George Carey has got the refugee crisis completely wrong
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Version 0 of 1. When George Carey was archbishop of Canterbury, no one took much notice of anything he said. Since becoming a newspaper columnist (sorry, “one of Britain’s most senior religious leaders”) for the News of the World and a supplier of opinion pieces for the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Telegraph, he has got better at being noticed. All he needs now is anything sensible to say. He had a go in the Sunday Telegraph with a piece on the refugee crisis that was vintage Carey: confident, clumsy and completely wrong. The most eye-catching part was his recommendation that we solve the crisis by “renewed military and diplomatic efforts to crush the twin menaces of Islamic State and al-Qaida once and for all”. Well, that will be easy. Why didn’t anyone else think of it before? Lord Carey continues in his bluff saloon-bar manner: “Make no mistake: this may mean air strikes and other British military assistance to create secure and safe enclaves in Syria.” Related: Syrian refugee crisis: why has it become so bad? The immediate and entirely literal question for anyone who proposes intervening in Syria is: “You and whose army?” The experience of the US bombing campaign against Isis shows that it is completely useless unless conducted in close cooperation with an army on the ground. Today’s New York Times carries a story about the almost incredibly farcical results of the American efforts to create such an army – after the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars, 54 soldiers were sent into an area of Syria controlled by an al-Qaida affiliate. Half of them promptly went off to visit their families; almost all the others were killed the next day when they came in contact with the enemy. So whose army does Carey propose we cooperate with? You can line up with Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin and Hezbollah; or you can join up with Isis, the Turks and the Saudis. There is no third force except the Kurds, and all they want is a country of their own (which the Turks are determined to deny them). But Carey wants us to help the Christians, which presumably means intervening on the side of the Assad regime. This is in itself a good thing. It is not many years since the received wisdom was that the Christian refugees in Iraq should not be encouraged to leave, because that would mean the extinction of some of the oldest continually surviving Christian communities in the world. That moment seems to have passed. There is nowhere for them to return to now; they need and deserve our help. Carey wants us to help the Christians, which presumably means intervening on the side of the Assad regime But it is difficult to think of a more damaging way to propose this than Carey came up with: “Some will not like me saying this, but in recent years there has been too much Muslim mass immigration to Europe. This has resulted in ghettos of Muslim communities living parallel lives to mainstream society, following their own customs and even their own laws.” Does he really suppose that this will make Britain more welcoming, and more at ease, with dark-skinned Arabic-speaking foreigners, of any religion? This is a country where Sikh temples are vandalised with anti-Muslim sentiments. “We are,” Carey writes, “a Christian nation with an established church, so Syrian Christians will find no challenge to integration.” This is a remark of such astonishingly pompous fatuity that it’s easy to believe the poor man is still archbishop of Canterbury – as he clearly does himself. How fortunate for the church, and indeed for English Christianity, that he is wrong, and that he has at last sunk to his proper level in society, as a man who has opinions for money in a newspaper. |