Do We Not Bleed?

I was struck by the sudden interest that the Syrian Government has shown in parliamentary democracy in recent days - parliamentary democracy in the UK that is, not Syria, of course.

The Speaker of the Syrian Parliament sent an open letter to Westminster MPs urging them not to support a military strike against the Assad regime - which has been killing its own people in large numbers for past two years - during the course of a murderous civil war.

'If you bomb us, shall we not bleed?' proclaims the letter - paraphrasing the the famous words of William Shakespeare in the Merchant of Venice - conveniently leaving out the following line 'If you poison us, do we not die?'. 

Now the same rhetorical device is not being used, for obvious reasons, in relation to Syrian civilians or the intrepid UK American journalist - Marie Colvin - who was deliberately targeted and killed by Syrian Government forces while reporting from the front line of the conflict and exposing the role of the Assad regime.

Now if President Assad were to stand aside - not an unreasonable demand after more that 100,000 Syrian deaths - and in doing so state the absolute need for a new power sharing Syrian Government with a new constitution which supports the rights of all citizens - then this conflict would effectively be over.

Because the international community with the backing of the United Nations would be able to step in and make any new deal work - despite the fact that terrorist elements would do their best to undermine any such agreement - through bombings and murderous sectarian attacks on their neighbours, as they have been doing in Iraq for many years.

But whether that can be done by politics alone seems highly doubtful as there has been no sign whatsoever that President Assad is prepared to do anything other than try to maintain his grip on power - by using chemical weapons against his own people in much the same way as Saddam Hussein did, some years ago, against the Iraqi Kurds.

I heard a Labour MP on TV yesterday who said that he was waiting for UN weapons inspectors to produce positive proof that the Assad regime was responsible for deploying chemical weapons against its own people.

All I can say is that he will wait a very long time because that is not the job of the UN weapons inspectors - whose role is only to confirm that such weapons have been used - not who fired them in the first place.

So it comes down to a political judgement and the advice of intelligence services - on whether military action can be justified in particular circumstances - and there are some, on both the left and right of politics, who will never be persuaded and who always find reasons not to strike against a tyrant like Assad.

I listened to much of the debate in Westminster yesterday and came to the conclusion that Ed Miliband's stance was politically dishonest - because his real purpose was to prevent any military action against President Assad by creating gridlock - by insisting upon ever more evidence and backed up by incontrovertible proof that the Syrian Government did, in fact, unleash a murderous attack on civilians using chemical weapons.

Now that will never happen - so it would have been far better, in my view, if Ed Miliband had adopted the same and more honest stance of the Conservative rebels who took the view that the West should stay our of a sectarian civil war - because the UK is not responsible for the terrible loss of life and that it's really not our problem at the end of the day.