RUSI Analysis, 30 Aug 2013 By Professor Malcolm Chalmers, Research Director / Director, UK Defence Policy Studies

The UK Parliament’s decision to not intervene militarily in Syria marked a massive watershed in UK defence and security policy. The results would be examined with interest by allies and potential adversaries alike.

 
20 Brigade departs from Basra, Iraq in 2009. Iraq had cast a shadow over last night’s vote.

Last night’s defeat of the govt. in the home of Commons was an assertion of Parliamentary sovereignty, on problems with war and peace, without modern precedent. It’s now hard to peer how any UK Government could undertake significant military action without the support of Parliament, or indeed of the broader public. And it’s difficult to work out such support being given unless there’s a clear national interest involved, or if military operations are undertaken with the imprimatur of a UN Security Council (UNSC) mandate – at the least until the shadows of Iraq and Afghanistan have faded much farther from the national consciousness.

Some commentators have all in favour of the tactical errors and special circumstances that contributed to the defeat. Calling for a vote while the UN inspectors were still in Damascus was always going to be an exceptionally hard sell when the case for action rested heavily on an assessment of what happened at the ground. Government whips had limited opportunities to convince backbench sceptics, who had only just returned from their constituencies for this vote. The Prime Minister took Labour’s support largely with no consideration, a stunning omission given the $64000 role that Ed Miliband’s opposition to the Iraq war had played in his surprise leadership victory in 2010. 

The Shadow of Iraq and Afghanistan

Yet something more significant has happened. This was not a vote simply against the premature timing of the talk, or for greater consideration of evidence on whether chemical weapons were actually used (on which there could have been little question amongst MPs). Rather it reflects the fact – person who Cameron accepted once the outcome was announced – that opposition to military action would have remained strong and widespread, whatever new evidence the UN inspectors eventually publish. For the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan have left most MPs – and, much more so, a wide majority in their voters – deeply sceptical of claims that military action can remain limited once the primary shot is fired. The voices of these who speak of the implications of inaction have, for now, been marginalised.

Many within the defense force will welcome this decision. Over the past decade, their main operational focus have been to conduct operations – in Iraq and, after 2006, in Afghanistan – for which a robust basis of public support was conspicuously lacking. This hasn’t ever been a cushty position for the militia of a democratic country to be in, and plenty will therefore be relieved by Thursday’s vote.

No More Intervention?

The tide of interventionism had already ebbed substantially since its high-water mark, as evident by the Government’s strategy to Afghanistan and its evident reluctance to think about further ‘boots at the ground’ operations. But this decision marks one other step in that process. No UK government, for the foreseeable future, would be capable of contemplate military action without first taken with if it is in a position to gain parliamentary approval.

Some of the army operations of the last twenty years would probably still have gained approval from today’s House of Commons. The liberation of Kuwait from Iraq in 1991, under a transparent UNSC mandate, would likely were overwhelmingly approved – as would the support that the united kingdom gave to america inside the overthrow of the Taliban after 9/11.

But most other interventions of the last quarter-century would have found it hard to get past the sceptical gaze of the united kingdom public because it is today, or of the home of Commons. With the good thing about hindsight, there’s little question that they might have opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But they might even have been sceptical of ‘wars of choice’ where the united kingdom Government desired to get out in front of the Americans – the UK’s costly ‘surge’ in Afghanistan from 2006, certainly, but in addition the UK’s support for using its own ground forces in Kosovo in 1999 (to the good irritation of Bill Clinton), and the united kingdom / French led drive for military action against Gaddafi in 2011.

How much impact an additional ebbing of appetite for intervention can have at the UK’s relationship with the united states remains an open question. For some within the US foreign policy establishment, this vote would be seen as further evidence of ‘anti-Americanism’ and wider European ‘demilitarisation’, as Richard Haass has commented in today’s Financial Times.[1]  Yet they need to surely take note that the trends in UK opinion parallel similar developments within the US. President Obama still seems set on conducting limited strikes against Syria over the following couple of days. But he has shown little appetite for further military action, unless Assad chooses to escalate further or use chemical weapons on an enormous scale again. The foremost likely scenario still remains that the war will grind on, with horrific human consequences, and the West won’t intervene again.

If the usa finds itself keen on further significant military action inside the Middle East (let’s say against Iran), it’s now less likely that the united kingdom will feel in a position to join it. But this vote may also add to the voices of these inside the US, including President Obama himself, who’re themselves weary of repeated military involvements within the Middle East.

