Much respect to the UK people and Parliament for defeating the Syria resolution

[steve2470]

I think all UK DU'ers can feel proud of their nation for this.

Sincerely yours,

Steve aka an Anglophile

[ladjf]

1. I agree. I rather thoght that the brits would go for the bombing. nt

[orpupilofnature57]

2. Tony Blair wouldn't have missed a beat Here, They actually hold their

Civil Servants accountable, lets face it pound for pound they're smarter than us .

[The King of Prussia]

3. Clever Tories

They get to
- ditch a leader they hate
- avoid a policy that would cost them seats
- and can correctly portray Labour as the party that DID go to war on the basis of dodgy evidence and legal advice

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. I don't think the Tories will ditch Cameron over this

And I doubt it would have cost them seats; deaths of British soldiers might do that, but they were always clear there wouldn't be "boots on the ground" to get shot at. A majority of people might have said, by election time, an attack was a bad idea, but it would be low down on a list of what influences people's votes, compared with the economy, immigration, the health service, etc.

It may encourage some Tories to revolt over other topics, so it may have some indirect electoral effects.

[T_i_B]

5. If anything, the Tories can breathe a sight of relief....

...that they've been saved from a costly foreign quagmire.

Of course there will be those such as Michael Gove who cling to neoconservatism in spite of all evidence to the contrary, but that view is not as well accepted on the right as it was 10 years ago.

[pennylane100]

6. Thirty Conservative and nine Lib Dems voted against the government.

They must take a large part of the credit for this vote. It is always a sunny day in the UK, regardless of the weather, when the Tories end up with so much egg on their faces.

[T_i_B]

7. The hawks haven't given up yet

We are now getting calls for a 2nd vote, although I can't any need to go over this one again at the moment.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10279620/Pressure-on-Cameron-for-new-vote-on-Syria-strikes.html

Lord Howard, a former Conservative leader, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former Foreign Secretary, and Lord Ashdown, a former Liberal Democrat leader, led calls to vote again on Sunday. Sir Malcolm, the chairman of the intelligence and security committee, said the situation has “moved on dramatically now” and that the evidence is “becoming more compelling every day”.

In his Daily Telegraph column on Monday, Boris Johnson, the London mayor, also suggests another motion could be put “inviting British participation”. Mr Johnson, who has been highly sceptical of intervening in Syria, believes that Parliament has helped the international community by allowing a delay in the action for further evidence to be collected.

Signs of Labour disagreements over Ed Miliband’s response to the Syrian crisis were also beginning to emerge on Sunday.

Jim Murphy, the shadow defence secretary, became the first senior Labour figure to admit that the case against the Assad regime over last month’s chemical weapons attack was not in doubt.

[non sociopath skin]

8. Again, reasons WHY this action should be taken are conspicuous by their absence.

To paraphrase the late Neil Postman, "What is the problem to which western air attacks would be the solution?"

The Skin

[fedsron2us]

9. Do these politicians get paid good money for being so useless

To me the response to any alleged use of chemical weapons is pretty obvious

One, determine what if any weapon was used and how it was delivered.

Two, find out who ordered it to be deployed and why.

Three, if its clear a war crime has taken place demand that those responsible are handed over for trail by the International Court in the Hague.

Four, should the parties involved refuse to surrender those responsible then approach the UN for a mandate for further action

Only after all these steps should anyone even be considering any type of military response and only then if it can be determined that this will disable or destroy the chemical weapons in question.

To my mind the big weakness for the Syrian government is that it is one of the few countries that has not signed the Chemical Weapons Convention (ironically one of the the others is Egypt a country about who the west has gone strangely silent after the recent military coup against its elected government ).

http://www.opcw.org/about-opcw/member-states/status-of-participation-in-the-cwc/

The first item on any list of demands being made by Obama and Kerry should be that the Syrian regime becomes a signatory to the convention so that its stockpile of munitions can be subjected to inspection by international monitors and eventually destroyed. As both the Assad regimes main allies Iran and Russia have signed the Chemical Weapons Convention they are going to find it hard to argue the case why Syria should not do the same. Quite why no western politician has gone down this path is beyond me. I can only assume that they are less interested in preventing the spread and use of these vile armaments and are more interested in finding some excuse to blow the crap out of the Syrian military so the rebels including the Saudi backed Salafist militants win the civil war. What will happen to those weapons if they fall into the hands of some of the more extreme rebel groups and who they might be used against in the future I will leave to your imagination. Suffice to say limited strikes of the type being talked about by Obama will most definitely not be enough to destroy them. That would require a much bigger, more dangerous and more bloody operation than most of the politicians talking up intervention are admitting.

On edit -

I note this issue was acknowledged by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey in a letter to the US Senate

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101001802

It is clear that to disable and neutralise the Chemical Weapon stock piles in Syria is going to require 'boots on the ground'.

Any politician pretending otherwise is either a fool or a knave.

[steve2470]

10. excellent post nt