Yesterday, Parliament voted in favour of airstrikes against ISIL in Syria. It all got pretty ugly. David Cameron infuriated Labour MPs after he urged his colleagues not to go through the division lobbies with people he described as a “bunch of terrorist sympathisers”. In allowing Labour MPs a free vote, Jeremy Corbyn managed to alienate both those colleagues who favour military action and the activists who admire his anti-war credentials. Some Labour MPs left in tears complaining about a campaign of ‘bullying and intimidation’.
And so, Britain joins possibly the weirdest cast of allies ever assembled, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Al-Nusra Front terrorist group and all the other incompatible Islamist factions that make up Cameron’s largely fictitious ‘70,000 moderates’. All with disparate plans for the future governance of Syria. What could possibly go wrong? And we’re all going to be bombing an enemy that is firmly entrenched behind a human shield of innocent civilians.
I guess doing nothing isn’t an option and military action may be the lesser of two evils. But, really, why are we not addressing the plausible additional/alternative strategy of cutting off ISIL’s lifeblood of arms and money? We should be making concerted efforts to stop the arms shipments from our allies in the Middle East. And we should be doing everything possible to staunch the steady flow of money filling ISIL’s coffers – the estimated revenue from ISIL oil production is nearly two million dollars every single day!
