the plane had entered its airspace. But later Turkoman rebels in Syria claimed they’d brought down the plane.

Russian jet brought down probably by Turkey.
Adding to the sense of chaos

So we have Russia running bombing strikes against ISIS nowhere near ISIS positions, and we have Turkey, or possibly Syrian rebels aligned with Turkey, bringing down one of the planes.

Confused? Yes, it’s a frighteningly confusing situation. Multiple actors with different agendas, including unavowable objectives kept hidden from their allies, and sometimes running directly contrary to the war aims of those allies.

But in Britain the debate has been boiled down to just one question: when are we going to join the US and France in bombing ISIS in Syria?

Isn’t it time that we started asking a few more questions? Perhaps more sophisticated ones? And maybe do a little thinking about the complexities of the situation before we leap into action?

Especially since such action isn’t likely to do a lot of good, and could create further dangerous incidents, like the downing of the Russian jet.


PS, on a lighter note

If it was the Turks that brought down the Russian plane, it does occur to me that they might have limited themselves to issuing warnings and following up with a stiff diplomatic note afterwards. That would at least have avoided the risk of precipitating a major international incident.

All that reminds me of a story told me by my Genevan uncle-in-law. 

During WW2, British bombers attacking Italian targets would apparently take a shortcut through Swiss airspace. The Swiss were neutral, but flying around took too long and consumed too much fuel.

Every time they did it, Swiss anti-aircraft crews would radio the RAF planes.

“You’re overflying Swiss territory, you’re overflying Swiss territory.”

The RAF crews would radio back.

“We know, we know.”

The Swiss gunners would open fire and the RAF would radio them again.

“You’re firing too far to the left, you’re firing too far to the left.”

“We know, we know,” would reply the Swiss.

Under attack, France unites in resistance around the Marseillaise

No words in response to the Friday the thirteenth attacks in Paris have struck me as much as the message “je suis en terrasse” – I’m on a [café or restaurant] terrace. 

As a way of expressing defiance to the terrorists who attacked, among other places, a café and a restaurant, they can’t be bettered: they say, “we’re not going to be put off, we’re going to go on living the life we choose, despite your vile actions and your threats.”

French defiance: your acts won't drive me away from the life I choose

It’s relatively unusual, since this particular attack hasn’t produced much in the way of universally appealing slogans. Nothing so striking as “Je suis Charlie” after the murders at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo or the first use of a phrase of this kind, “Nous sommes tous Américains”, we are all Americans, the day after 9/11. There has been one fine visual image, the peace symbol with the Eiffel Tower at its centre. It has power and elegance, but hasn’t had the impact one might expect.

A great symbol, but it hasn't taken of like “Je suis Charlie”

In the absence of overarching visual symbols, there’s an audible one that keeps recurring and really does incarnate French attitudes towards their aggressors: the singing of the Marseillaise.

The French are lucky in possessing a stirring anthem. One that it’s hard not to hear without wanting to sing it. Why, some of the best bits of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture are built around the Marseillaise. That’s ironic, since he wrote the piece to communicate quite the reverse message – the triumph of Russia over Napoleonic France. Sadly, the national anthem of Russia, as it appears in the same piece of music, is as dirge-like as our own anthem, here in Britain.

There was a bit of a scandal in Britain some weeks ago over the then newly-elected leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, failing to sing the anthem at a memorial service. He could never have said it, but I wish he’d replied that he found nothing sufficiently inspiring in that dreary tune to make him want to sing it.

I mean, compare God save the Queen with The Star Spangled Banner. All we Brits ask for is to be allowed to have the Queen reigning over for us for ages, to a stodgy tune. I prefer Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, which England fans sing at rugby matches. On the other hand, given the recent performance of the team, something dirge-like is probably, and sadly, more appropriate.

The Americans, in contrast to the Brits, celebrate the continued resistance of their gallant forces to the overwhelming aggression of their dastardly (and, as it happens, British) foes.

The French call on their compatriots to rise up against the blood-soaked flag of tyranny. In passing, I have to admit that the Marseillaise also calls for the furrows of French fields to be irrigated with “impure blood”, which could lead to all sorts of racist notions of what kind of blood is pure – notions that have sadly played a role in the debate since the ISIS attacks. That’s going to be discussed repeatedly in the coming months and years, as we argue over the difference between the small numbers of Muslims behaving viciously, and the entire Muslim community.

That can wait, however. For now, let’s focus on the way the Marseillaise acts as a bond between Frenchmen in adversity.

Fans were being evacuated from the Stade de France, filing through the tunnels to the exits, spontaneously began to sing the anthem. The same scene occurred several times on the following days: the Marseillaise being sung by people gathering to mark the event. Again, on Friday evening a man, in an apartment near the Bataclan concert hall, started to sing it as the time of the attacks came round, one week on. Passers-by took it up in the street.

All this reminded me of a Frenchman I heard interviewed on the radio some years ago. As a young man, in 1940, following the disaster of the French defeat in May of that year, he was one of the handful who immediately responded to de Gaulle’s call to form a resistance to the Nazi occupation. He managed to make his way to London and eventually to the building the Churchill government had made available to de Gaulle for his headquarters. There was, as yet, no accommodation for the young volunteers and so he spent the first night with several dozen others, sleeping rough on the floors of the offices.

The young men were of many backgrounds and viewpoints – poor or wealthy, Catholic, Republican or Communist – thrown together in their sleeping bags on the hard floor. The one thing they had in common was that they were French, and they were determined to start on the long, hard and uncertain road which would take their nation back from humiliation to pride.

So, spontaneously, like the football fans in the tunnel at the Stade de France, or the Parisians near the Bataclan, in the lonely dark, they began softly to sing the Marseillaise. Which so fully expressed what united them, and their will to fight back.

Harking back to that time, and the spirit of resistance it generated, is perhaps the best way for the French to react to what happened in the ISIS attacks. Maybe it’s appropriate that the Marseillaise should be the principal symbol of their response.

Terrorism: hardly a tactic refused by the West, and by no means an expression of power

The atmosphere today is febrile with the fear of terrorism. 

Not without reason. If the attacks on Paris prove anything, they prove that terrorists are capable of reaching right into the places we think of as safest and hit us there. That’s a prospect that makes ISIS seem frighteningly powerful.

We’d do well, however, not to be carried away by our natural fear. In particular, we mustn’t overstate the power of a terrorist movement. In reality, terrorism is precisely the opposite of the expression of power – it is a blind lashing out in impotence, by a movement incapable of exerting real power against its foes.

Nor should we make the mistake of thinking the West incapable of acting in equally terrorist ways. Indeed, we should remember that when the Western democracies went for terrorism, they wreaked incomparably more harm than ISIS ever has.

After the defeat of France by Nazi Germany, Britain was briefly left to fight on alone – although it wasn’t quite as isolated as that sounds, since it could draw on the support of a still substantial empire. However, Britain was in no state to wage an effective ground war against Germany. Indeed, when France and Britain together had decided to strike at Germany using ground forces, it was through an invasion at Narvik in Norway, designed to win access to Swedish iron ore supplies, and deny them to the Nazis. The campaign ended in the ignominious retreat of the French and British forces, and the defeat of Norway by Germany, which promptly occupied the country (as it had Denmark on the way).

At sea, British dominance was unchallenged. But Germany wasn’t fighting a naval war, apart from the submarine campaign against convoys supplying Britain – in which it was giving the Royal Navy a tough battle.

So, in its inability to achieve any kind of success on land, and fully committed in a defensive battle at sea, Britain could only turn to air power to produce some evidence to its population of effective action against the enemy. Hence was born what came to be called the strategic bombing campaign. Cutting through technical and apparently neutral terms, that was the mass bombing of German cities.

The thing about bombing cities is that the only thing it will certainly do is kill a lot of civilians. Indeed, something like 305,000 Germans were killed by this campaign. Nearly 800,000 were wounded. 7.5 million were made homeless.

Aftermath of the bombing of a German city in World War 2

Naturally, the campaign wasn’t openly described as terrorism in Britain (it was, equally naturally, in Germany). It was justified as a way of degrading German industrial capacity, in which it was a failure: production continued to grow throughout the war. However, it was also presented as a means of breaking the population’s willingness to support the war. The Area Bombing Directive of Valentine’s Day 1942 (history is full of ironies) which began the carpet bombing of cities, set as its objective “to focus attacks on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular the industrial workers.” That really is the textbook definition of terrorism: deliberate targeting of a civilian population in order to destroy its morale.

The Germans used the same approach. Over 60,000 British deaths were caused by German bombing. The Germans were just as happy to adopt terrorist tactics as the British; only lack of resources prevented them causing the same level of damage.

So a first observation: it would take over 2000 attacks like last Friday’s in Paris to inflict on the French the kind of destruction the Allies wreaked in Germany. When it came to terror, we had the resources to be a lot more effective at it than ISIS is or ever will be.

And a second observation: it was no evidence of strength on the part of Britain, and later the USA. It’s hard to point to any advantage to the Allied cause that came from bombing German cities. Indeed, it often did us harm. As military historian Correlli Barnett has argued, the campaign diverted resources from providing air cover for convoys, driving Britain nearly to starvation at the height of the U-boat campaign. When it came to depleting German capacity, far more was achieved by bombing railways and canals. No, the bombing was the reaction of a nation that could see no way to win significant victories for the time being, lashing out at its enemies in the only way it could. It hardly mattered whether it did anything useful.

The use of terror tactics by ISIS is of the same order. It had some spectacular success initially in Iraq and Syria but now it’s bogged down. Terror is a way of venting its hatred against its enemies, whether in Lebanon, at Sharm El Sheikh, or in Paris, and it matters little whether it achieves anything for its cause.

In fact, it looks strongly as though ISIS is doing itself harm. It has brought down a Russian airliner and attacked Paris. That has suddenly brought together people who were having real trouble reaching any kind of common ground. We may even see NATO and Russia finally coordinating their actions in the Middle East to defeat ISIS, before considering the questions on which they have differences.

Rather like Japan attacking Pearl Harbor, ISIS may have woken a sleeping giant. That may seal its fate.

See what I mean? The use of terrorism doesn’t show power, it shows weakness. In this case, a possibly fatal weakness.