Dear Nick,
Today Parliament is considering international action in Syria and you will take the most important decision of your leadership of the Liberal Democrats.
It would seem to me that there are four clear questions that must be answered before any military intervention is launched in Syria.
Is there compelling evidence of Assad’s guilt?
If compelling evidence of Assad’s guilt emerges, has an international arrest warrant been issued under international war-crimes law?
Have all non-military avenues for extradition to The Hague failed?
Has the Security Council sanctioned the necessary action to execute the arrest warrant?
Right now there appears to be no compelling evidence of Assad’s guilt being placed before the international courts, and yet the motion before the house tonight considers none of these questions, indeed it presumes Assad is guilty in the first paragraph and then goes on to say how his guilt is to be punished.
International and cross party consensus have no meaning if the result is an escalation of a war in which atrocities have been committed and the security of all Eurasian and European nationals are placed in jeopardy. For the sake of all of us we must find the least damaging outcome, even if that means the west swallowing its pride and supporting a Russian led interim Government post Assad to rebuild the Syrian infrastructure, medical care, education and deliver humanitarian aid.
It is not enough for the action to be legal; it must also follow the due processes of the law. You say that proportionate, targeted military action following a regime’s use of chemical weapons is legal under humanitarian law. Why then has it not been taken in so many recorded instances until now, why is this suddenly a benchmark when it has never so been before?
Personally I don’t think that this is the same situation as Iraq, but not for any of the five reasons that you have given. I think that this is not the same situation as Iraq because the Russians and Chinese can be brought to the table if the evidence is presented and the international arrest warrant issued.
Like you I joined the Liberal Democrats in no small part because of the Party’s commitment to build a world in which all people share the same basic rights, in which they live together in peace and in which their different cultures will be able to develop freely. However if we are build that world and people are to ever respect what we are striving for we must not only maintain the rule of law, but also the process of law.
The aim of the British Government should be and must be to strive to secure justice for the victims of this use of chemical weapons, and that justice will come through the courts, not the bomb.
* Iain Donaldson is the treasurer of the Rochdale Liberal Democrats.
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39 Comments
“I think that this is not the same situation as Iraq because the Russians and Chinese can be brought to the table if the evidence is presented and the international arrest warrant issued.”
What makes you think that ?
As an anti-war Lib dem voter . Please ,please impeach neocon Clegg.
I wonder if this misses the point? Based on the Commons debate this afternoon, this is at least the 14th time chemical weapons have been used in this conflict, and it is the worst instance so far. There are credible suspicions that Assad is testing the boundaries. Justice may perhaps eventually be served by the steps suggested here, but the aim now is not to achieve immediate justice, which is impossible, but to deter the regime from doing it again.
Simon: I firmly believe that if there is an international arrest warrant issued following evidence being presented to the International courts then Russia and China will comply.
And: what crime are you proposing Nick Clegg be imeached for? So far all he has not signed up to anything, and if he signs the deal before parliament then he will have signed up to a deal that Britain will not participate in military action without another vote.
Richard, are you arguing that two wrongs make a right?
I am arguing for a bit of humanity, and a whole lot less intellectual claptrap!
I would be astonished if Assad holds any real power in Syria ; every sighting of him is like a rabbit caught in headlights .
He is not a braggart Saddam, I suspect he is a prisoner of the army and does what he’s told
Iain, it’s almost certainly impossible to prove beyond all doubt that the regime is responsible for this attack. But it is so incredibly unlikely that if could have been anyone else that the question becomes, ‘will justice really have been served if the final proof comes in 6 years time with hundreds of thousands more dead?’
This is NOT the same argument that was used to ‘justify’ the assault upon Iraq. Iraq had not recently used chemical weapons, and there was no real evidence that the regime’s chemical weapons programme was anything more than an aspiration. What ‘evidence’ did exist was heavily distorted when it was presented to parliament and the public and mixed in with outright lies (e.g. the yellowcake uranium story which had been discredited years before).
“I firmly believe that if there is an international arrest warrant issued following evidence being presented to the International courts then Russia and China will comply.”
