No wonder Blair found this country a complete pushover – 43% believe Assad is responsible although without evidence. The word ‘believe’ is not without its religious connotations!

Let us remember that outside countries have fueled the Syrian civil war by supplying a never ending amount of weapons through the back door. This has created unimaginable deaths and destruction.

Now lets consider who else is responsible for this never ending cycle of death.

The 43% who “don’t know” about who ordered the use of chemical weapons can include those who are sure the Syrian government forces did it, but don’t know if Assad explicitly ordered it – there was an option in the question to say “government forces but Assad didn’t give the order”, but only one form of “don’t know”. Since there was a news report of an intercepted call from a high-ranking official saying “what the hell have you done?”, it’s a realistic position to say “it was the army, but I don’t know if Assad told them to”.

Why was Britain supplying the Syrian Government with the materials to make the gas?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/government-let-british-company-export-nerve-gas-chemicals-to-syria-8793642.html

“Why was Britain supplying the Syrian Government with the materials to make the gas?”

Try this:

“Following the first Gulf War of 1991 there was interest in the extent to which British companies had been supplying Saddam Hussein’s administration with the materials to prosecute the war. Four directors of the British machine tools manufacturer Matrix Churchill were put on trial for supplying equipment and knowledge to Iraq, but in 1992 the trial collapsed, as it was revealed that the company had been advised by the government on how to sell arms to Iraq. Several of the directors were eventually paid compensation.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms-to-Iraq

Marx wrote: History repeats itself: first as a tragedy, the second as a farce.

But Marx got it wrong again. On this occasion, the second time was the tragedy.

Try also:

“On 11 April 1990, HM Customs & Excise in Middlesbrough seized parts of what were believed to be parts of a massive ‘supergun’ on a ship bound for Iraq. It was revealed that parts of the gun had been manufactured by [Sheffield] Forgemasters who stated that they had been told that the pipes were to be used in a petrochemical project.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_Forgemasters

As I recall, the official who signed off the export licence took retirement. As it turned out, this became a tremendous advertisement for the forging capabilities of Sheffield Forgemasters, which boosted the company’s international sales.

“No wonder Blair found this country a complete pushover ”

Really? At his absolute peak he never managed to get the sort of poll numbers Assad is enjoying here at the minute.

The British imperial mind has always placed the Arab just below badgers on the racial hierarchy and if you can gas badgers you can gas Arabs. Of course Libya was different. We have oil interests there unlike Syria so they halted Gadaffis insane threat to flatten Benghazi. But Assad is welcome to carry on killing and parliament gave the Coalition the excuse it wanted not to act and somebody to blame for the results. Appeasement is back and Putin has the wheel.

The problem with humanitarian intervention is that those intervening always want to take a quick easy option. Get in quick, crush the baddies, back home in time for tea and medals. Governments are so keen to present conflicts in terms of good versus evil, a frankly idiotic reduction, war is never this simple.

The quickest way to intervene and get out again is to give unwavering military support to one side and win the war for them, as happened in Sierra Leone, Haiti, Liberia, Libya, etc., this can of course work but only in cases where a conflict is a clear cut fight between two forces, clearly not the case with Syria. The side the intervener comes down on is inevitably politically motivated.

This is what the West is trying to do, they want to go in, crush the baddies (Assad), win and go home. They don’t care what kind of state this leaves Syria in, with various factions fighting over a power vacuum and no one able to control the country, so long as they back up their rhetoric with actions and gain a popularity boost for doing so. Thankfully the public, at least in the UK, has not been convinced this time but it does not mean they won’t be again.

For what its worth, I believe we should be intervening in Syria, just not in the way governments like to. This isn’t like interventions in the past, you don’t have a government committing genocide against a defenceless population as in Timor Leste and Rwanda, you don’t have a massively one sided military conflict with genocidal ambitions as in the Balkans. What you do have in Syria is Afghanistan circa. 1979, a massively complex civil war with numerous ill-defined factions and no clear unifying force, once you topple Assad there is no one to take his place. This being the case, the only way to effectively halt the bloodshed is for the international community to establish a large neutral peacekeeping operation in Syria to force a ceasefire on all sides and find a diplomatic solution with a view to democratic elections and a truth and reconciliation process. Unfortunately this is politically impossible from a Western stand-point, after Afghanistan who wants a 5-10 year peace keeping operation when you can spend a month fucking the place up and get the same popularity boost at home?

“Appeasement is back”

It’s worth recalling that at the end of WW2 in August 1945, 55 million people had been killed.