The risks from this UK vote therefore lie, not quite a bit relating to the special relationship – which remains important and useful to both parties – as in what it says about wider trends in UK and Western willingness to apply military force in future. The united kingdom Parliament and public are not any longer prepared to present their Government the good thing about the doubt on military operations, and the govt can be constrained in what it might probably do in future subsequently. The results for UK defence and foreign policy could be examined with interest by allies and potential adversaries alike.

 Note

[1] Richard Haass, ‘Britain drifts towards isolation’, Financial Times, 30 August 2013.

Further Analysis: , , , , ,

RUSI Analysis, 29 Aug 2013 By Dr Jonathan Eyal, International Director and International Studies Director

Creative reasoning is being deployed to justify the legality of military intervention in Syria. However the the legal case for strikes against Syria  is removed from being either obvious or clear-cut.

Mr Dominic Grieve, Britain’s Attorney General and chief legal advisor to the Crown, has told his country’s Cabinet that military strikes against Syria ‘would be legal’ under international law.

It is apparent from the Guidance that an army intervention in Syria is legal belongs to that special category of ‘creative reasoning’ that is often supplied by bright, expensive lawyers to clients who’ve all of the wealth but no persuasive legal case: this can be a concoction of selectively-chosen facts mixed with a couple of high-sounding principles which, with somewhat luck, would bamboozle anyone who cares to read it. For the truth is that the legal case for strikes against Syria, and particularly for the limited, punitive strikes which might be now being contemplated, is much from being either obvious or clear-cut.

To start with, it’s worth remembering that, as was the case with almost each international military intervention because the end of the Cold War greater than twenty years ago, Western governments first decide that they need to make use of force and only then scramble for legal justifications, instead of the opposite direction around. Politicians could have decided to behave in Syria out of strategic or tactical considerations and even out of sheer frustration, but compliance with international law isn’t the driver to such actions. And, invariably, the legal case is fuzzy.

The Self-Defence Argument

The most tempting argument to make in such cases is usually that of self-defence, an inherent right of each sovereign nation and a principle which, because the United Nations Charter explicitly acknowledges, predates the creation of organisation itself and is, therefore, not always subject to an identical panoply of restrictions which were created to using force because the end of the second one World War. There were uncorroborated media reports that a minimum of component to the British case for a strike against Syria now could be  ‘to protect British interests inside the region, including the defence of the UK’s sovereign base in Cyprus, that’s considered potentially within range of President Assad’s Scud missiles’.

But the logic of this argument is thinner than air. To invoke the necessity to use force in self-defence, the alleged threat must, among others, be grave and immediate, brooking no delay. It’s patently obvious that this isn’t the case with Syria now: presumably, the British knew for no less than twenty years that Syria had a ballistic capability to hit at their sovereign bases, and so they knew for greater than the last two years that this capability was getting used in a hostile environment, against rebels.

There isn’t any evidence that President Assad is set to fireplace any of his arsenal against any Western target; indeed, the simplest countries that could invoke the main of acting in self-defence now could be Israel, which was directly threatened by Mr Assad in a speech earlier this week and Russia, which has a number of its own citizens inside Syria, now being threatened by Western military strikes. Briefly, if the British government desires to avoid tying itself in knots and exposing itself to the ridicule rightly heaped on former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s claim that Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi missiles could reach British soil or installations ‘in 45 minutes’, it’ll be well-advised to drop the self-defence argument when it comes to Syria.

Deterring any more Use of Chemical Weapons

A weightier – or not less than a more intellectually-coherent – argument for military action is that of the terror that if no international response is forthcoming to a chemical attack that is believed to have killed as many as 1,400 people in Damascus last week, a very important, long-standing distinction between conventional process of warfare and weapons of mass destruction turns into blurred, potentially encouraging others to resort to similar chemical attacks. Action is, therefore, required not just as a result of enormity of the massacre, but in addition due to its implications on global security, due to a necessity to revive the part of deterrence against using chemical weapons.

That is, essentially, the argument recommend by British Foreign Secretary William Hague earlier this week, when he said in connection with the atrocity in Syria that  ‘this is the primary use of chemical warfare within the 21st century. It needs to be unacceptable, we need to confront something that may be a war crime, something that could be a crime against humanity. If we do not accomplish that, then we shall need to confront even bigger war crimes within the future’. The usa argument also runs along similar lines:  President Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons violated ‘the general law of war’ while the use and proliferation of such weapons represented ‘a threat to America’s core national interests’, is how the united states State Department’s spokesman put it earlier this week.

But there are serious issues of this argument in addition. Western governments skirt across the basic proven fact that  Syria is a celebration to neither the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, nor the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, nor the so-called Rome Statue of the International Criminal Code (which also reinforces the taboo against chemical weapons) and can’t, therefore, be held answerable for obligations it hasn’t ever accepted.

True, Syria is a celebration to the so-called Geneva Protocol of 1925, which bans the usage of toxic gases in wars. But that document is often interpreted as having been designed with inter-state wars in mind, not with internal conflict of the type we’re witnessing in Syria today; that’s why the next international efforts to enrich the Geneva Protocol with other obligations have been undertaken, and most of these haven’t been accepted by Syria. a more robust case may be made – and is being made by the International Committee of the Red Cross – that the prohibition against chemical weapons has now become customary international law, namely that it’s so entrenched that it has acquired the status of a duty applying to any sovereign state, if it is party to a particular treaty about that topic or not. A fair stronger case could be made that the best way the Syrian regime handled its own citizens constitutes a grave violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which prohibit the indiscriminate killing of non-combatants, and apply specifically to civil wars, like Syria’s today.

But no matter if these kind of arguments are correct and rise up, they don’t amount to a justification for the united states, Britain and a handful of alternative, self-proclaimed members of the ‘international community’ to take it upon themselves to apply force so that you can uphold these principles. Neither is it very clear how the Syrian government may be held answerable for gassing its people simply because the united states and a handful of alternative allied government claim to have ‘irrefutable’ evidence to that effect, even before a UN team of inspectors at the ground have produced any report all alone investigation. Furthermore, establishing the truth that a sovereign state has violated international or bilateral obligation can’t be held to intend that other nations can take it upon themselves to enforce these obligations by using force, or launch ‘punitive’ expeditions.

Humanitarian Arguments and the Responsibility to Protect

A more imaginative argument is that the action against Syria is motivated by the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ idea which rose at the global agenda over the past 20 years, based on a manifest have to act in circumstances when a state is either unwilling or unable to give protection to its people. The horrors of Rwanda, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and Darfur, to call but a couple of: in these types of conflicts, earlier action by the international community can have certainly saved lives, and will have prevented some conflicts altogether.

R2P – because it is now generally known – was initially elaborated by a committee of experts in 2001, and subsequently endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2005. But, as is commonly the case in international law, R2P’s intellectual roots return a millennia, to the customary ‘just war’ concept. As refined by generations of jurists and practice, the ‘just war’ theory argued that, under certain conditions – inclusive of a grave danger to international security or to a set of folk, the exhaustion of all different kinds of conflict-management and a cheap prospect of success – an army intervention may well be considered ‘humanitarian’ and therefore permissible,  in the sense that it served an efficient moral purpose.   

However, quite excluding the indisputable fact that the legal validity of R2P is heavily contested by key countries including Russia and China in addition to scores of developing nations, this is difficult to determine why a ‘punishment’ operation of the type envisaged in Syria should help protect the folk of that country from the tender mercies in their rulers or, again, why it falls to simply a handful of states to enforce this rule without bothering to create a much wider international consensus, and against your complete evidence that the genuine international community – that represented in the course of the UN Security Council, most emphatically doesn’t see matters within the way they’re seen in London, Paris or Washington. Abusing the R2P concept, or transforming it into the catch-all justification for any wanton use of force which can’t be justified under some other international law criteria is a gross disservice not just to the UN and its agencies, but additionally to future humanitarian crises.[1]

And an identical applies to the increased usage during the last few days of the argument that a Syria operation might be justified so-called ‘Kosovo Precedent’, the choice in 1999 to visit war within the former Yugoslavia within the teeth of Russian opposition and despite the absence of an explicit UN Security Council mandate. For, quite aside from the undeniable fact that two wrongs are not making a right, the fundamental fact remains that, despite the fact that the Kosovo operation was justified at the grounds of averting what at the moment gave the impression of genocide, there’s little or no doubt that the Kosovo war itself violated the provisions of the UN Charter, and considerable doubt that an analogous conditions which prevailed in Yugoslavia in 1999 are applicable to Syria today apart, perhaps, from the disappointment of Western governments with the present situation.