Iain, I think there’s every chance that China would agree to abstein if the rest of the UN security council were agreed on action. But there is no reason on earth to think that the Russians will be persuaded by evidence.
Past lies to the UN and breaches of international law by the US and Britain clearly don’t help our case, to put it mildly, but we shouldn’t consider for a moment the idea that Putin, who was happy to see Chechnya raised to the ground and couldn’t give a fig for democracy or the rule of law within Russia would base it’s policy on anything other than perceived self-interest.
Jonathan Brown
You are right there are some differences but not all in favour of the action today.
The evidence is stronger that WMD were used but it is not that great either
The aim of the attacks is not clear and has not been explained at all well
Finally, there has been absolutely no opportunity for the inspector’s to report to the UN and for a discussion of the information. At least Blix was allowed to speak before being ignored. From what I can see Cameron asked for an ‘all necessary means’ resolution. This is never going to happen!
The only reason we are not voting for a military attack today is due to the opposition of Labour and some Tories, nothing to do with the LD
I can accept you want to see a response, that is an understandable position to take but why the rush? Why does this need to be decided before a UNSC decision – in the arguments you make you and your party are copying those used by Blair
I want to correct what I said, sorry. Chemical weapons are not WMD and though the evidence is pretty strong that they were use the evidence on who did it is currently circumstantial
Iran is threatening to attack Israel if the West attacks Syria.
Assad isn’t Saddam Hussein, with a bunch of rusty old tanks . He might say “oh ok then, no more chemical weapons, we’ll just carry on bombing rebel areas with conventional ones’. Or he could lob a missile at the British airbase in Cyprus. Or get Hezbollah to do the honours and in doing so, return Lebanon to civil war.
Or. Assad is so weakened by our attack he falls and we’ve handed Syria over to rebels, (the strongest group of whom are led by al-Quaeda). Strengthened, they then carry out their own atrocities that kill many more thousands.
Yes, we see horrible sights and want to Do Something to stop it. Sometimes, however ghastly things are, there’s little or nothing successful we can do.
The Archbishop of Canterbury thinks intervention is a bad idea if it makes things worse.
Anyone want to accuse him of not caring or lacking humanity?
@ Jonathan Brown
“it’s almost certainly impossible to prove beyond all doubt that the regime is responsible for this attack. But it is so incredibly unlikely……”
Why is it so incredibly unlikely that the attack was carried out by the rebels? It wouldn’t be the first time terrorists had got hold of chemical weapons – e.g the sarin attack on the Tokyo underground in 1995 – although the Assad regime would have been better placed to substantiate their allegations if they had invited the UN weapons inspectors in immediately instead of delaying for days.
Nick
Why let Ed Milliband assume the leadership over Syria.
Agree with you Iain
It is not likely that the rebels could have launched the weapons that were used.
There seems to be a increasing view that the attack was the work of a “rogue commander” within the government forces.
Tony
Tony
Apparently the troops that were attacking the suburb of Damascus had personal protection against chemical warfare – another reason for summising that the Syrians made a conscious decision to use the nerve agents
On Saturday 15th February 2003 I was proud to march alongside the then Liberal Democrat leadership and hundreds of fellow Councillors and activists against a disastrous Western military adventure. All of our prescient warnings that day came to pass, with interest. Sadly, the current Libera Democrat leadership appear to have learned all the wrong lessons from the ashes of the still smouldering Iraqi tragedy, and sadly Clegg appears to have morphed into a Blair figure.
Western military intervention in Syria may well reap an even more savage whirlwind than Iraq. It will inevitably further enflame (and expand) the bloody sectarian chaos in the Levant and pour fuel onto the tragic legacy of Sykes-Picot’s Anglo-French imperialist meddling.
This Saturday 31st August there is another London demonstration seeking to avert our Government from following the US into yet another Middle Eastern bloodbath. I hope to see as many Lib Dem colleagues this Saturday as I did that February day back in 2003. The march will kick-off at 12 noon, meeting at Temple Place (nearest tube Temple) and will march via Parliament, Downing Street to a rally at Trafalgar Square.
