Mick Hartley

Good stuff from Gary Kent – Can liberal interventionism be rescued?

Liberal interventionism has been in the dog house since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but the Syrian charnel house is driving a new alliance of MPs and others to revive the concept. Last week, a passionate debate in the Commons was prompted by the "complete meltdown of humanity" in Aleppo – "the Srebrenica of our time." It highlighted the failure of the doctrine of the responsibility to protect that was supposed to underpin the mantra of "Never Again" after such atrocities. Labour's John Woodcock also spoke about "the irretrievable breakdown of the United Nations."

Former Chancellor George Osborne made his first speech as a backbencher and gave the debate increased authority. He argued that "the tragedy in Aleppo did not come out of a vacuum; it was created by a vacuum—a vacuum of western leadership, including American and British leadership" – the failure to punish Assad for using chemical weapons in 2013.

He warned that "we have come to a point where it is impossible to intervene anywhere—we lack the political will, as the west, to intervene." He detailed the price of inaction as thousands killed, millions of refugees, neighbouring countries destabilised, rising fascism in eastern Europe and extremism in western Europe, and Russia a decisive player in the region for the first time since the 1970s.

Labour's Anna Turley argued that "we cannot be frozen by the guilt surrounding well-intentioned military action of the past" and should learn the right lessons from Iraq which are "when the potential for military action arises we should not commit until it is clear that it can be achieved. We should properly prepare for what comes afterwards and work better with regional partners."

Turley added "we must pledge never again to turn our backs, never again to be ground down or put off by the length or difficulty of the struggle, never to give in to moral equivalence between brutal fascist dictatorships and a people’s struggle for self-determination and freedom. We must pledge never to be so determinedly full of self-indulgent self-loathing for the west that we do not believe that we can play a positive role for the good of the world. Never again should we lack a sense of responsibility to humanity, wherever it is and however hard the struggle."…

One parliamentary debate will not by itself change widespread aversion to liberal interventionism – a gamut of military and non-military options. But continued passivity is becoming discredited. We still have no idea what approach the new American administration of Donald Trump will take. The UK may be on its way out of the European Union but that does not mean that it lacks the power, alone or in concert with other European powers, to do the right thing. It is high time we began listening to the Kurds and others as partners in liberal interventions against fascism.