Operation Safe Haven
David Aaronovitch does a good job mocking the political establishment's lack of a viable strategy for dealing with the murderous thugs who are causing mayhem in Syria and Iraq under the banner of the Islamic State, formerly ISIS.
In doing so he also explains the background to Operation Safe Haven which drives a coach and horses through the ridiculous argument made by Robert Fisk a few days ago that the west is interested only in defending non-Muslim interests in the Middle East.
Not only that because Operation Safe Haven also applied to the southern part of Iraq which is dominated by Shia Muslims of course.
Only military action will defeat the jihadis
By David Aaronovitch - The Times
It is not enough to send a few Chinooks. Labour must stand up and hold the government to account for its inaction
In April 1991, after the Gulf war, the government of John Major — a man subsequently ridiculed for supposed weakness — conceived promoted and implemented a plan that saved the Kurds of Iraq.
Operation Safe Haven was simultaneously a humanitarian and a military plan involving thousands of personnel, many of them British. It lasted two months and its results were sustained by a no-fly policy that literally shot out of the sky any Saddamite aircraft attempting to enter restricted airspace.
Now, two months after Isis (now the Islamic State) took Mosul, we can barely scramble a Chinook and our politicians tremble with fear at the possibility that a marine’s boot will step for an infinitesimal moment on Iraqi soil. This, so far, has been Operation Drop Something From a Tornado and Get the F*** Out.
The history of Safe Haven should remind us, as we are selectively forgetful on the point, that the mantra “interventions never work” is as useful a generalisation as “interventions always work”. We can try to imagine, if we like, the counterfactual consequences of not intervening in Sierra Leone or Kosovo, of leaving the Taliban intact in Afghanistan, Saddam in Baghdad, letting Gaddafi loose on Benghazi and so on, just as we can the possible results of not permitting genocide in Rwanda or ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. But any reasonable person ends up concluding that you win some, you lose some, and not always the ones you expect.
But at the very least a country like ours, with allies like we have, a history like ours, armed forces like ours and — among our more enlightened citizens — a sense of some responsibility for what happens in the world, should want to make a difference where we can. A real difference, not just a rhetorical one.
Yet for months the practical response in America, Europe and Britain to the Islamic State’s advance out of Syria into Iraq and its theocratic Nazism in relation to inferior believers was at the level mostly of disapproving chit chat. Only yesterday did we have anything substantive from the government about possible plans for an airlift for the Yazidis.
Something broke in western policy when Ed Miliband won the vote preventing action in Syria after the chemical attacks this time last year. Mr Miliband understood immediately that his effective position (as opposed to his formal one) was popular in the country, and so did the prime minister. So Britain could not support any military action in defence of President Obama’s red line and Mr Obama drew the conclusion that if no one else was bothered about his red line, then he wouldn’t be either. The message was clear to everyone and is the worst you can ever send — that the cops have left town.
So, right now the opposition should be baying either for the government, with our allies, to take whatever action would help to prevent effective genocide on the Iraqi-Syrian border and protect Kurdistan or for a recall of parliament to debate such action. It is doing neither.
Before analysing Labour’s inaction — so very different from its rhetoric on Gaza — I should take note of two stock objections to any involvement in Iraq. The first concerns the UN and legality. Here, for once, there is no problem. The sovereign nation, Iraq, has asked for military intervention in the form of air support and the authorities of the Kurdish Autonomous Region have requested whatever assistance we can give.
The second is more substantive and has to do with the Maliki government’s alienation of Sunnis, many of whom are in temporary alliance with the Islamic State. It would be folly, runs the argument, to intervene heavily on the side of a sectarian government, which would then have less incentive to find a political solution.
This latter argument will lose force with the creation of a new government in Baghdad, as seems likely, and in any case does not apply to assistance given to the Kurds or action taken in their support.
In that context it grieves me beyond measure that the Vatican can see what the Labour party, in power just four years ago and seeking to be in power again next year, can’t: that the Islamic State has to be defeated militarily as well as politically.
A few days ago the shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, wrote an article in The Daily Telegraph for which the word “pusillanimous” conveys too great a sense of audacity. Wasn’t it awful about the Yazidis and the Christians and the chopped-off heads? And wasn’t Mr Obama on the money when he said there was a humanitarian catastrophe? So, said Mr Alexander, what we needed to do was to “speak out”. He had already urged people to speak out and now the government “should be doing more to speak out”, and — even more than that — the government should “set out what steps it will now take”.
