Mick Hartley

Well now. As his political career languishes in the doldrums after that Brexit debacle, Michael Gove is keeping his hand in by writing columns for the Times. And the latest one on Syria is rather good: 

(O)ur failure to intervene has been followed by the killing of hundreds of thousands, with millions more driven from their homes. We hear constantly from some quarters about the failures of intervention. We hear far less about the terrible consequences of non-intervention.

Our intervention in Iraq in 2003 now finds few defenders. Mistakes were undoubtedly made. But had we not intervened then, the country would have remained a torture chamber above ground and a mass grave below. Power would have passed to Saddam’s murderous sons Uday and Qusay, who would have waged genocidal conflict on the Kurds and the Shia, while also exploiting western sanctions fatigue to re-stock their chemical and biological weapons arsenal.

More than that, Iraq enjoyed a new stability and security as a result of President Bush’s troop surge in 2007. The winding down of the US military presence following President Obama’s election was a foolish retreat from responsibility which allowed Islamic State to occupy a vacuum of the West’s creation.

And Obama failed again when he did not follow through on his threat to punish Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons on his own people. His failure to intervene in 2013, following the failure of our parliament to sanction intervention, has been a global disaster.

We threw away any respect for western security guarantees, we failed to save the Syrian people from mass murder, we failed to support those we called our allies on the ground, we allowed Islamic State, once again, to exploit another vacuum and develop a new global terror network and we signally failed to put any pressure worth the name on Vladimir Putin for aiding, abetting and funding tyranny, so he grew in power and prestige at our expense and strengthened the hold of his secret police state over the Russian people.

That’s not the worst of it. Our biggest failure has been our inability to check the advance of the Iranian regime — Assad’s puppet masters. The Khomeinist rulers of the Islamic Republic have been identified by the US state department as the world’s principal state sponsors of terrorism. Driven by eliminationist antisemitism and hatred of western values, they are intent on bringing yet more bloodshed to the Middle East — and beyond. Iran’s rulers describe Israel as a “cancerous tumour” and their Revolutionary Guards have promised to export violence to Europe and the US.

History warns us that it is seldom a good idea to acquiesce in the military advance of a regime which makes explicit its desire to purge the world of Jews. And doesn’t care how many other people it kills along the way.