Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping at BRICS summit, 2015. Wikicommons/ Пресс-служба Президента России. Some rights reserved.The British parliament is debating whether to start bombing Syria or not, and the Labour party is openly split. Its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is opposing air-strikes whereas his parliamentary party and the majority of his shadow cabinet are not. Corbyn is resorting to the rank and file and wider left-liberal forces in Britain to amass support, yet the British establishment is overwhelmingly in favour of Britain's participation in the bombing campaign against Syria. The pretext? The extermination of ISIS and of the jihadists in Syria and standing on the side of France and other western countries of the NATO-land after the Paris attacks. This Cameron-led argument that some Labour MPs too have embraced is ‘ foolish and must be stopped’, as Simon Jenkins wrote in The Guardian (27 November 2015).
Bombing Syria cannot exterminate terrorism abroad: it will only proliferate terrorism at home. When the British cabinet under Edward Heath in October 1973 was contemplating the involvement of Britain in support of Israel against the combined Arab attack, most cabinet members opposed intervention against the Arabs because it would have imported Islamic terrorism to London. Nowadays this rationale seems to be completely absent from the minds and acts of the British elites. The last twenty years are clear evidence that the more the west is getting involved in the Middle East, the more ghastly acts of terrorism become prominent in western capitals. Those familiar with European and Middle Eastern historical evidence and those who have delved into archives will be in a position to recognise the validity of this argument.
And the vicious cycle continues. Yet these are just agential epiphenomena of a profound structural shift in loyalties and geopolitical alliances in the Middle East and beyond. Take the downing of the Russian plane by Turkish fighter jets over Syria-Turkey borderlands. All the evidence we possess points to the fact that this was a premeditated act having the full approval of the US and NATO and not just a decision taken on the spot as the Russian plane crossed the Turkish airspace for 17 seconds. In other words, it was a joint political decision contemplated at the higher echelons of western power, to which specific Turkish interests had been accommodated - among others, the preservation of the AK party in power, US guarantees against the political aspirations of the Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq and other deals, including regional networks of oil and gas transportation routes.