In the 1930s, especially at the time of the Munich agreement in September 1938, Britain didn’t have an effective land army to intervene on mainland Europe, hence the debacle at Dunkirk in 1940.

On rearmament by Britain: “The fact is that the rearmament programme was seriously begun under Baldwin, pushed along more slowly than Churchill wanted, but more quickly than the opposition advocated. Defence spending, pegged at about 2.5 per cent of GNP until 1935, increased to 3.8 per cent by 1937.” (Peter Clarke: Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-2000 (Penguin Books)).

This is start of the Guardian’s report of 4 March 1935 on the Baldwin government’s rearmament White Paper:

“In a major reversal of rearmament policy Britain today announced new expansion plans for its army, navy and air force. The plans, in a defence white paper, are to demonstrate that Britain does not take lightly Germany’s continuing rearmament.

“The white paper calls for an enlarged fleet, improved defences for warships against air attack, more aircraft for the RAF and new coastal and anti-aircraft defences. The emphasis on air defence follows fears that Britain is an easy target for cross-Channel air raids. . . ”
http://century.guardian.co.uk/1930-1939/Story/0,,126998,00.html

As Clarke reports in Hope and Glory, Britain’s rearmament budget was increasingly skewed to air defence by the RAF, then the Royal Navy and finally the land army. In retrospect, those priorities were wisely chosen. I can still recall the small red gas masks issued for children in case of a chemical weapons attack. We already knew of nerve gases in the early 1940s and it was the threat to retaliate that deterred their use.

@4. Tris

“Why was Britain supplying the Syrian Government with the materials to make the gas?”

Sarin is an exceedingly simple chemical to make, although very dangerous.

The precursor chemical are used in a very wide number of processes, and are themselves simple to obtain. Merely acquiring them is no sign that you are attempting to produce Sarin.

The maverick Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan made use of sarin gas for its terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway in March 1995:

“In five coordinated attacks, the perpetrators released sarin on several lines of the Tokyo subway, killing thirteen people, severely injuring fifty and causing temporary vision problems for nearly a thousand others.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin_gas_attack_on_the_Tokyo_subway

My father told me about “nerve gas” in the early 1940s. Britain didn’t have much of a bomber fleet at the start of WW2 but the heavy 4-engined bombers were first flown in 1942 and by 1943, the RAF was mounting 1000 bomber raids over Germany. The total casualty toll from 1000 bomber raids on Hamburg alone in the summer of 1943 rivals the casualty numbers from the A-bomb on Nagasaki. It was a credible threat for Britain to use chemical weapons on Germany.

MoCo @ 1:

“43% believe Assad is responsible although without evidence. The word ‘believe’ is not without its religious connotations!”

No, the 43% hold that there are reasonable grounds for believing that Assad/the Syrian government forces are responsible. That is not irrational or unreasonable, even if their belief turns out to be false. And religious belief involves ‘belief in’ while the 43% are ‘believing that’: there’s a difference.

CB @ 9:
“The British imperial mind has always placed the Arab just below badgers on the racial hierarchy and if you can gas badgers you can gas Arabs.”

That’s a gross generalisation. For more than a century, parts of the Foreign Office have been Arabist.

***

I do not favour missile strikes against Assad, as I think they would be futile and counter-productive. However – and I may be talking rubbish here – I do wonder why we are not waging cyber-war on Syria?…disrupting communications, air traffic control and government computer systems, not to mention banks and public services? And is it not possible to freeze the Syrian elite’s western bank accounts (so Mrs Assad cannot go on her internet shopping sprees)? Just a possibly naive thought…

@14

Not sure how much good electronic warfare would be able to do in Syria. Most EW and ECM assets NATO forces have are designed for use against quite modern systems which, although Syria might have in limited numbers, do not seem to be being used too much against rebel groups.

This conflict actually seems surprisingly low-tech, most of the fighting being with small arms and artillery which are impossible to disrupt and what limited air strikes there are/were having been carried out by very old aircraft with no critical digital systems.

Disrupting command and control (communications) systems is the usual way to go but they seem to be in a right mess in Syria anyway, with the regimes level of control over its forces in question. The other problem of course being that you couldn’t disrupt the regimes communications without doing the same to the rebel groups, which is certainly not the way Western governments want to play it in the press.

I seem to remember the Assad’s bank accounts being frozen quite early in the conflict.

Just in case you missed this:

Miliband’s proved he’s not fit to be PM

Chancellor blasts Labour leader over Syria vote

By KEVIN SCHOFIELD, Chief Political Correspondent
The Sun: 2 September 2013
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/politics/5110790/george-osborne-says-ed-miliband-not-fit-to-be-pm-after-syria-opposition.html