Did Ed Miliband Save The World?

This morning I happened to hear a Southern drawl coming out of the TV in my bedroom when I was washing up in the bathroom. The drawl was making a lot of good sense on Syria, which surprised me. It walked over to see who it was: Lloyd Doggett, a progressive from the Austin area. Figures! He talked about how his constituents are adamantly opposed to an attack on Syria, particularly if it's just the U.S. alone holding Assad accountable. Thank you, Ed Miliband!

The UK's imperialist establishment has the knives out for Miliband, the leader of Britain's Labor Party-- even more than usual. Needless to say, Cameron and his Conservative Party have somehow blamed Miliband for the vote in Parliament against Cameron's proposal to bomb Syria. Unmentioned is that without Cameron's own Conservative backbenchers voting NO, it wouldn't have mattered what Miliband said-- the war would be rolling ahead and it is unlikely Obama-- and the U.S. imperialist establishment-- would have even decided to let Congress have a vote. Cameron's junior partner, the excruciatingly pathetic Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, has jumped on the "It's Miliband's fault" bandwagon. And forget the national polling, of course.

About 60% of those questioned said that, given the level of evidence about the use of chemical weapons by the Bashar al-Assad regime, they were against British troops intervening, while 24% said they were in favour. Among Conservative supporters 34% were in favour and 50% against, while 24% of Labour backers were in favour and 59% against.

The Liberal Democrats are the most evenly split of the three main parties, with 50% in favour and 36% against. More men (27%) than women (22%) back intervention.

A BBC poll released yesterday found that 71% of Britons agreed with Parliament's decision to reject Cameron's call for war and two-thirds of them don't care if that damages U.S.-U.K. relations. Only 20% of those polled felt Parliament had made the wrong decision. That makes it pretty hard for Cameron to bring it up for another vote, despite the Ruling Class freak out in London.

I haven't been a big Miliband fan. He's seemed too tepid and vacillating to me, even if he would be an improvement over Cameron or the ridiculous Clegg. But he sure made the big difference when it really mattered. I am certain, we-- and not just Britain-- would be engaged in a war right now if not for Ed Miliband's courageous stand. I wish he would have asked Cameron if he would have advocated unleashing missiles on Russian or China if one of those powers (who can fight back) had used chemical weapons on their own people. I hope someone asks Obama.

Speaking at a nursery in Hammersmith, west London, Clegg made clear his personal disappointment and strongly criticised Labour's "political point-scoring" for scuppering any prospect of British involvement in strikes against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

There are growing calls for the coalition to consider holding a second vote on military action, despite the humiliating defeat for David Cameron on Thursday. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, chairman of the Commons intelligence and security committee and a former foreign secretary, led the push for a second vote, as the US said it had evidence that sarin gas was used.

However, Clegg slapped down this idea, saying parliament was "very clear" it did not want military action. "I cannot foresee any circumstances in which we would go back to parliament again on the same question and the same issue," he said. "We can't go back asking the same question over and over. So no, I can't foresee such circumstances."

Despite saying the coalition would respect parliament's wishes, the Liberal Democrat leader called into question Miliband's motives for rejecting coalition plan. He said no one could begrudge Labour "wrestling" with the issue but the party had not behaved in a way befitting the gravity of the situation.

"My own view is that the Labour party seemed to take this as an opportunity for party political point-scoring," he said.

...On Sunday, William Hague and George Osborne said parliament had spoken and Britain would offer only diplomatic support to its allies.

In his first big interview since the government's defeat in the Commons, Hague said he could only envisage a change in UK policy if Labour became "less partisan". His remarks were echoed by the chancellor, who told BBC1's Andrew Marr Show that Miliband looked less like a future prime minister after helping to defeat the government.

I disagree-- and I think the vast majority of Britons do as well, though probably not Tony Blair who still, out of tradition I assume, calls himself a member of the Labour Party. I'd say Peter Hain, writing in The Guardian got it right when he urged Cameron to stop spinning his humiliating defeat by questioning Miliband's motives.

David Cameron has a streak of petty, bullying arrogance which often reveals itself at prime minister's questions-- very un-prime ministerial. Now his henchmen have been trying to spin his humiliating defeat by parliament over military intervention in Syria into an unedifying character assassination of Ed Miliband. It wasn't Miliband who attempted to grandstand by bouncing parliament prematurely into attacking Syria. The Labour leader hasn't been responsible for perhaps the most monumentally misjudged British foreign policy in recent times. Cameron began two years ago demanding regime change-- which didn't work. Then he resourced the rebel forces-- which failed too. Then he tried to send arms to the rebels-- until cross-party opposition in parliament blocked that: perhaps he forgot the series of protests by MPs culminating in the vote opposing his policy by 114 to one on 11 July on a backbench motion moved by Tories?

...[B]ackbench and frontbench Labour MPs made it clear they were unwilling to go along with the PM. As did many Tories too-- though No 10 ignored them, in a way the Labour leader did not with his party. But the real problem is that Cameron gave absolutely no sense of where all this was going to lead. What would happen after a military strike-- "surgical" or not? What about collateral civilian casualties, retaliatory attacks, escalatory consequences? Although they do indeed cross a red line in warfare, chemical weapons actually account for just 1% of all the terrible casualties in Syria. What would parliament be asked to do next?

...The fundamental flaw in the position of the government, the US and its allies is to see Syria as a battle between a barbaric dictator and a repressed people. It's a civil war: a quagmire involving Sunni versus Shia, Saudi Arabia versus Iran, the US versus Russia, with al-Qaida fighters increasingly prominent among the rebel forces. Bashar al-Assad has the backing of 40% of the population who may fear his ruthless dictatorship, but fear much more becoming victims of genocide or Sunni extremism. Surely if western military strikes toppled Assad without a settlement in place, there could be even greater chaos and carnage in a powder keg of a region?

There can be no military victory by either side. The alternative is to drop a failed British policy and promote a negotiated settlement between Assad and his enemies. However impossible that looks today, it's the only way to solve this bloody and increasingly dangerous war.

I tried embedding this video but... well who knows how or why YouTube-- or whomever-- decides what can and can't be seen in which countries and at what times? But this one below can still be seen: