You said on Facebook you felt guilty about going to a festival when there were terrible things happening in Syria. Made me think.
When I first visited Syria I hadn’t been to many Arabic countries. So I expected noisy calls to prayer and beautiful, crumbling mosques, which I got.
Other things I didn’t expect at all. For example in the central business district, where I was staying, the women wore loads of make up and really short skirts, just like they were going for a night out in Middlesbrough.
I took the road to Damascus in a BMW taxi from Jordan; the driver didn’t speak English and I had Manfred Mann’s ‘Blinded by the Light’ in my head the whole time. I noticed truckloads of soldiers too, looking bored in badly-camouflaged trucks. Too many soldiers – a country under Emergency Law from 1963 to 2011. Who let that happen? Who sold them the weapons, the trucks?
But I remember the welcome more than anything. People really do go out of their way to make you feel at home. It was December so I was driven to the Christian quarter by my colleague to see the Christmas lights. I wanted to say I could get Christmas lights at home, and that these were fairly average. But in the face of such a welcome it felt churlish. ‘Tell your friends,’ said my colleague. ‘We are tolerant people. Did you know we had Christians here in Syria?’
I didn’t.
This conflict is about people I email, with whom I’ve eaten excellent food and discuss the Premier League. People who have now been shelled, lost their home, who are being attacked with chemicals.
Should there be an armed intervention? Why are chemical weapons so important in deciding whether to get involved? What can we do to stop people killing each other in future?
The second one is strange; following the First World (actually, European) War, the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibits ‘Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare.’
Horrible as a gas attack must have been, in WW1 they killed a tiny proportion of the millions of war dead at a time when planes, tanks, machine guns and submarines became acceptable methods of mass slaughter. Why didn’t they go further?
The existence of chemical weapons was famously used as an excuse to invade Iraq; that a US-led coalition can remove a world leader from power on the basis of a lie has naturally undermined the trust in such a coalition, particularly in the Arab world.
I know many people aren’t bothered by this because Saddam Hussein was clearly an evil man; but it seems obvious that if you are going to invade a country, you can’t lie about the reasons for doing so, nor should you be surprised when this causes outrage or when your enemies use your dishonesty to recruit against you.
Before I went to Syria, I happened to be in the southern states of America in 2001, just after 9/11. I met someone, a stripper in fact, who told me that ‘they should flatten Iraq’. It was a chilling sentence and has stuck with me.
It is a reminder that ignorance is rife and that people still see violence as an acceptable way of resolving conflict. ‘Punch the bad man, problem over’ is such an unavoidable Hollywood meme it is hard to escape it from or avoid its influence, even if our own direct knowledge of street violence contradicts the notion. It has become the norm from which deviation seems strange, even though we have access to an emerging body of data on how conflict resolution actually works.
The extent to which violence is seen as a viable foreign policy tool was perfectly illustrated during ‘Gulf One’. President Bush (mk 1) proudly declared that ‘we have finally kicked the Vietnam Syndrome.’ By this, he meant that a successful action in Kuwait had brought an end to that temporary blip in US foreign policy during which the public revulsion at overseas military intervention meant that US overseas interventions were conducted covertly, rather than accompanied by the waving of flags. It was a short, sharp victorious shock, and one that seemed repeatable.
Of course, there are some people who want to ‘flatten’ America too. It must be frustrating for the US military that these people refuse to fight clean and build jets, drones and aircraft carriers; and that that invading the wrong countries has increased their number.
With just under 1.5 million Americans on active service at home and abroad, it’s easy to see how invading places starts to feel like a normal and sensible thing to do; and driving through the southern states of America I was struck again by how many bored looking soldiers in camouflaged army trucks there were, just like in Syria. Build an army and they will come to believe it is normal to fight.
I find I’m shaking. I’m rambling and at this point, I don’t know which way I would vote tonight if I were an MP: do nothing about a regime which poisons its own people and is accused of torturing children? Send in jets knowing that some will miss their target, and make even more people hate the West?
I only have a long term solution. Here’s the clue, in the Independent and elsewhere this week:
“The Government has issued more than 3,000 export licences for military and intelligence equipment worth a total of £12.3bn to countries which are on its own official list for human rights abuses.”
(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blood-money-uks-123bn-arms-sales-to-repressive-states-8711794.html accessed 29 August, 2013)
Until the UK stops selling weapons, particularly to repressive regimes, we are all accessories to war crimes. The cold war has already created stockpiles of weapons in the most volatile places on the world already. We can kill everyone in the world several times over with what we have. We don’t need any more weapons.
Things You Can Actually Do To Help Syrian Citizens:
1) give money to the Syria Crisis Appeal:
http://www.dec.org.uk/node/3181
2) use less oil, because oil fuels conflict:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/climate/10-simple-ways-to-use-less-oil/blog/12883/
3) campaign against the arms trade:
http://www.caat.org.uk
4) keep on travelling
because people who travel see the world map as a place not a series of targets, and other people as people rather than enemies.