Left And Right Must Unite And Fight II

Peter Hitchens writes:

A word of praise here for The Guardian which has once again shown the value of a diverse and adversarial press. Earlier this week The Times carried reports which suggested that there was now credible evidence that the Syrian government is using chemical weapons against the Syrian rebels.

This view is pretty much shared by the BBC (which has in my view been running a disgraceful and unbalanced campaign for intervention in Syria for many months, way beyond the remit of its Charter obligations) and by many newspapers and politicians. Regular readers here will know that it’s not shared by me, but forget that for a moment and examine the matter for yourselves.

This is important because if such an action could be proven, the USA, Britain and France could get round the difficulty that the UN Security Council will not currently permit intervention in Syria, thanks to the vetoes of Russia and  China. Moscow and Peking both feel their goodwill was abused in Libya, where an operation said to be aimed at protecting civilians ended in the overthrow of the Gadaffi state, and its replacement,  as it happens, with a lawless chaos, which nobody mentions.

Also, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, as I have pointed out before, has a shrewd feeling that the trend towards over-riding national sovereignty could one day soon be used to overthrow him and his government. Russia is unique in the modern world in not being a global superpower, but in having enough military, economic and diplomatic power to continue to behave as a sovereign nation.

This was Britain’s position till the unhinged Suez episode of 1956. After that, we became a sycophantic client of the USA, which showed its gratitude for our loyalty by ushering us brusquely into EU servitude, and backing Irish nationalist revolts against our internal national authority. What a terrible tangle this gets us into, especially when EU and US interests don’t coincide.

I don’t know if Mr Putin cares about what would probably happen to Syria if the rebels won, though if he doesn’t, he should. I fear for the Christian and Alawi minorities if Sunni Muslim radicals, backed by Sunni Saudi Arabia and Sunni Turkey, take over. And who knows what would then happen in precarious Lebanon, where the Shia Muslim Hizbollah would then be in a very sensitive position, deprived of a major ally, presumably next on the Saudi target list,  yet still powerfully armed and well-trained?

And then there is Shia Iran - Syria’s principal ally and Saudi Arabia’s principal hate-object, and probably the real target of all this fuss. Much could follow from an Assad defeat, and much of it could involve violence and danger. It is time people realised that the Sunni-Shia split, in which Syria is embroiled whether she likes it or not, is now a more dangerous fault-line in the Middle East than the stalemated Arab-Israeli conflict.

Anyway, Friday’s edition of The Times carried a frightening and distressing despatch from Anthony Loyd in Aleppo, which began ‘The chemical attack that killed Yasser Yunis's family was a small, almost private affair. Had the 27-year-old car mechanic not managed to struggle out of the doorway of his home in Aleppo on to the street in the darkness of night, clutching his infant son to his chest, no one might have ever known what wiped out the family. They died twitching, hallucinating and choking on white froth that poured from their noses and mouths. Their doctors believe that they were killed by nerve gas.’

Mr Loyd, like other Times writers who send despatches from that country, is a fine and brave reporter. And I’ve no doubt that the Syrian civil war has caused a great deal of pain, grief and loss. This is why I hate war. I’ve seen the fringes of this sort of thing and it is intensely dispiriting and gloomy, as one has no comfort to offer, and often yearns for ‘something to be done’ in an irrational way.

After seeing Soviet special forces go mad in Vilnius, Lithuania, in January 1991, and observing a few of their victims with various bits of their heads and bodies absent, and then having attended a grotesquely dishonest press conference at which these actions were justified by uniformed officers,  I was for weeks afterwards in a  state of dark, angry despair and rage.

From having been sympathetic towards my Russian neighbours, colleagues and acquaintances, I grew testy with them. The tone of my writing and my conversation changed. I lost objectivity and detachment, and took many months to regain them. Another odd effect was that for about ten years afterwards I could not bear firework displays, as the noise is so similar to that of real guns being fired, and it would instantly remind me of dark, dangerous nights in Vilnius.

My point is that anyone reporting on such things is entitled to his feelings. More, we should be glad that he is engaged, and ready to risk himself in the general cause of revealing the true face of the world. But his editors at home need to be cooler and more dispassionate, especially when so much is at stake.

This is where The Guardian comes in. In Saturday’s edition, Julian Borger (the paper’s Diplomatic Editor) wrote a crisp question-and-answer summary of the position, which makes it clear that things are not as clear-cut as you might have thought, if you depended on (say) the BBC for your view.

‘The letter issued by the White House to two senators on Thursday [on Syrian use of chemical weapons] makes it clear the evidence is far from conclusive. There are questions over the "chain of custody" of the physical evidence - ie the US analysts cannot guarantee the provenance of the samples they have been given because they were collected and handed over by someone else, either another government or an opposition faction.’

According to a report by the McClatchy news agency in the US, the soil sample examined by American experts is minuscule and contains a byproduct of sarin that could also be from fertiliser production. Some of the videos in circulation online show alleged victims foaming at the mouth, but that is not listed as a sarin symptom on the website of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Richard Guthrie, a British chemical weapons expert and former head of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Project of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said: "That [foaming at the mouth] would not be indicative of use of nerve agents but is more likely to be a sign of a choking agent such as phosgene being used, if anything."

Jean-Pascal Zanders, an expert at the EU Institute for Strategic Studies, said: "It's not possible that what is being shown to the public is a chemical weapons attack. The video from Aleppo showing foaming at the mouth does not look like a nerve agent. I'm wholly unconvinced." Alas, I cannot link to Mr Loyd’s report in The Times, as it is behind a pay-wall.

Personally, it strikes me that President Assad would need to be exceptionally stupid to use chemical weapons. They are tricky things to use anyway, unstable, hard to transport, apt to decay in storage, unsafe for their users as well as for their victims.  That, rather than international convention, is the reason why they have been used so rarely since they were introduced in the 1914-18 war.

Mainly designed to be used on battlefields (where by forcing the use of cumbersome and hot protective clothing they can gravely hold up an advancing army) they would provide him with little advantage in the sort of urban war he is fighting. He knows perfectly well that their use would be the pretext for a Western intervention.

On the other hand, the rebels, many of whom aren’t much nicer than Mr Assad, would see many advantages in suggesting to outside observers that such weapons had been used. I have no idea of the truth, but I would examine the evidence on that basis, and informed by the knowledge we all gained during the Iraq war run-up, that governments don’t always tell the truth.

Shocking, I know, like the fact that statistics aren’t always wholly right, and may be influenced by those who compile them.  But you need to know.