05/12/2015 Dateline London

Hello and welcome to Dateline London, Britain Bonds Islamic State

targets in Syria, what difference would it make militarily and in

terms of security? Outguess today Art Ian Birrell of the Mail on

Sunday, Nesrine Malik is a Sudanese writer and broadcaster, Janet Daley

who is a writer and Jeffrey Kaufman. The British Parliament's decision to

overwhelming endorse the bombing of Islamic State or Daesh in Syria,

comes as the German parliament comes to agree to help non-lethal

assistance, and America, is considering whether the mass

shooting in America is linked to Islamic terrorism. Does British

involvement make any difference militarily or diplomatically? First

of all, Janet, is it a big deal? It is a big deal, militarily, there was

a complete logical breakdown in the fact that we were bombing in Iraq

but not in Syria, even though, the border between Iraq and Syria does

not exist any longer, and it would have been shameful, given that this

is an unprecedented situation, of course it is unpredictable as

everybody says. Of course it is chaotic as everybody says, of course

it is a shambles but this is an unprecedented situation, this is a

death cult that is threatening not just innocent life as we have seen

repeatedly in Europe. But, the liberal democratic values, the human

values that the whole of our supposed Western alliance is

supposed to stand for and even in the East. There is no more, possible

plausible moral argument for standing on the sideline in this

fight. This is a malignant form of nihilistic love of death, this isn't

even a negotiable Army given any more. This is not a recognisable

war, that is true because it has broken all of the rules of war. What

is it that they are to minding that we could concede? Of course the

reaction will be incoherent and shambolic, recalls this is an

incoherent phenomenon. But it would still be morally unacceptable to

stand on the sidelines, particularly when close allies of ours have just

been under attack. Nesrine? We have been on the sidelines for a very

long time, the timing is arbitrary and reflects a need to be see to be

doing something, rather than doing something because you think it will

be productive. I think that is the fundamental discomfort that I have,

with the decision to proceed with bombing because I feel that, it kind

of harks back to the response to 9-11 which as people say, we don't

actually, we can't actually pinpoint where all of this terrorism is

coming from but we can be seen to be doing something about it. If it

means that we have to bomb certain targets indiscriminately or mean

that they are civilian casualties, that is less important than what it

says about Britain's standing in the world and I find that deeply morally

objectionable, that people's rhetoric, particularly Hilary

Benn's message of what we are sending. It doesn't really matter if

it cost innocent lives, that is not the issue. This is not an issue of

the perception of yourself. This is not narcissism. It is parochial

narcissism. This is the opposite parochial, this is an international

response to an international threat of unprecedented proportions. This

is beyond anything that we understood in the Cold War, it is

not an argument about how men should live, it is not a post in light and

disagreement about critical philosophies, this is just nihilism

and murderous merciless cult. I don't think anybody is going to sit

around and defend Isis, I lost somebody who I knew in Paris. It is

about how we defeat them and the best way to do so. The reality is

that British bombing is going to do very little difference, we sent for

bombs to bomb an airfield, when America sent 4000 strike missions.

There are no forces on the ground, there aren't any good guys, we don't

know who we are working with. All we will do is prop up a sad, we were

being told that he was a danger to us. Assad is the root cause of all

problems. In that country. We should not get away from that. What we

should do, we are aiding Assad, who was our turn me two years ago, and

Putin who I was told was the biggest threat to us in Europe, and I

believe it. And we're not doing anything to come the problem of

Islamic Jihad is on, that is not just in Syria and Iraq, we have seen

it in Mali and Somalia and nine Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The idea