Such as calling an urgent meeting of the Security Council, such as discussing things with the UN refugee agency and such as urging the UN Human Rights Council “to build a consensus for action on religious freedom at the highest international level”. Oh, and he welcomed and supported “the government’s assurances it is not proposing military intervention in Iraq”, before pointing out that last Sunday was a day of prayer so let’s get to it. Douglas is one of Labour’s brightest, yet I think that is what you call beyond satire.
On which day does one pray for an opposition with balls? Or a government? That lovely old coalitionist Ming Campbell warned the BBC this week of “incalculable consequences” if Kurdistan fell to the Islamic State, then added: “I am not persuaded at the moment that the UK should join in airstrikes along with the US. But one has to keep an open mind about that.”
What bizarre form of “after you, Claude” is that? If it’s necessary to do stuff, then let the Yanks do it? Meanwhile we will waft a few Chinooks over, accompanied by Douglas Alexander’s prayers.
The creation of the convention that any form of military action requires parliamentary approval (while any inaction, however damaging, requires none) was based on the premise that governments had to be stopped from doing things. It means that in matter such as these, government during a recess has become like a bad weekend at A&E: the patients still turn up, but the doctors don’t. No one has a plan for when the problem is a government that does almost nothing.
Poisonous Comment (11 August 2014)
I found this opinion piece by Robert Fisk in The Independent quite poisonous, I have to say, lazy journalism of the worst kind, underpinned by a personal political outlook, as opposed to a sensible argument supported by facts and evidence.
Because limited military action was proposed against Syria recently, and vigorously opposed by Robert Fisk if I recall correctly, and while these air strikes did not go ahead their purpose was to prevent President Assad from using chemical weapons against his own civilian population.
Likewise in Libya where the western countries intervened again to prevent the mass killing of civilians, and others, in Benghazi who were surrounded and outgunned by the murderous army of President Muammar Gaddafi - or previously in Iraq where the west imposed a no 'fly zone' to protect the Shia Muslims in the south and the Kurds in the north from Saddam Hussein after the war that followed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
So yet again the charge of discrimination against Muslims bears little scrutiny and while hypocrisy abounds in the Middle East the western countries are far from being the only ones with a case to answer.
Another example, which a journalist of Robert Fisk's experience must remember is the civil war in the former Yugoslavia in which Serbia attacked its neighbours and the majority Muslim populations in Bosnia and Kosovo, in particular.
And the ethnic cleansing instigated by the Serbs was finally stopped by NATO and the western countries, initially by the use of air strikes and latterly by the threat of putting 'boots on the ground' so I've no doubt that Robert Fisk remembers these events very well since both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were key players.
In which case why does he write such nonsense?
Bombs away! US to the rescue – but only of certain minorities, not Muslims
By ROBERT FISK - The Independent
Obama’s air strikes on Isis in northern Iraq are hypocritical, and a sense of déjà vu is understandable
He wouldn’t bomb Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s bloody caliphate when it was butchering the majority Shia Muslims of Iraq. But Barak Obama is riding to the rescue of the Christian refugees – and the Yazidis – because of “a potential act of genocide”. Bombs away. And thank heavens that the refugees in question are not Palestinian.
This hypocrisy almost takes the breath away, not least because the US President is still too frightened – in case he upsets the Turks – to use the “G” word about the 1915 Turkish genocide of a million and a half Armenian Christians, a mass slaughter on a scale which even Abu Bakr’s thugs have not yet attempted. We’ll have to wait another year to see how Obama wriggles out of the 100th anniversary commemorations of that particular Muslim massacre of Christians.
But for now, “America is coming to help” in Iraq with air strikes on “convoys” of Isis fighters. But isn’t that what the Americans staged against the Taliban in Afghanistan, often mistaking innocent wedding parties for Islamist “convoys”? Dropping food parcels to minority refugees in fear of their lives on the bare mountainsides of northern Iraq – also under way – is exactly the same operation US forces performed for the Kurds almost a quarter of a century ago; and in the end, they had to put American and British soldiers on the ground to create a “safe haven” for the Kurds.
Nor has Obama said anything about his friendly ally Saudi Arabia, whose Salafists are the inspiration and fund-raisers for the Sunni militias of Iraq and Syria, just as they were for the Taliban in Afghanistan. The wall between the Saudis and the monsters they create – and which America now bombs – must be kept as high as it must be invisible. That is the measure of American dissimulation in this latest act of duplicity. Obama is bombing the friends of his Saudi allies – and the enemies of the Assad regime in Syria, by the way – but won’t say so. And just for good measure, he believes that America must act in defence of its consulate in Erbil and embassy in Baghdad.
