David Cameron’s case for UK military action in Syria has several highly contentious key points.
‘There is a credible military strategy to defeat Isil in Syria as well as Iraq’
If there is, no one has told the US. In private briefings and in public testimony to Congress, a long line of senior American officers have acknowledged frustration with the battle against Islamic State. General John Allen, who was in overall charge of the US campaign in Syria and Iraq, has quit after a year.
‘Airstrikes can degrade Isil and arrest its advance’
It is debatable whether this is true. The coalition repeatedly says it has shrunk the geographical area controlled by Isis by 30% in the past year, but in that same period Isis has advanced on and taken Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. In any event, Cameron goes on to concede that air strikes alone cannot defeat Isil.
‘We need partners on the ground’
Who is going to provide these troops on the ground? The Obama administration is opposed to deploying more ground troops. British military chiefs laugh off suggestions of committing tens of thousands of UK troops to take Raqqa.
So who is going to do it? The Kurds are too small a force, with little interest in fighting beyond neighbouring territory. The Iraqi army is riven by religious and ethnic divisions. The Free Syrian Army and similar groups have so far been largely ineffective – although Cameron says there are 70,000 anti-Assad non-Isis fighters available for the task.
How easy will it be to take the IS stronghold Raqqa?
The US had 170,000 troops in Iraq at the peak of the fighting in Iraq in 2007 and struggled to suppress the insurgent force, even though it was much smaller than IS. Quelling towns and cities often required house-by-housing fighting, with high casualties on both sides.
'Our intelligence is that there are 70,000 moderate Sunni forces’
Retired British brigadier Ben Barry, a specialist in land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, estimated a joint US-UK-French coalition would require 20,000 troops to retake Raqqa. He described the prospect as “challenging”, given that IS had been preparing its defences for the last year.
Rebel leaders claim to have 70,000 fighters but Cameron should have added that at present they are not much of a fighting force. The rebel forces are deeply divided among lots of competing factions. For many of them, the focus is fighting Assad’s forces around Damascus, not Isis.
Cameron said the intelligence about the 70,000 moderate Syrian rebels comes from ‘the highest level’
The one thing it might have been assumed that Cameron would avoid is an echo of the dodgy intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And yet he did just that, saying the intelligence about the 70,000 figure had come from the “highest level”. Who is this? The UK’s joint intelligence committee, which coordinates information from all the agencies and was responsible for the bogus claim in the run-up to the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein could hit a UK base with missiles within 45 minutes.
'Decisions to use force are not to be taken lightly’
Politicians nearly always say that. The British military, like their counterparts around the world, like to fight, to put into practice all those hours of training, but only if there is a clear strategy, a fixed objective, an endgame. And there is none at present.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...ly-contentious