that if you British bombs are going to solve this problem. I agree

fundamentally with what you are saying, this is a death cult and we

cannot ignore it, but I would question whether if you British jets

are going to make a difference and we know that they are not. In fact,

the paradox that we see right now in the Western world, is that we want

to be involved but we don't actually want to have two touch anything, so

aerial bombing is a sanitised way, holding dating that ultimately we

know is not going to be effective. So you want ground forces? So the

reality is it will likely take boots on the ground to defeat these evil

people. Iraq gave birth to Isis, let us not forget that. This is toppling

a regime. Neutralising these guys is not going to be done... But that

will not be neutralising it, pouring oil on the fire. That is true, we

have a problem which is this generation of young Sunni is is

alienating in Iraq and Syria, they had Shi'ite governments, there is no

sense of part of a political discourse and there has to be a way

to bring them into the discussion. These guys are not going to enter

political discussion. But that is the long-term. I want to make a

point about your argument about Assad. I agree with you with Assad

and I was in favour of the original vote for bombing, but if Britain

pulls out, if it makes it clear that it is, it has no intention of

entering this fray, we will not bolster... One of the reasons that

Obama decided not to bomb Assad is because of the vote in the British

Parliament, it increased his tendency to eye to nation is. If

if you allow Putin to run the show and get Europe and America out of

the game, Assad will be there permanently as a client state, and

assuming there is a post Isis world and in the Middle East it will be

run by the Russians, with people like Assad. This is a red herring,

nobody in the West who has voted for bombing Syria, cares about either of

these disenfranchised people joining Isis or cares about Assad's

longevity. The only thing that made people scrambled to action was

terrorist attacks in Europe, in Paris, and now in the United States.

I think, that is fundamentally, the Matic inconsistent. This is why I

find the rhetoric around the death cult aspect of it really

disingenuous, nobody cared about the Muslims that were being killed,

beheaded, all of the Muslim concubines being raped. Nobody cared

about that until it became a convenient vehicle, for posturing in

the British Parliament. I think you are confusing general public opinion

with political opinion, I happen to know that there are an awful lot of

MPs who had particular passion and concerns about that region. Why

didn't they vote for bombing one year ago? Some of them did. Why did

they not pass it? Because Ed Miliband pulls the plug, Cameron

thought he had a deal with Ed Miliband's labour to vote in favour

of the bombing and he pulls the carpet. Can we bring some of these

threads together, is everybody around the table agreed about the

end is, that Isis somehow must be defeated? Do you agree? Absolutely.

It has two B but Isis is just one part of a global confrontation. The

idea that it is perpetuated by people arguing for if you British

bombs to drop in Syria is that Isis is defeated and the problem is

solved. It isn't, this is about local politics, religious politics,

sectarianism, corruption, repression. Intervention can make it

worse, look at what has happened in Mali and Iraq and even in Syria.

Look at Libya, intervention is not the solution stop blue just one

other thought, is everybody also agreed, none of you have made the

argument that bombing makes Britain more of a target, does

everybody agree that Britain is already a target? Yes yes yes.

Surely you are not suggesting that nothing should be done? Something

has to be done. The problem is that now it is so out of control that

something surgical is required, and bombing is the first step. But it

comes with no guaranteed outcome. I completely agree with you, if you

wipe out Isis, even if you took troops in, if you put 20,000 troops

in tomorrow and you neutralised their command centres and killed

their leaders, something else will crop up in that void. Is do

something that has been proven in the recent past... Because we did

not stay, we did not finish the job. Debt has not forget, that Isis, the

four members of the military Council of Isis were former Baathists. It is

about Sunni-sheer sectarianism. America is so averse to being

colonial, that it would not stay and finish the job, having beheaded the

regime, it wouldn't stay on and do what needed to be done. It will take

a long, long time to develop stability in this region, and

somebody is going to have two stick it, it is not a question of military

intervention. This time it is going to get worse? So what, so we should

do nothing? I think there is a difference between Iraq and Syria.

There is a big difference because in Iraq, varies the Kurdish group, who

are forces that we should be backing and they are forces that will bring

a degree of sanity to the situation there. Not in the view of Turkey I

have two says. In Syria there is nobody like that, what can be done,

we can have logic in our politics where we stop backing the people who

are funding terrorism like Saudi Arabia. We can have logic in our

foreign policy where we stopped backing repressive regime so that we

have logic in the domestic policy that we stop permitting corruption.