If the regime has stockpiled chemical weapons with so little security that rogue commanders can use them at will, then the regime has surely failed in its duty to protect, and is surely just as much to blame as the rogue commander? And it would be all the more reason to talk in the language of pain – something simple enough and direct enough that rogue commanders are likely to understand the message very well.
Has Syria actually signed up to the ICC in full? Wikipedia is not totally clear on the point.
More generally Mr Donaldson, you are putting way too much faith in international law here. These mythic norms – sovereignty, self-determination, democracy, human rights, an R2P are not like common theft. They can not be optimised against each other, neatly codified in a nice tidy statute and overseen by some court that commands global respect and which can meaningfully enforce a ruling. One man’s self determination is a loss of another man’s sovereignty, one man’s human rights impinges on others. People may have an expectation of protection, but that does not mean that the UK has to provide that P. If the law can be an ass, so can international law.
These things are not absolutes – they are very, very abstract and subject to balancing acts that are not going to have meaningful legitimacy. The stark truth is that a panel of judges is not going to be able to hand down a judgment that will make everyone in Syria decide to stop the conflict. In looking to law you are chasing a phantom.
Indeed, one could argue that intervention is intervention. Why exactly does the say-so of a court or the UN suddenly make it better? If the UN had said that conflict in Iraq in 2003 was A-OK would you have then supported it?
Firstly can I say that I am very pleased that last night our Parliament came to the right decision on this issue.
Now our Government must concentrate all its efforts into ensuring that the rule of international law is adhered to and that if evidence exists as to who is responsible for this attrocity, that those responsible face trial in the international courts.
Jonathan Brown, as Tony Greaves points out it is looking more an more likely that the attack was conducted by a rouge general. If that is proven then the most appropriate action for the Assad regime would be to hand that general over to the international courts for trial, and pressure must be brought to bear for this to happen. I do not ever assume that bringing international law to bear is going to be easy, but it is the right thing to do and if we were to do it more often then it would in time become the accepted norm.
Tony Harwood, thankfully there will be no need for the protest this Saturday as the Parliament came to its senses, and knocked some sense at last into our Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister.
Richard Dean, the more salient point is that the regime has developed the chemical weapons. Perhaps it is time that a new international agreement were reached that no more chemical or biological weapons will be produced and/or stored.
Little Jackie Paper, pehaps when you have read what I wrote we could enter into a discussion about that rather than about your fanciful and wrong assumtion that I was suggestion that a war crimes trial would somehow result in a Judge saying that as a result of someone being found guilty of this heinous act the international community should unite in bombing their country.
Syria has always been a complex network of religious and ethnic group. (It does help to have been there and observed it, even as a tourist.). Old Assad kept the balance of power through rewarding minorities and clamping down on religious hostilities. It was undoubtedly a police state but perhaps the least worst option.
Once young Assad took over, the forces of democracy tested the boundaries. The USA thought that Assad might be persuaded to go and that this would remove a supporter of Iran and enemy to Israel. So there have been a series of misjudged measures to support the opposition. (We did the same with the provision of secondary military equipment.). The result has been the current appalling mess.
The least bad solution that avoids a Middle East meltdown and continuing Shia / Sunni conflict is a continuing Ba’athist dominant role supported by the Russians. Other approaches are wishful thinking and will lead to further human disaster.
The comment made above from A SOCIAL LIBERAL:
“Apparently the troops that were attacking the suburb of Damascus had personal protection against chemical warfare – another reason for summising that the Syrians made a conscious decision to use the nerve agents”
Where is the source for this?
I have not seen any evidence for this, anywhere in the Media.
But on another thread, A SOCIAL LIBERAL makes a quite forceful defence, of the deployment of White Phosphorous against the Palestinians in Gaza and the Iraqis in Fallujah.
So maybe A SOCIAL LIBERAL knows better than I do ????
Obviously I do.
