With the imminent safety of the British Sunday Times
photographer Paul Conroy and the FCO’s necessitated use of the Syrian
opposition and Free Syria Army fighters to insure his safe return, it is time
to consider the government’s options regarding peace and stability in the
Middle East.
It is becoming increasingly more likely that we will see
Western troop’s yomping through the desert in the next 18 to36 months. But
there appears to be two very different, some would say juxtaposed reasons for
such a massive reversal of the government’s policy, ether way we can only fight
one war – As fighting both would completely destabilise the middle east.
So firstly we have the Syrian question, how long can the
western world ignore the massacres of innocent civilians authorised and
implemented by a dictator who has no wish to stop, negotiate or compromise. Mr
Conroy’s return will no doubt be a full and thorough test of the morality involved
in none-intervention, it will be followed by a deep and explicit retelling of
the horrors he has faced whilst in Syria and the western world will no doubt recoil
at the telling of his experiences. As his first hand reports lead the news
agenda in the coming weeks each and every one of us will be forced to stop and
make moral account.
Syria is an issue of morality and issue of hart rather than
mind, we as the British public will in all likelihood no longer stand for Mr al-Assad’s purge. But will the morality of the British public be enough to take
the west to war?
This is the real question, the west will go to war but Syria as the moral conflict can not be the conflict of our generation, instead look further to the east. As long as Iran and Mr Ahmadinejad continue their posturing and menacing we must put the safety and security of our citizenry before the safety and security of the Syrian people.
The closure of the strait of Hormuz would cut the west’s oil
supply and in doing so cause an enormous recession in an already unstable and
unhealthy west. The threat to the oil supply cuts deep as it would limit the
movement of goods and food and drive costs to unmanageable levels - in short it
would cause another great depression.
So the question becomes more complicated it becomes a
question of keep our troops to defend our oil supply and protect our interests
or deploy all the assets we can to Syria because it is the immediate and
tangible moral obligation?
