Look at Syria, and you can see all the elements that have led to world wars

It’s hard to believe the west’s leaders are letting this escalate. Have we learned nothing from history?

Simon Jenkins


Thu 12 Apr 2018 19.09 BST


‘Theresa May says the chemical attack cannot go unchallenged, but that is a politician’s love of intransitive verbs.’ Photograph: Frank Augstein/AP

What on earth are we doing? I have not heard a single expert on Syria explain how dropping missiles on that country will advance the cause of peace or lead its dictator, Bashar al-Assad, to back down. It will merely destroy buildings and probably kill people. It is pure populism, reflected in the hot-and-cold rhetoric of Trump’s increasingly whimsical tweets. Heaven forbid that British policy should now, as it appears, be hanging on their every word.

We can accept that the chemical attack on a Damascus suburb was probably by war-hardened Syrian airmen, though rebellions do kill their own to win sympathy. But Britain too has killed civilians in this theatre. No, we don’t poison our own people, but we somehow claim the right to blow other country’s civilians to bits. Theresa May says that the chemical attack “cannot go unchallenged”, but that is a politician’s love of intransitive verbs. Who is to be the agency and under what authority? The time to punish the Syrian leadership is when the war is over. Outside intervention will make no difference to the conflict, except to postpone its end. That is doubly cruel.

This crisis is already displaying the familiar preliminaries to a reckless conflict. Hysterical language cavorts with the machinery of militarism.It seeks reasons for violence, not for its avoidance. Thus there was no reason for Britain to go to war with Iraq in 2003, beyond a sabre-rattling competition between Tony Blair and America’s George Bush. Nor back in history was there a reason for Germany and France to fight in 1870. There was no reason for war in 1914, beyond the murder of an archduke in Serbia. As AJP Taylor said of 1914: “Nowhere was there a conscious determination to provoke a war. Statesmen miscalculated [and] became prisoners of their own weapons. The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.” I wonder what Taylor would have said of Trump’s “Get ready Russia” tweet.

Most wars nowadays follow a triggering of often casual alliances and obligations, and from the absence of any potent forum – or even “hotline” between leaders – through which disagreements and minor disputes might be resolved. Peace in Europe was roughly sustained for 50 years through the councils of the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Then it collapsed as if from exhaustion. The dread prospect now is that the post-1945 cold war settlement, roughly overseen by the United Nations, has outlived its usefulness.

 White House struggles to explain Trump's Russia missile tweet – video

All the more reason for the world to beware of proxy wars. Britain has no dog in the Syrian fight, which is a miserable resurgence of one of the oldest and bitterest Middle East clan feuds. Assad was able to call on Iran and Russia to come to his aid, and they have done so with grim effectiveness. The rebels on the other hand were encouraged to hold out by the moral support of the west, and by material support from the anti-Iranian Saudis. Syria has paid a terrible price. Further intervention now would be lunatic.

May seems trapped by Washington, as Blair was in 2003. It is clear that her advisers do not think bombing Syria is the best way to respond to a chemical weapons attack, but she seems reluctant to admit it. She claims not to need the approval of parliament in firing missiles. That convention dates from when monarchs and their generals needed discretion to ward off imminent threats to national security. There is no threat now. This is not a military but a foreign policy decision. Going to war has serious implications. It clearly merits collective approval, especially from a minority government.

In 2003, Blair sought the approval of parliament to invade Iraq, albeit on a lie. Shamefully he received it. In 2013, Cameron sought approval to fight Syria, and was mercifully denied it. May can avoid a Commons vote, but with a mere 22% of the public reportedly in favour of bombing Syria and 43% against, even the gain to her machismo might be at risk. The danger is what happens next. An eye for an eye suggests a more spectacular and photogenic repeat of Trump’s missile bombardment of last year. But the risk of killing Russian or Iranian troops is clearly high, and of provoking military retaliation higher still. Russia’s Vladimir Putin is said to be in a paranoid state, as tanked up on machismo as Trump and May. These are moments when leaders take on the raiment of commanders, and give themselves licence to decide policy alone. It makes the job of their colleagues in restraining them all the harder. In-house hawks have all the best tunes.

This shows how weak are the underpinnings of international peace when the balance of power is upset. Nothing in the current state of the world merits a superpower confrontation, only the narcissistic and belligerent personalities of certain world leaders. Victors in war have an obligation to show patience and restraint towards the defeated. Russia in 1989 was defeated, but the west has been gloating ever since. Russia in Syria is guilty. That is not the point. In this first crisis in east-west relations since the cold war, it seems we must now rely on Russia, not the US, to show patience and restraint. That is an ominous prospect.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/12/syria-elements-world-wars-west-leaders-escalate-history

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My Comments : 

1. Jenkins is right in his conclusion, that the looming confrontation between "the West" and "The East" (Russia plus it's allies), seems to contain all the ingredients for the ignition of a semi- till full-blown world war.

