The ever thickening Red Line

RED LINES have a historical pedigree among politicians, and they should be used cautiously. For instance, the red line was used by Neville Chamberlain who was reported to have told Adolph Hitler to steer clear of blitzkrieging Poland. This was Chamberlain’s red line, and when it was crossed, the Second World War began.

            Today, Barack Obama now faces his own ‘red line’ being crossed by Syria. There is, almost on a daily basis, evidence that sarin gas has been used in Syria. The use of such a chemical by Assad would be a game changer, according to president Obama on his recent visit to Israel: implying military action in some form.

            In the Western democracies, the public are generally given to expect military action when a politician draws a red line. If they fail to do so, the architect of such a challenge can expect little sympathy from his or her own people; and utter contempt from the targeted enemy.

            

            So a great deal of backtracking has been taking place. There is no doubt that Syria has chemical weapons by the lorry load. The question is, did one of those lorries fall into the hands of the Syrian opposition made up of  anti-Western jihadists? If so, did they use them in order to hold president Obama to his word, knowing that any American intervention against Assad would benefit the jihadists.

THE WEST SHOULD steer clear of any military involvement in Syria unless, and only unless, a threat to the state of Israel comes about through the fluidity of events. Israel is as concerned about Syrian chemical weapons as they are about Iranian nuclear ones: and are fearful that Syria’s chemical weapons do not fall into the hands of the Syrian opposition, whose fanatics have little use for diplomacy.

            These chemical weapons will indeed fall into the hands of the Syrian opposition if they, as the Western political leaders wish to see, the successful overthrow of the Assad regime. The West has no procedure for allowing the tons of chemical weapons falling into opposition hands once Assad has been overthrown.

            

            Assad’s overthrow would be welcome to the West, but it is not an end-all. It merely opens up another chapter. A chapter more dangerous than that which preceded it for the state of Israel. The Arab Spring has unleashed anti-democratic forces: elected, may be, but intolerant of both Christianity and Judaism. In Egypt the Coptic Christians have been attacked by Islamists of the Islam Brotherhood, under the charge of Egypt’s president Morsi who refuses to intervene according to latest reports.

THIS WHOLE Arab Spring that was once celebrated by our political leaders as an advance toward democracy; has turned out to be no such thing. The ‘liberated’ Arab world has fallen fowl of Islamism, as we in the West have chosen to call it. But the Arab Spring has always been about Islamic jihadism. 

 The despots that reigned, for a period, supreme over Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and now Syria, have all now left their occupancies to Muslim extremism. We should have left well alone. Instead, in our Western naivety, we believed that such nations could become part f the democratic fraternity.

There is one aspect to the events in Syria that should cause us in the UK great concern. Many young British jihadists have gone out to Syria and will presumably return home and go back and  melt away into our Muslim communities. They will have many well honed skills used by terrorists, and, come the hour make first class commissars.

I wonder if there are others, who, like myself, are fearful for the country’s future… and I do not mean from Europe. The Muslim world is in turmoil, and it blames everything that befalls it on West. The West in return behave like paper tigers, who will growl endlessly but are afraid to bite. There comes a time when the growl no longer scares, if it ever did, Islamic terrorists. Instead they smell the fear of Western politicians, and this only whets their appetite.