President Obama clearly thought David Cameron’s catastrophic defeat by the House of Commons over the Syria bombing was so terrific he wanted to have one all of his own.
How else to explain the US Commander-in-Chief’s entirely unnecessary decision to ask the approval of Congress for the Syria strike, thus exposing it at best to delay and at worst to defeat?
But then, why should anyone be surprised? For it was clear from the get-go that Obama didn’t want to take any action against Syria. All the running was apparently made by the British Prime Minister, who had been urging Obama for months to strike against Assad.
As I explained here last week, I believe this proposed Syria strike was always going to be no more than useless gesture politics and would only serve to advertise the west’s weakness and total absence of strategic goals in the Middle East.
Assad would not be unseated; nor would he be deterred from committing further atrocities against Syrian civilians such as napalm bombing, even if he henceforth left the chemical weapons out of it. Obama had already taken care to let the Assad regime know well in advance what targets he was going to hit, in order that no-one might get hurt from this act of war, heaven forbid. So the whole thing was farcical from the start.
But that does not alter the catastrophic damage done to western defences by both the Cameron defeat in Parliament and Obama’s neon-light-illuminated display of vacillation and funk.
Britain has belatedly woken up to the dim realisation that just maybe it has turned into a nation of beef-eating surrender monkeys. There has been a certain amount of breast-beating over the perception that hostility to the war in Iraq has ‘poisoned the wells’ of public debate.
Well, I’m afraid that the British still just don’t get how badly they don’t get it. Ever since 9/11, Britain has been consumed by a kind of deranged denial of the threat to the west from the Islamic world.
Consumed by a toxic combination of head-in-the-sand isolationism, the arrogant assumption of westerners that the rest of the world thinks like them, the even more arrogant belief by the UK Foreign Office in the tactic of dividing and ruling foreign natives, Jew-hatred, national demoralisation and cultural cringe, an abysmal ignorance of the Islamic world, an absolute refusal to acknowledge the driving role of religious fanaticism and the stupid belief that in a global conflict the alternative to the bad guy must be a good guy – all laced with the defeatist appeasement mentality which has gripped Britain since 1918 and was only briefly interrupted by the accident of Winston Churchill’s existence – the British assumed that Iraq would be a ‘quagmire’ well before the removal of Saddam Hussein.
So when what followed Saddam’s removal was so badly botched by the US-led coalition, the British told themselves that Saddam had never been a threat to anyone outside Iraq, that there was no serious terrorist threat to the west, that there was instead a conspiracy stretching from Jerusalem to Washington DC to subvert the peace of the world, that they had been ‘taken to war on a lie’, and that they would never again believe a word that western intelligence sources might tell them about any threat from anywhere in the Islamic world. Ever.
With the British thus politically lobotomised, America then inflicted upon itself the catastrophe of a President and Commander-in-Chief whose core political goal was to neutralise America’s influence in the world (bad) and encourage the Islamic world (good) to do whatever the hell it liked, on the basis that this would restore America’s honour by atoning for the manifest injustice and oppression it had imposed upon that world (of which the existence of Israel was the major offence). Hence Obama’s appeasement of Iran, now on the verge of getting its genocide bomb, his encouragement into power of the Muslim Brotherhood, his cutting and running in Afghanistan and his patent foot-dragging over Syria.
The conclusion of all this is a paradox. To the question ‘Does the Syria debacle in London prove that Britain has turned disgracefully isolationist?’ the answer is no; that vote was simply bungled through Cameron’s incompetence, and the strike itself was never anything other than gesture politics and spin.
But the fact remains that Britain is now disgracefully isolationist and appeasement-minded – as is also America’s Commander-in-Chief. Even if they eventually do lob a few token Tomahawks at vacated Syrian sites.
Concern has been expressed that, as result of that Commons Syria vote, the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the US is now at risk. I’m afraid the current reality is far more alarming: a ‘special relationship’ between two countries which once stood in the forefront of the defence of the west – but are now so devastatingly working in harmony to undermine it.
It has become a special relationship for a civilisation which seems to have lost the will to survive.