That’s the same excuse the US used when it fired its naval guns into the Chouf mountains of Lebanon 30 years ago: that Lebanon’s pro-Syrian warlords were endangering the US embassy in Beirut. That the Islamists are as unlikely to seize Irbil as they are to capture Baghdad is neither here nor there. Obama says he has a “mandate” to bomb from the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki, the elected but dictatorial Shia who now runs Iraq as a broken and sectarian state. How we Westerners love “mandates”, ever since the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which drew the borders of the Middle East for our “mandates” – the very frontiers which Abu Bakr’s caliphate has now sworn to destroy. There is not much doubt about the awfulness of the equally sectarian Isis which Abu Bakr is creating.
His threat to the Christians of Iraq – convert, pay tax or die – has now been turned against the Yazidis, the harmless and tiny sect whose Persian-Assyrian roots, Christian-Islamo rituals and forgiving God have doomed them as assuredly as the Christians. Ethnic Kurds, the poor old Yazidis believe that God, whose seven angels supposedly govern the Earth, pardoned Satan: so inevitably, this ancient people came to be regarded as devil-worshippers. Hence their 130,000 refugees – at least 40,000 of them living on mountain rocks in at least nine locations around Mount Sinjar – tell stories of rape, murder and child-killing at the hands of Abu Bakr’s men. Alas, they may all be true.
The Yazidis are probably descended from supporters of the second Umayyad Caliph, Yazid the First; his suppression of Hussein, the son of Ali – whose followers are now the Shia of the Middle East – might theoretically have commended the Yazidis to Abu Bakr’s Sunni Muslim army. But their mixed rituals and their denial of evil were never going to find favour with a group which – like Saudi Arabia and the Taliban – believes in “the suppression of vice and the propagation of virtue”. In the fault lines that lie across ancient Kurdistan, Armenia and what was Mesopotamia, history has dealt the Yazidis a bad hand.
But for them and the Nestorians and other Christian groups, Obama has gone to war. The French, their old Crusader spirits reawakened, called the Security Council to reflect upon this Christian pogrom. But the question remains: would America have done the same if the wretched minority refugees of northern Iraq had been Palestinians? Or will Obama’s latest bombing campaign merely provide a welcome distraction from the killing fields of Gaza?
It is not enough to send a few Chinooks. Labour must stand up and hold the government to account for its inaction
In April 1991, after the Gulf war, the government of John Major — a man subsequently ridiculed for supposed weakness — conceived promoted and implemented a plan that saved the Kurds of Iraq.
Operation Safe Haven was simultaneously a humanitarian and a military plan involving thousands of personnel, many of them British. It lasted two months and its results were sustained by a no-fly policy that literally shot out of the sky any Saddamite aircraft attempting to enter restricted airspace.
Now, two months after Isis (now the Islamic State) took Mosul, we can barely scramble a Chinook and our politicians tremble with fear at the possibility that a marine’s boot will step for an infinitesimal moment on Iraqi soil. This, so far, has been Operation Drop Something From a Tornado and Get the F*** Out.
The history of Safe Haven should remind us, as we are selectively forgetful on the point, that the mantra “interventions never work” is as useful a generalisation as “interventions always work”. We can try to imagine, if we like, the counterfactual consequences of not intervening in Sierra Leone or Kosovo, of leaving the Taliban intact in Afghanistan, Saddam in Baghdad, letting Gaddafi loose on Benghazi and so on, just as we can the possible results of not permitting genocide in Rwanda or ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. But any reasonable person ends up concluding that you win some, you lose some, and not always the ones you expect.
But at the very least a country like ours, with allies like we have, a history like ours, armed forces like ours and — among our more enlightened citizens — a sense of some responsibility for what happens in the world, should want to make a difference where we can. A real difference, not just a rhetorical one.
Yet for months the practical response in America, Europe and Britain to the Islamic State’s advance out of Syria into Iraq and its theocratic Nazism in relation to inferior believers was at the level mostly of disapproving chit chat. Only yesterday did we have anything substantive from the government about possible plans for an airlift for the Yazidis.
