With the tragic terrorist attacks by IS in Paris just 2 weeks ago fresh in people’s minds, one would naturally expect a massive majority swell of the public to be fully behind the Prime Minister’s rushed proposed bombing campaign. More so even than the attacks in Beirut, ongoing attacks in Iraq and on the Russian passenger plane over Sinai.
Yet this is blatantly NOT the case with 75% of Labour members against airstrikes.
This is surely because the British people have learnt to be far more sceptical from witnessing the disasters inflicted by our ‘liberation’ of Iraq and Libya, seeing the killing and making into desperate refugees of millions of innocent civilians, and the turning of large areas of those lands into lawless terrorist breeding grounds, with mostly homegrown terrorist blowback attacks here. So we do not want our government to continue to commit the same cycle of bloody terror-inciting wars, especially on the “deceitful”(1) basis we’ve already seen from Cameron referring to a fantasy “70,000 ‘moderate’ jihadi ground troops”, and claiming that this time there’d be a different result to the previous catastrophes – the very definition of insanity. (1. “straightforward deceit by David Cameron” – Peter Ford, ex Ambassador to Syria: http://youtu.be/Hh1BbvbMOp4 )
Below are some of the best reports available which show the dangers and impossibility of success of the bombing campaign as currently laid out by PM David Cameron.
As MPs your job, paid for by us, is to represent us and keep us safe. Please read these reasons why we urge you to vote NO to the proposed bombing campaign on these grounds:
1) Bombing will Increase Not Reduce the UK terror-threat.
– Julian Lewis, MP and Chair of the Defence Committee with Peter Ford, Ambassador to Syria 2003-2006
– Baroness Manningham-Buller, MI5 Chief: “Iraq War led to wave of terror” http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/188200/MI5-chief-Iraq-war-led-to-wave-of-terror
2) There are so-called ‘Allies’ – including Turkey and others – who in many ways support IS: they must be identified, regardless of money/power-fuelled croneyism wherever the oil/money/arms trail leads, and the essential lifelines they provide to IS must be immediately severed as an urgent and necessary precursor to any UK military involvement. Without that action, there is no hope of any lasting success, and the UK military will be killing and dying at great cost for nothing.
– Joe Biden, US Vice President: “The Turks, the Saudis, the Emiratis … were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war … they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad except that the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”
http://mideastshuffle.com/2014/10/04/biden-turks-saudis-uae-funded-and-armed-al-nusra-and-al-qaeda/
– David L Philips, Columbia University, Ex Foreign Affairs Expert US Dept of State: a comprehensive record of Turkish collusion highlighting how Turkey provides recruits, military equipment, training and medical care to ISIS, buys oil from ISIS and its forces have fought alongside ISIS.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-l-phillips/research-paper-isis-turke_b_6128950.html
– ISIS Oil Trade Full Frontal: “Raqqa’s Rockefellers”, Bilal Erdogan, KRG Crude, And The Israel Connection
3) There are so-called ‘Enemies’ – Syria, Iran and Russia – who are actively engaged in fighting IS in Syria with UN approval far more effectively than the US has been, and who do not request or necessarily require the involvement of another air-force. If the UK is to get involved – once lifelines to IS from so-called ‘allies’ have been properly identified and cut – Syria, Iran and Russia must of course be coordinated with as allies in the fight against the common terrorist enemy: in order to most effectively target that enemy and shorten the campaign, and to drastically reduce the killings of civilians and non-IS combatants.
– “Russia’s success in Syria marks the end of U.S. hegemony”
http://www.australiannationalreview.com/russias-success-syria-marks-hegemony/#sthash.u6aHSNZt.dpuf
– “”We must acknowledge that nobody other than President Assad’s armed forces are truly fighting the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations in Syria,” Putin
– Peter Hitchens On Cameron’s ‘Delusional’ Case For War: “a better response would be to side with the Syrian government, Kurds and Iranian-backed Shia militias such as Hezbollah to truly win against ISIS.”
http://www.lbc.co.uk/peter-hitchens-on-camerons-delusional-case-for-war–120456
– Contrast of BBC reporting of ‘good heroic US bombing’ vs ‘bad destructive Russian bombs’ which backs up the staunch ‘them and us’ position taken by the US and UK governments in refusing Russia’s offers of working together against IS: “We can call this ‘journalism’ if we like, but actually it is indistinguishable from state propaganda.”
http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2015/806-bombing-syria.html
4) Mission Creep: David Cameron famously lost the vote in Parliament in August 2013 to bomb Syria in a regime-change move led by the US and also involving France. The vote was lost according to many accounts because MPs realised that the rebels who it was decided should be supported to topple the Syrian government were (and are) dominated by Al-Qaeda. We need a cast iron assurance before any UK military involvement against IS that the objective of a campaign to destroy the terrorist cult IS cannot revert at some unknown point down the line to target the Syrian Army, infrastructure or government in line with the US’ regime-change plans of 2013. Further, a war in which the major nuclear powers US and Russia are taking part without coordinating actions has enormous potential risks.
– Conditions Agreed at Labour Conference for Intervention:
- “clear and unambiguous authorisation” from the United Nations;
- an EU-wide plan to offer “humanitarian assistance” to refugees;
- a promise that only IS targets will be attacked, not the Assad regime;
- and that “any military action is subordinated to international diplomatic efforts – http://www.politicshome.com/foreign-and-defence/articles/story/labour-conference-demands-tough-criteria-any-syria-strikes#sthash.t7yUQvji.dpuf
– “The Escalation to World War? Mission Creep Drags Britain Into Quagmire of Global Conflict”
– “Stumbling to War With Russia?”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43566.htm
5) Legality: Russia and Iran are fighting in Syria at the request of the Syrian government. It would be illegal – again – for the UK to take military action without that invitation.
– “Russia is operating there due to a direct Syrian government appeal for assistance, the Russian military role in Syria is perfectly legal.”
http://www.rt.com/op-edge/323396-unsc-isis-syria-us/
6) Bigger Picture Issues
– “To Stop ISIS, Outside Powers Must End Their Proxy Wars in Syria”
http://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/outside-powers-must-end-proxy-wars-in-syria/
– “The blundering of our military into the Middle East; the failed states that have risen out of the mismanagement and chaos of Iraq and Afghanistan; the millions of innocents we have driven from their homes, terrorized or slaughtered; the bankrupt puppet regimes we have equipped and trained that will not fight; the massive amounts of munitions and military hardware we have allowed to fall into the hands of jihadis—thousands of them carrying Western passports; and the myopic foreign policy whose single tenet is that more industrial violence will get us out of the morass created by our industrial violence in the first place means that we, like France, are in for it.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/states_of_terror_20151122
– Cat Smith MP: “I do not wish to see the brave air crew of the RAF placed in danger on a mission I do not believe will achieve its desired outcomes nor provide greater security for us at home.”
