We get the politics that we deserve and last night Parliament voted not to consider any form of intervention in the civil war in Syria. Was it a good thing? Did it represent the triumph of reason over impulse or was it the long awaited revenge of democracy for the manipulation and dishonesty that took us into Iraq? Judged by its intentions, Parliament's actions may well represent both of these things. Not intervening in a complex civil war is undoubtedly a rational course of action.
Syria is bloody; it is a mess and in the course of this civil war the differences between right or wrong have been extinguished. But the conflict in Syria has not always been like this. For a long time it was sustained by demonstrators whose only weapons were their courage, their convictions and the beauty of the songs they sang. For a very long time the only blood being spilt in Syria was that of the peaceful and the innocent. In the beginning Syria was not a civil war, it was the ruthless pacification of protests that arose out the aspiration for a better world for the Arab people. When Assad began to machine gun his people the conflict in Syria was not complex, it was wrong. But at that point nobody intervened we simply stood on the other side of the road and passed it by and Assad knew that he machine gun his children with impunity.
Since then the conflict has unquestionably become more complex, an interplay of everyday savagery and global politics. The conduct and tactics of the Free Syrian Army more ruthless, their allies more troubling. Yet throughout Assad has known that he was immune from intervention. When shooting people was not winning the conflict, he knew that he could turn to shelling and bombing and that the international community would not act. In this he was supported by the conduct of the international community. The Russians and Chinese had decided that the emergence of a post revolutionary Syria was not to their liking and that the ideas and values of the Arab Spring had spread far enough. They needn't have worried of course because the challenge of articulating the principles democracy into predominantly Islamic Cultures was not something that the West would allow to come to fruition. The democratic will of the Arab people is not a voice that the West is actually comfortable with. The victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was not what the West wanted or expected, and it will have surprised nobody in Washington when the Egyptian Army ousted its democratically elected government. For all of its hand wringing over the conflict in Syria the West is as reluctant as Russia to see the emergence of an Arab World responsive to the will of its people.
Yet despite this Barack Obama rightly knew that complete inaction in the face of the Syrian carnage was unacceptable, he had to be seen to be doing something. But how to act without acting, he had no intention of intervening directly, which is why he drew his red line in the sand. It was not the misjudgement that most commentators think it was, it was actually a brutal expression of real politik. The meaning of his statement to Assad was clear - as long as all you do is shoot, bomb, burn, rape, torture and massacre we won't intervene. All of these things would slip beneath the media horizon that had settled above the suffering of the people of Syria. As long as the killing took place in a way that had come to be seen as ordinary, mundane and not news worthy - then the killing could go on.
Unfortunately he underestimated the stupidity of the brutal and the lengths to which they will go to sustain themselves. It is likely that the recent offensives by the Assad regime and Hezbollah had not been able to sustain their initial progress and that recourse to weapons of mass destruction symbolises an act of their military desperation. Regardless of the reason, the line was crossed and the British government sought approval from its Parliament to intervene to prevent further use of chemical weapons.
There was remarkably little spin in what David Cameron sought to do - he wanted to support Barack Obama and he wanted the support of Parliament in order to do so. There was something almost naïve in the way in which he hoped that Ed Miliband and the British people would share his belief that an outrage had been committed, an outrage that could no longer be ignored. With the horror with which he had viewed the footage of the attacks evident in his voice, David Cameron sought to lead us across the road of our indifference to the Syrian people's suffering.
But for a mixture of reasons the British Parliament decided that it was not our place to intervene to prevent the use of chemical weapons and as a result David Cameron is being pilloried from all directions, portrayed as inept and his authority has undoubtedly been undermined. Whilst Cameron's performance in the House of Commons may not have been the performance of a consummate political operator a la Blair and Obama - it was transparent, principled and ultimately it was the performance of a politician who believed he was doing the right thing.
But all of this is largely irrelevant. Whether intended or not, the actions of Ed Miliband and the British Parliament will have strengthened the hand of the Assad regime. Regardless of what small gesture the US undertakes, the struggle in Syria will worsen and we will cloak our general inaction in the language of reason and national interest. We will believe that intervening in someone else's war will always makes things worse and we will argue that the lessons of the Iraq War justify what is in effect our practical indifference to other people's suffering. But in truth that acceptance of suffering has nothing to do with reason but is invariably underpinned by self interest and racism.