Something broke in western policy when Ed Miliband won the vote preventing action in Syria after the chemical attacks this time last year. Mr Miliband understood immediately that his effective position (as opposed to his formal one) was popular in the country, and so did the prime minister. So Britain could not support any military action in defence of President Obama’s red line and Mr Obama drew the conclusion that if no one else was bothered about his red line, then he wouldn’t be either. The message was clear to everyone and is the worst you can ever send — that the cops have left town.
So, right now the opposition should be baying either for the government, with our allies, to take whatever action would help to prevent effective genocide on the Iraqi-Syrian border and protect Kurdistan or for a recall of parliament to debate such action. It is doing neither.
Before analysing Labour’s inaction — so very different from its rhetoric on Gaza — I should take note of two stock objections to any involvement in Iraq. The first concerns the UN and legality. Here, for once, there is no problem. The sovereign nation, Iraq, has asked for military intervention in the form of air support and the authorities of the Kurdish Autonomous Region have requested whatever assistance we can give.
The second is more substantive and has to do with the Maliki government’s alienation of Sunnis, many of whom are in temporary alliance with the Islamic State. It would be folly, runs the argument, to intervene heavily on the side of a sectarian government, which would then have less incentive to find a political solution.
This latter argument will lose force with the creation of a new government in Baghdad, as seems likely, and in any case does not apply to assistance given to the Kurds or action taken in their support.
In that context it grieves me beyond measure that the Vatican can see what the Labour party, in power just four years ago and seeking to be in power again next year, can’t: that the Islamic State has to be defeated militarily as well as politically.
A few days ago the shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, wrote an article in The Daily Telegraph for which the word “pusillanimous” conveys too great a sense of audacity. Wasn’t it awful about the Yazidis and the Christians and the chopped-off heads? And wasn’t Mr Obama on the money when he said there was a humanitarian catastrophe? So, said Mr Alexander, what we needed to do was to “speak out”. He had already urged people to speak out and now the government “should be doing more to speak out”, and — even more than that — the government should “set out what steps it will now take”.
Such as calling an urgent meeting of the Security Council, such as discussing things with the UN refugee agency and such as urging the UN Human Rights Council “to build a consensus for action on religious freedom at the highest international level”. Oh, and he welcomed and supported “the government’s assurances it is not proposing military intervention in Iraq”, before pointing out that last Sunday was a day of prayer so let’s get to it. Douglas is one of Labour’s brightest, yet I think that is what you call beyond satire.
On which day does one pray for an opposition with balls? Or a government? That lovely old coalitionist Ming Campbell warned the BBC this week of “incalculable consequences” if Kurdistan fell to the Islamic State, then added: “I am not persuaded at the moment that the UK should join in airstrikes along with the US. But one has to keep an open mind about that.”
What bizarre form of “after you, Claude” is that? If it’s necessary to do stuff, then let the Yanks do it? Meanwhile we will waft a few Chinooks over, accompanied by Douglas Alexander’s prayers.
The creation of the convention that any form of military action requires parliamentary approval (while any inaction, however damaging, requires none) was based on the premise that governments had to be stopped from doing things. It means that in matter such as these, government during a recess has become like a bad weekend at A&E: the patients still turn up, but the doctors don’t. No one has a plan for when the problem is a government that does almost nothing.
Poisonous Comment (11 August 2014)
I found this opinion piece by Robert Fisk in The Independent quite poisonous, I have to say, lazy journalism of the worst kind, underpinned by a personal political outlook, as opposed to a sensible argument supported by facts and evidence.
Because limited military action was proposed against Syria recently, and vigorously opposed by Robert Fisk if I recall correctly, and while these air strikes did not go ahead their purpose was to prevent President Assad from using chemical weapons against his own civilian population.
Likewise in Libya where the western countries intervened again to prevent the mass killing of civilians, and others, in Benghazi who were surrounded and outgunned by the murderous army of President Muammar Gaddafi - or previously in Iraq where the west imposed a no 'fly zone' to protect the Shia Muslims in the south and the Kurds in the north from Saddam Hussein after the war that followed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
So yet again the charge of discrimination against Muslims bears little scrutiny and while hypocrisy abounds in the Middle East the western countries are far from being the only ones with a case to answer.
Another example, which a journalist of Robert Fisk's experience must remember is the civil war in the former Yugoslavia in which Serbia attacked its neighbours and the majority Muslim populations in Bosnia and Kosovo, in particular.