The cause of what happened in Syria was partly the grotesque corruption

of the Syria regime who all had big links to London. Let us take the

plank out of our own high. Yes I agree, framing the question, if

you're not going to do this do you want to do nothing is problematic.

It is difficult to answer without sounding like a mumbling delivered

liberal, saying maybe we shouldn't do this. Actually, it is a perfectly

legitimate thing to do nothing in the immediate term. If there is

nothing precise and affected to do. I completely agree with Ian, these

are the legacies of entrenched long-term political decisions that

had been made by successive governments in the West and in the

Arab world, and it is not sexy and it doesn't wind you any plaudits, to

stand up in Parliament and sailor does not bombing Syria but that does

have a coherent plan. If you are saying, what can we do other than

bomb? The answer is that there are several things that can be done that

require commitment, cross-party, cross government over the years in

gauge and with the Arab world in a way, that means that dictators are

propped up, that Muslim governments like Saudi Arabia and other similar

ones are not allowed to fund gratuitously and arbitrarily Muslim

opposition in other countries. It is a failure of a coherent in gauge

went in the region. Having said that, it doesn't mean it is a

British or a western problem but it does mean if you are asking me what

else can be done, there are other things that can be done but they are

not things that you can rouse people up about. It is a British and

Western problem if protecting ourselves against the consequences

of this gratuitous and anarchic violence is not only going to

destroy life and destroy values. We are effectively going to have two...

I have mused for you, terrorism existed before Isis and will exists

afterwards. There were more terrorist in Europe than there had

been since 9/11. Hold on. Hold on. Hold our next mission at I said it

is not just a threat to life which is on a pretty small-scale. It is

the threat to the values of freedom and liberty, and the kind of

security measures that are going to be needed to protect, because all

governments have a moral sponsor ability to protect the security of

their citizens especially in West and Chris Eves. The kind security

measures that are going to have two be brought in are going to undermine

the freedom and liberal democracy that we accept as part of our

liberal culture. Bombing because you don't want to telephone tapped? --

your telephone tapped. Compare to what we had in the 1970s,

Baader-Meinhof, the IRA, every single one of them wanted something

on this planet that you could negotiate with. Either a change of a

governmental system or a bit of land. Is there anything that can be

negotiated with the people of Isis? We need to go back one step because

it is not about Isis beating demands, it is about why does Isis

exist in the first place? You do realise that there are immediate

demands, which is democracy, not propping up quite as a military

dictatorships, but if you listen to what might she said, we need to go

back one step and asked why Isis exists and why ceramic terrorism has

existed in the Islamic world since the 60s and 70s. There is a whole

political and historical context, and if you take a very simple not

particularly intellectual look at the Arab world in the last 50 years,

you will see that from Omar unto the Maghreb, the entire region has been

led by undemocratic, princelings. You cannot expect that to happen

backed by Western governments who have their own interests taken care

of, you cannot expect that to happen for 50 or 60 years, and not have

disenfranchised people stop and I think we agree but the problem with

your argument, and you bring the argument into reality. If you look

at Sadam and the consequences ten or 15 years later, is that we can't

simply go in and say we are going to make things better. There is no

quick or even long-term fix. That is the problem. You can't go in and do

regime change, George Bush effectively taught us that and

Tony Blair thank you. But you could also cannot sit back, you cannot

respond to Bataclan by doing nothing. Saying it is a long-term

study and we should report with an international commission. But there

are things that you can do on the ground, Yiu Kam Shing Iraq some of

the tribal groups, -- you can separate some of the tribal groups.