I hope you are watching Newsnight. Kerrys speech included much of what I said in the post. I paraphrase. ‘We KNOW there were chemical warfare troops and equipment in the area’ . . . .’We KNOW troops [in the attack] were donning protective clothing, including gasmasks’ . . . . . ‘We KNOW where the rockets were fired from’
(These were not his actual words – which is why there are not quotes round them – as I cannot recount vertabrim what he said)
So, do “liberal democrats” now support a “least bad solution” in which a smooth talker in a smart suit can front a brutal regime which massacres its own country’s civilians? Not what I expected liberal democracy to be at all.
Multiple repetitions of the words “We KNOW” do not constitute knowledge.
David
You know very well that when Kerry emphasised “we know” he was referring to intelligence the White House had seen.
While we’re raking the ashes of debate, America is gearing up for WW3. Here is how.
Our cool Democrat US President conducts a nicely calibrated, limited surgical strike.
Assad does not respond rationally. Why should anyone expect him to? Assad murders a few Israelis.
Israel feels it must respond with disproportionate force.
Iran feels it must respond to the Israeli attack, and so do Hamas and Hezbollah.
Israel escalate to full scale war, and nuke the Iranian reactor.
Russia comes in. The US come back in again, but not so cool and hip this time.
Crazy, unthinkable chain reaction? Tell that to Archduke Ferdinand.
The historians have spun it that WW1 was inevitable and any spark would have done to start it. A terrible misjudgment by the historians. It;s the spark that is critical. We live in a chaotic world where the “beating of a butterfly’s wings” really can change global events. The historians would like to think that it is a cut-and-dried deterministic world, and that analysis by clever historians can maintain intellectual control. They are kidding themselves. War and peace depends on chaos theory, on whether a spark ignites the fire.
Don’t ignite the spark.
David Allen
Are you a historian? If so can you opint me to some of the papers you have written so that I can see how qualified you are to pooh pooh your colleagues.
If, on the other hand you are not, kindly enlighten us as to your qualifications which allow you to put them down.
@Richard Dean
If you are advocating regime change in Syria then you are advocating something different to what yesterday’s vote was claimed to be about.
@Richard S
If you are replying to my post then you are replying to something different to what my post was about.
Friday nights are sometimes like that, aren’t they? 🙂
@Richard Dean
🙂 but if yesterday’s vote wasn’t about regime change then you still have the smooth talker in the sharp suit even if it had been passed.
@Social: I am not prepared to take on faith any secondhand reports of “intelligence.” And neither should you be.
@David. Then you are not fit to make any decisions regarding this or any other matter of governance. I make this point dramatically, but think about it … Any and every government has to use reports from others – politicians cannot be there in person at every event or every atrocity.
Even so, first hand experience can be hugely valuable, as indeed you suggest. Tonight on Newsnight Diane Abbot said she’d willingly go to Syria to experience things first hand. I hope she lives up to that promise.
@Richard: You have no standing to declare who is or is not “fit” to make decisions. Your track record is plain to everyone who reads this site.
David, I apologize if I was rude.
My basic point still stands. As politicians, and as voters, we are more often than not called to make judgments on reports prepared by others. First-hand experience is enormously valuable, but also very limited, and none of us can possibly have first hand experience of everything. So instead of rejecting second-hand or third-hand reports automatically, we need to develop individual and collective ways of judging whether reports are accurate, false, misleading, or what.
My own judgment is that few MPs disbelieve the reports that chemical weapons were used by the Syrian government against its own people, or that the atrocity in Damascus was perpetrated by government forces. That, though, was not why MPs voted against the government.
Despots have long traded on people’s fear of something worse if they are overthrown. I hope Diane Abbot goes there and is sufficiently alert to not be fooled by the Assad propaganda machine.
Agreed with richard: it is called judgement, and in an indirect democracy we implicitly must trust those we elect to act in our name.
Don’t like that, create a party called liberal athenians.
David
I refer you to Jedis post just above this one
Richard Dean makes a condescending comment as follows:
“Even so, first hand experience can be hugely valuable, as indeed you suggest. Tonight on Newsnight Diane Abbot said she’d willingly go to Syria to experience things first hand. I hope she lives up to that promise.”
And I hope Richard Dean “lives up to his promise”, and puts on his helmet, picks up a gun, and goes to Syria to carry out a “Humanitarian Action”