And the ethnic cleansing instigated by the Serbs was finally stopped by NATO and the western countries, initially by the use of air strikes and latterly by the threat of putting 'boots on the ground' so I've no doubt that Robert Fisk remembers these events very well since both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were key players.
In which case why does he write such nonsense?
Bombs away! US to the rescue – but only of certain minorities, not Muslims
By ROBERT FISK - The Independent
Obama’s air strikes on Isis in northern Iraq are hypocritical, and a sense of déjà vu is understandable
He wouldn’t bomb Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s bloody caliphate when it was butchering the majority Shia Muslims of Iraq. But Barak Obama is riding to the rescue of the Christian refugees – and the Yazidis – because of “a potential act of genocide”. Bombs away. And thank heavens that the refugees in question are not Palestinian.
This hypocrisy almost takes the breath away, not least because the US President is still too frightened – in case he upsets the Turks – to use the “G” word about the 1915 Turkish genocide of a million and a half Armenian Christians, a mass slaughter on a scale which even Abu Bakr’s thugs have not yet attempted. We’ll have to wait another year to see how Obama wriggles out of the 100th anniversary commemorations of that particular Muslim massacre of Christians.
But for now, “America is coming to help” in Iraq with air strikes on “convoys” of Isis fighters. But isn’t that what the Americans staged against the Taliban in Afghanistan, often mistaking innocent wedding parties for Islamist “convoys”? Dropping food parcels to minority refugees in fear of their lives on the bare mountainsides of northern Iraq – also under way – is exactly the same operation US forces performed for the Kurds almost a quarter of a century ago; and in the end, they had to put American and British soldiers on the ground to create a “safe haven” for the Kurds.
Nor has Obama said anything about his friendly ally Saudi Arabia, whose Salafists are the inspiration and fund-raisers for the Sunni militias of Iraq and Syria, just as they were for the Taliban in Afghanistan. The wall between the Saudis and the monsters they create – and which America now bombs – must be kept as high as it must be invisible. That is the measure of American dissimulation in this latest act of duplicity. Obama is bombing the friends of his Saudi allies – and the enemies of the Assad regime in Syria, by the way – but won’t say so. And just for good measure, he believes that America must act in defence of its consulate in Erbil and embassy in Baghdad.
That’s the same excuse the US used when it fired its naval guns into the Chouf mountains of Lebanon 30 years ago: that Lebanon’s pro-Syrian warlords were endangering the US embassy in Beirut. That the Islamists are as unlikely to seize Irbil as they are to capture Baghdad is neither here nor there. Obama says he has a “mandate” to bomb from the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki, the elected but dictatorial Shia who now runs Iraq as a broken and sectarian state. How we Westerners love “mandates”, ever since the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which drew the borders of the Middle East for our “mandates” – the very frontiers which Abu Bakr’s caliphate has now sworn to destroy. There is not much doubt about the awfulness of the equally sectarian Isis which Abu Bakr is creating.
His threat to the Christians of Iraq – convert, pay tax or die – has now been turned against the Yazidis, the harmless and tiny sect whose Persian-Assyrian roots, Christian-Islamo rituals and forgiving God have doomed them as assuredly as the Christians. Ethnic Kurds, the poor old Yazidis believe that God, whose seven angels supposedly govern the Earth, pardoned Satan: so inevitably, this ancient people came to be regarded as devil-worshippers. Hence their 130,000 refugees – at least 40,000 of them living on mountain rocks in at least nine locations around Mount Sinjar – tell stories of rape, murder and child-killing at the hands of Abu Bakr’s men. Alas, they may all be true.
The Yazidis are probably descended from supporters of the second Umayyad Caliph, Yazid the First; his suppression of Hussein, the son of Ali – whose followers are now the Shia of the Middle East – might theoretically have commended the Yazidis to Abu Bakr’s Sunni Muslim army. But their mixed rituals and their denial of evil were never going to find favour with a group which – like Saudi Arabia and the Taliban – believes in “the suppression of vice and the propagation of virtue”. In the fault lines that lie across ancient Kurdistan, Armenia and what was Mesopotamia, history has dealt the Yazidis a bad hand.
But for them and the Nestorians and other Christian groups, Obama has gone to war. The French, their old Crusader spirits reawakened, called the Security Council to reflect upon this Christian pogrom. But the question remains: would America have done the same if the wretched minority refugees of northern Iraq had been Palestinians? Or will Obama’s latest bombing campaign merely provide a welcome distraction from the killing fields of Gaza?