Some of them support Isis for short-term political reasons, you

can get Isis away from oil, a lot of people, are fleeing Isis. It may

well collapse under its own misery. The West always thinks that the

solution is to go in and stir things up and make matters worse. There is

politics and diplomacy that can be done and that does go back to what

you are talking about with the IRA, ultimately there was a political

solution. Like it or not, it is not about giving ground to the fanatics,

it is about solving some of the bitter good problems that attracted

millions of people to their side no matter how much people like them. --

some of the political problems. But you are implying that there is a

rational argument that we can have, this is absurd, this is way beyond

that. You are in Paris and Wonderland, people say, you love

life, we love death. You also criticised the West for

supporting these tinpot dictators, which you are right for but then you

criticised them for displacing them. Which? I am criticising the view

that bombing Isis is going to solve anything, I did not say anything,

about regime change. You did. The problem is, I agree with you, that

their generational issues that have led to this and the propping up, of

the 20th century dictators in this region, it has led to this anger and

frustration. And 21st-century too. Part of what we are seeing is the

direct result of the toppling of Saddam Hussein, when Paul Bremer

issued his decree number one getting rid of the Baathist party and agree

number two, disbanding the Iraqi army.

He sowed the seeds. All of those disenfranchised Sunni 's in Iraq,

felt that they had no way to actually press the case. That was

the case of removing a tyrant, so you are

wrong if you remove a tyrant and you are wrong if you keep a tyrant. I

think one thing where you are right is that we will be talking about

this for a long time, there is no quick fix. Isn't this a problem,

that it is being sold to the problem that this is a quick fix, that we

will white out Isis and it will all be fixed. If you tell Francois

Hollande that he needs not to do anything, he has two. It is about

not pouring oil on the fire. Bombing the oilfields is very specific and

meaningful. Our discussion unfortunately cannot go on for an

entire generation, we have got five more minutes. What impact is is

having on British domestic politics if any? We are seeing, the Labour

Party, some MPs saying that they are being hectored by this, there is

some nasty politics going on. The leadership of the Labour Party is

saying there is no place for this. For David Cameron it is very

important, I think the authority of the Prime Minister was weakened in

2013, not backing the Prime Minister and making him look foolish on the

world stage. So it has been very important for the authority of the

British Prime Minister, also only seven Tory MPs did not back him, and

it has reasserted his hold on his new look and image, Conservative

Party. For the Tories it has been very good. For labour it has been

disastrous because it has brought to a head, the craziness of the

division, where you have got a leader who is backed by the new

membership, quite strongly and politicians in parliament who really

don't like him and don't like what he's doing. And wanting to be more

in tune with public. It is a huge fissure and it has been brought into

the public eye and it needs to be reconciled, whether to be throwing

out the leader or the MPs. Edition artist is, it is not always about us

but it is sometimes about us? What if it is a vote in the British

Parliament, it is about you, I can't take that away from you. But it is

interesting to see, self-involved, what does it say about us. But very

little about what does this actually mean, hearing from Syrians and

Middle Eastern experts, even the media discourse about it. You have

question Time panels, you have moral maze discussions on BBC Four where

you don't hear from anyone from the region, it is about what should we

BBC to be doing and what does it say about us and what does it say about

the liberal left. I have seen Syrians being interviewed and

Iraqis. But in terms of what has been bubbling up in the main screen

discussion, what people had been used for evidence. What politicians

have viewed as evidence, has not been native and indigenous. We heard

a lot from amateur lobby in the lead up to the Iraq war and it was not

entirely helpful, to the administration. That does not mean

that we throw out the baby with the bath water. The constituents, that

has to be the case, it is the only thing over which we have any

accountability. This is a very important point, sorry to cut you

off. Because of short-term democratic cycles, I'm not saying

that we should have dictatorships, these decisions are made, with

short-term deadlines. Can I finish. When democratic politics is about

being accountable to the population, and the relationship and the

population, I am sorry, you don't seem to understand the principle,

democracy is about explaining to the nation and the nation responding to

your explanation of why you are doing what you are doing. There is

nothing wrong with being assessed with that, that is the system. We

have a minute left. My own country, Canada, the new Prime Minister is

pulling the teams from the bombing campaign. That is what he ran on,

but he says since Paris, Bataclan, he will be increasing the training

forces. But different currents in different countries. I think what is

happening here is that Cameron is asserting himself on the foreign

stage and saying we are a player. On that note of agreement, do we agree

with that? That is it for Dateline London, you can comment on the

programme on Twitter, we are back next week at the same time, thanks

for watching and goodbye.