None of this is often to indicate that the Western powers now contemplating action in Syria are without all arguments. a fair case – at a more profound level – could be made that the UN Security Council isn’t the absolute, ultimate arbiter of using force, in all cases: force was used before the UN was invented, international law existed centuries before even the League of countries was conceived, and the UN Charter itself hasn’t ever claimed to substitute for customary international law. True, the UN Security Council is the biggest institution authorising using force, and ignoring it – as some Western governments at the moment are proposing to do in Syria – is a damaging impulse which ought to be resisted under most circumstances. But folks that accuse the West of destroying the credibility of the UN Security Council will do well to indicate an accusing finger at Russia and China, the 2 countries that have blocked any action on Syria by way of their veto powers. The credibility of the UN Security Council is not just damaged when it’s by-passed; it’s also damaged when the organisation is paralysed by countries which includes China and Russia. So, if China and Russia value their veto power, then they should also learn how to use their vetoes sparingly. That could be a significant argument which will be recommend by Western governments a lot more frequently.

But, ultimately, that’s also a political argument for brand spanking new norms in international behaviour; it is not a legal argument for the action being contemplated in Syria. For actually that, although clever lawyers will always discover a wheeze, the Syria operation has little justification in international law.

Note 

1. For an extended discussions of the opportunities and dangers in using R2P to justify operations which can’t be otherwise justified see RUSI, Short War, Long Shadow: The Political and armed forces Legacies of the 2011 Libya Campaign.

Further Analysis: , , ,

Michael Stephens, Deputy Director, RUSI Qatar, outlines the most recent developments in Iran’s Nuclear Talks with the International Community and the prospects for fulfillment.

RUSI Analysis, 0 Aug 2013 By Raffaello Pantucci, Senior Research Fellow, Counter-Terrorism
British citizen Ibrahim al-Mazwagi killed earlier within the year

The ongoing intractable civil war in Syria has become a magnet for foreign fighters of each stripe. Unlike previous jihadist battlefields that experience drawn foreigners in, however, this has not to date produced a terrorist threat back within the West. This isn’t same regionally. Around the border in Jordan, a terrorist network with connections to the battlefield have been disrupted, while in Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey, bombs have gone off with return addresses in Syria. The question now preoccupying European policymakers specifically is whether or not the pipeline of European nationals going to fight at the battlefield in Syria may eventually transform right into a similar set of incidents in Europe.

The the first thing to realize is how we’ve seen terrorist threats emanate from battlefields ago. Historically speaking, jihadi battlefields have produced three sorts of terrorist threats (with an unknown number choosing to come return to dull lives): directed plots by individuals sent back with instruction; terrorist plots conducted by people who choose to perform attacks without direction; and networks of people that offer support and infrastructure for other terrorist plots.

Directed Plots

The archetypal example of here is Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shezhad Tanweer, the pair of young men on the core of the 7 July 2005 attack on London’s transport system. Khan notably was a daily to fighting and coaching abroad, and made no less than three known trips to enroll in with extremist groups with whom he conducted some variety of training, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Initially interested in the battlefield by mythology around Kashmir, he seems to have quickly moved into preferring the Afghan struggle and ultimately believing that he was going to fight and die in Afghanistan. Once there on what he thought could be his final trip in 2004, he was instead re-directed by Al-Qa’ida to go back to the united kingdom to launch his infamous terrorist attack.

The clear lesson in foreign fighter terms here was that Khan was drawn initially to the battlefield to fight there, and was then persuaded by groups there to launch an attack back home. The motive force of this seems to have largely been the fervour of the crowd at the ground, Al-Qa’ida, to strike the West. The advent of British passport holders trying to support the cause was a present to the gang that they were capable of transform right into a tool to conduct a successful operation. The 7 July  cell could have been the sole ones to have succeeded, but a variety of other plots has been detected that bear similar hallmarks.

Self-Started Plots

Security officials on all sides of the Atlantic have spoken of outrage in regards to the growth of lone wolf or small cell terror plots. Usually involving single individuals or tight-knit units of people who demonstrate no direction from either Al-Qa’ida or certainly one of its affiliates, expressions of this threat are available in recent incidents in Boston, Paris, Toulouse, and Woolwich.

In these kind of cases, a trace connection are located to a known terrorist organisation, though there’s little evidence of any direction within the collection of targets or other operational specifics. The foreign fighters phenomenon has some linkeage here: in both the Toulouse and Woolwich cases, as an example, there’s evidence that the individuals involved sought to make connections with radical groups abroad. Specifically, in Toulouse, Mohammed Merah went to Pakistan, trained with Al-Qa’ida linked groups and was then apparently sent back with some loose direction. However, his subsequent attack against off-duty French soldiers after which against Jewish school children seems to were carried outlargely under his own steam.