2. His explanation however of the motives of the respective political leaders behind the development of this highly dangerous situation, are miles from the truth.

3. Although one has to assume, that Jenkins will know very well, that this situation has not merely arrived from the apparent labile character of the USA president, he systematically refuses to imply the driving force behind this state of affairs : The western colonial project called "Israel", both steered from within the colony and from a variety of places around the world, to start with the USA

4. Since the powers of the Zionist Internationale (also know as the Zionist Diaspora) have - from the moment the project officially started at 1896 in Vienna - are embedded into the political core of most of the western power houses, it has been declared a taboo to ever mention the existence of this constellation.

5. As I mentioned many times before, it has been the super-PAC financiers the Jew-supremacists Mercer and Adelson, who (paradoxically) parachuted White-supremacist Trump into the White House, because he has been their closest guarantee of the rapid fulfilment of the realisation of the "Eretz-Israe project plus the realisation of the hegemony of "Eretz-Israel" in the ME region.

6. Trump has not only received the electoral backing from the evangelicals (most of them are staunch christian zionists, who believe, that "the chosen people" need to return to "zion" in order to fulfil the prophecy that "the son of Jaweh will descend from heaven, in order to redeem humanity"), but with Trump came also his jew-supremacist son in law into the WH.

7. Although the Mercer clan had been able to dictate the list of - mostly jew-supremacist - personnel that Trump had to appoint into his administration and his WH staff, they did not succeed to install their most favourite proxies in the first all at once.

8. So the better half of 2017 had to be occupied by purging out all the people that did not fully approve of the USA geo-political agenda that the Jew-supremacist clan had in mind.

9. With the recent appointment of the extreme-right neo-conservative, christian zionist and notorious war-hawk Bolton the renovation of the WH staff and the replacement of Tillerson by Pompeo, meant to achieve unanimous approval for the long awaited attack on Shiite Iran - via an attack on the Lebanon and Syria and possibly a provoked third Intifada - has been completed.

10. Macron, who has close ties and ditto shared ME geo-political visions with the extreme-right Jew-supremacist leader Netanyahu has been a grateful pawn, that might give the long time zionist objective of the completion of the seven nations in five years at least the appearance of legitimacy.

11. May is not in a position to refuse the USA - that is supposed to be a leading trade partner, once the Brexit might be completed - any request of assistance either.

12. Furthermore one has to assume, that the entire NATO machinery might be employed once the spearheading USA-UK and France forces will have started the first stage of the confrontation, by forcing any excuse of initiating the article five of the NATO treaty.

13. Provoking article Five - one for all / all for one - will be the climax of a process of slowly but certainly preparing systematically for the final re-positioning of the western colony of "Israel".

14 Conform the historical tradition of absolute mercilessness / ruthlessness and uncompromisingly one-dimensional determination of reaching out for the zionist goal of the ultimate foundation of Eretz-Israel - one must not be surprised as World Peace will indeed be sacrificed on the altar of Zionism, be it the Jewish or the Christian branch (and most probably : both). 

15. Not just the foundation of Eretz-Israel, but as well the (finishing off of the) forced transfer of the indigenous Palestinians to Jordan (or preferably to southern Egypt, because Eretz-Israel will not be complete without both the West- bank AND the East bank of the river Jordan and eventually even having Eretz-Israel bordering the bank of the river Nile further South).

16. World Peace has to be sacrificed for both the world domination of the neo-conservatives from the USA - do consult the publications around the imperial PNAC objective - and for the regional domination of "Eretz-Israel" - do consult for instance the Yinon-plan, in combination with the Clean Brake strategy of (revisionist) Jacobinsky adept, Netanyahu - even if this would mean, that the looming confrontation between "the West" and "the East" at some point in the near future might bring in the nuclear power from the Far East (from the western-centrist perspective that is), called China....  

N.B. a. It has been former NATO secretary De Hoop Scheffer of all "authorities", who recently did warn against the Western doctrine of closing in geo-politically on Russia -  this in direct violation of the treaties the west had agreed upon with the then Gorbachev regime of not extending NATO influence beyond the borders of the post-Cold War zone - for this doctrine of cornering the former USSR will most certainly lead up to retaliation from the contemporaneous Russia leaders.

b. Cornering Russia, that also took place by the West and it's ME proxies, along the lines of exercising false flag attacks - notably the many "nerve gas attacks" (supposedly) by the Russian ally Assad (who, contrary to his opponents) in all cases did not have any coherent logical motive at all, to use these weapons) and the nerve gas attack on the Skripals, that apparently have been conveniently attributed by the West, to Russia - that all had been carefully staged by parties (like "Israel") that have a special interest in the region and the de-legitimisation of Russia. 

Disclaimer  : I do detest the abhorrent, authoritarian White supremacist and mafia-style operating Oligarchy leaning Putin as much as I do detest the abhorrent, authoritarian White supremacist and mafia-style operating Oligarchy leaning Trump.