For the first time, I have agreed with the UK Labour Party.
I do not think Britain should join America and go to war with Syria.
That’s not because Syria’s tyrant Bashar Assad is just a cuddly chap with bad PR. Instead it’s because I and most Brits no longer trust any Western government to wage war.
For a start, the whole saga has a déjà vu feel to it. Cast your mind back to 2003 when that notorious warmonger George Bush invaded a country because, among other things, the dictator and leader of the Baath party of Iraq indisputably gassed his own people.
Ten years later that famous Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama wants to invade a country because the dictator and leader of the Baath Party of Syria probably gassed his own people.
But the biggest distrust is because the entire military strategy stems around some hand-wringing demands that ‘something must be done’.
Okay, I agree something must be done. However, in the West, when things go south ‘something must be done’ soon becomes ‘you can’t do that’.
There’s a very fine line between a ‘legal’ war and an ‘illegal’ one.
Obama will invade Syria legally because the luvvies love him. Cowboy Bush couldn’t even blow his nose legally, let alone blow up another country, as the luvvies hated him.
But above all, the chattering class doesn’t grasp that ‘doing something’ means doing what the military is designed to do.
As the much parodied recruitment poster goes, they have to visit exotic places and kill people. And sadly when that happens, it’s not only the bad guys that kark it. Civilians, children and babies get killed as well.
On the other hand, what about the saying that all it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing?
Indeed, but look what happens today when good people do something.
If just one solider puts one foot wrong in the heat of battle, the cappuccino quaffers march in London’s streets burning flags and demanding an end to imperialist warmongering.
If a civilian is killed in the confusion of battle, the luvvies go ballistic, calling our warriors baby butchers. If anyone ‘wiki-leaks’ military secrets that compromise the lives of our soldiers, they’re hailed as heroes by the Guardian newspaper.
So which sane person would trust our governments to commit militarily?
But more importantly, who’s going to stop Assad? Not the British Army which shrinks by the day. By 2018 Her Majesty’s armed forces will number a mere 82 000 regulars and 30 000 reservists.
The number of Challenger tanks will be cut by 40% and the number of AS-90 self-propelled guns will be cut 35%. The Royal Navy is building two new aircraft carriers, one of which goes directly to storage because there isn’t enough money to operate both simultaneously.
So that leaves America. No one in their right mind would directly take on America, which accounts for 40% of gross global expenditure on armaments. That’s why you don’t see many tank battles these days.
Yet America hasn’t won a war since it dropped the A-bomb on Japan nearly seven decades ago.
But fear not. Obama has a cunning plan to lose a war against Syria in less time than America usually takes.
An unnamed official told the Los Angeles Times that they were planning military action ‘just muscular enough not to get mocked’.
As inspirational quotes go, that’s not exactly right up there. Can you imagine Leonidas saying that to his Spartans at Thermopylae? Or Davy Crocket yelling that, fist in the air, to his ragbag bunch of wild Texans at the Alamo? Or King Henry at Agincourt?
The problem with the American way of war is that technologically it can’t lose, but in every other sense, it can’t win.
As the military theorist Liddell Hart observed, the object of war is not just to destroy the enemy’s tanks but his will. From Vietnam to Baghdad to Kabul, America seems incapable of that. Their soldiers win, but their politicians lose.
What will make Damascus any different?