Almost five years before Merah committed his bloody acts, an identical dynamic played out within the UK when Bilal Abdulla and Kafeel Ahmed first left a couple of auto bombs in central London before launching an attempted suicide attack on Glasgow’s international airport. Ahmed died through the attempt in Scotland, but Bilal Abdulla was arrested and convicted, along with his case uncovering a link between him and Al-Qa’ida’s Iraqi affiliate, with whom it’s believed he had undertaken some training. Seemingly undirected by the gang, Abdulla seems to have taken it upon himself to punish the united kingdom for its involvement within the war that tore his country apart.

Networks

In many ways it’s the networks that foreign battlefields create which might be of the best longer-term concern. The risk will not be that folks who’re attracted to foreign battlefields may very well come again and launch anti-Western attacks, rather, they could instead provide support networks for those who were tasked to launch attacks or help radicalise others.

With experience and contacts from the battlefield, they present the opportunity of providing soft support for networks desiring to launch attacks in addition to becoming potential radicalisers who persuade others of the salience of the worldwide jihadi narrative, using their very own personal experience for instance. In most terrorist plots which were uncovered within the West, links to such radicalisers are located – either when it comes to loud public preachers such asAbu Hamza or more locally radicalising figures who don’t appear at the public radar but feature within the background of security investigations.

This last group is deeply intangible, but in lots of ways can manifest itself because the most deadly long-term menace, providing a natural incubator for global jihadist ideas inside the West. Those going abroad to fight can have no intention again and launch attacks, but through connections they may find themselves drawn into supporting others and invariably through transmission in their experience will act as radicalising agents. Groups wanting to launch attacks against the West live on abroad, and it’s miles perfectly possible that they’re going to use these networks and communities to eventually try and direct other attacks.

New Ungoverned Spaces Presents Long-Term Problem

At this point the flow  of Europeans going to Syria to fight has not produced any threats back home, though there were plenty of related arrests around the continent. Within the UK a bunch is facing trial later within the year in connection to the abduction of a couple of European journalists in July 2012. A cell in Belgium appears to was overheard talking about attacking the Palais de Justice in Brussels, however it is unclear that this had moved anything beyond the discussion phase.

Other networks are available across Europe, and as security agencies do something about them, it’s likely that other echoes could be heard. The larger problem, however, is the placement in Syria where an inability to topple the regime and an incoherent opposition signifies that we’re slowly seeing a Balkanisation of the rustic with radical groups  taking hold of pieces of territory and are creating parallel governance structures. This presents the risk of latest safe havens allowing groups to coach and plot. It is all of the more menacing when one considers the heavy presence of the Islamic State of Iraq and as-Sham (ISIS, the most recent incarnation of Al-Qa’ida’s Iraqi affiliate) at the field, in addition to other Salafi-jihadi groups. Atop this, there are the reports of growing numbers of foreigners from around the Muslim world a number of whom are connected to other Al-Qa’ida affiliates being interested in Syria. Networks linking these spaces and groups to the West are of clear concern and rightly alarm security services.

Syria’s slow slide into chaos and civil war is tearing on the fabric of the Muslim world. The already tense Sunni-Shia divide now has a battlefield by which to brutally play itself out and has already provided overspill into neighbouring countries. The West remains divided over what to do, and age-old rivalries are playing themselves out within the UN Security Council. European foreign fighters provide a right away link between Europe and a battlefield this is developing in such a lot of different directions that it’s difficult to grasp what the repercussions within the longer-term would be.  What does seem clear though is that the community of foreign fighters is probably going to prolong the incubation of maximum and violent Islamist ideas in Europe for the foreseeable future.

RUSI is currently undertaking a research project the phenomenon of foreign fighters in Europe and the way this could express itself as a terrorist threat back home.

Further Analysis: , , , , ,

RUSI Journal, Feb 2014, Vol. 159, No. 1 By Doug Stokes and Paul Newton

Strategy is normally about choices and people made within the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review could have significant implications for the way forward for UK defence and wider national security. America has already made profound choices on this regard: it’s rebalancing to East Asia. The consequences for the united kingdom, both as a US partner and a serious European military power, include the opportunity of deeper engagement with the center East and North Africa. Doug Stokes and Paul Newton examine the UK’s nascent ‘east of Suez’ initiative, its key interests in addition to the geopolitical drivers, dangers and opportunities involved. Because the US seeks greater burden-sharing from its European allies, should the united kingdom bridge the Gulf?

Continue reading

Posted in Security Systems

Iran and the Geneva Agreement: A Footnote to History or a Turning Point?

Posted on July 9, 2013 at 11:26 am