I don't really now how this sits with other members of my party but I think the time has come to make some pretty practical decisions on where to go when it comes to diplomacy in the middle east.
Don't get me wrong, I regard my self as a liberal living in a liberal democracy and I value the freedoms we enjoy. But there do come times when situations arise that might put the practice of those very values into jeopardy and I think we are there right now.
The massive migrant crisis we are currently enduring has placed enormous pressures on the governments of the EU trying to handle that.
The sheer scale of it has the potential to produce revolutionary, and not just evolutionary, change. Evolution is a good thing, but revolutions cost lives.
The primary (but not sole) source of refugees in the migrant crisis has been war torn Syria. Our priority must be to end that conflict. Sad though the recent attacks in Paris and over the Sinai desert are, it has opened up an opportunity in Syria which I believe should be seized.
The main opportunity internationally is that it has brought the positions of Russia and the Western nations closer together, and this needs to be grasped.
We all love our liberal democracies in the West, but our insistence on bringing about revolutionary changes in other countries so that the seeds of democracy can be sown in them can not be said to have been very productive. Within the context of recent conflict, people will continue to vote for "their side" and on the basis of fear rather than any particular ideological orientation. It is arguable in such a situation whether it makes sense to have any elections at all in the short term. I believe that generally we have been too focussed on the immoralities of so-called dictatorships, and in fairness recent evidence seem to suggest that at least in Europe governments are also coming around to this opinion. Can we really fault Castro's achievements in bringing about universal (free) health care and literacy in Cuba?, in both Syria and Libya there was never any problem for women to get an education, or for them to be able to freely express themselves. Indeed general religious tolerance was promoted. Of course Assad is fighting a war in his countries and in fairness he has been brutal about it, but the Myanmar dictatorship were brutal to their people, and we are now talking to them. There are many exmaples of other things which we take for granted but which the Syrians and Libyans under Gadaffi also enjoyed. And perhaps the most important thing --- life was never so bad (in non wartime) that they felt they had to leave their country in huge masses. In a sense, we are reaping what we have sown in insisting on democracy where it was never really ready to be installed. That is the Realpolitik of our world today.
So if (and this looks increasingly likely) the Western (and Russian) response is going to involve going after ISIS in Syria and Iraq at full throttle, and in so doing destroy them, then it has to be accompanied with a serious approach to bring about a ceasefire between Assad and his other opponents in Iraq. This means that everyone has to get around the table...i.e. the Western nations, Russia, Assad, and leaders of Syria's opposition.
Insisting on Assad's removal is unhelpful and flexibility has to be shown here...one can change the diplomatic wording for Western nations to something like "our long-term goal is to ensure a democratic and peaceful future for the people of Syria", without making any specifics about who should be involved. This would not preclude Assad's involvement in the future running of the state of course, but perhaps in a revised administration he and his associates would still have a useful role to play. Running a dictatorship isnt just about running a system of objective oppression (which likes to be stressed in the West) ...its also about running schools and hospitals and many other important organs of the state, and I have heard nothing to suggest that these were run erroneously, or not at all in the systems governed by Gaddafi and Assad (the same cant be said of Myanmar by the way...with whom we DO now talk).
To coax Assad and his associates you would have to offer them some legal impunity in exchange for a positive involvement in the future running of that state once a ceasefire has been reached. And for a while the state would probably have to be governed as a UN administration with input from all the major involved nations, and perhaps China as well whose investment role might also prove positive. Syria will have to be ready for democracy, but I believe it has to be brought in slowly, because after wars people vote only on the basis of fear, which is not productive or desirable. In the end though, the most important thing is that they have a government committed to providing generalised peace and prosperity for all its people, and perhaps Assad is more willing to do that than many in the West give him credit for.
Sure he has done some barbaric things in his own country with his military campaigning, but many of us are gearing up to condoning the same kind of actions by bombing ISIS, and much of the "collateral damage" will seem just as barbaric to those affected.
There have been some genuinely bad men running countries, such as Hitler, Polpot and Stalin who were probably all driven by paranoid megalomania, and followed by men they did not trust and would say yes to everything. We can genuinely be thankful that there are not people like that in the positions that matter in the world today. I also do not believe that people like Assad fall into that category, and I was always a believer that Putin is a man who is more aware of his geopolitical responsibilities than the West would give him credit for.
No comments:
Post a Comment