Free Syrian Army's loss may have been diplomacy's gain – Malcolm Rifkind

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/30/free-syrian-army-loss-diplomacy-gain-malcolm-rifkind

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MPs' refusal to accept the principle of military action against President Bashar al-Assad in the summer may have had the surprise benign effect of restoring the good name of diplomacy in the Middle East, according to Sir Malcolm Rifkind.

Rifkind, the chair of the intelligence and security committee and a former Conservative foreign secretary, had been a strong supporter of military action to punish Assad, but described the Commons vote to the Guardian as "a chapter of accidents which for once had a happy outcome, and which could have equally had a very unhappy outcome".

Syria, he says, remains "a hellhole", but he argues the chain of events set off by the decision not to endorse war has also had benign effects in terms of controlling Assad's chemical weapons, and aiding the interim deal on Iran's nuclear weapons.

He says: "It is rather like Gorbachev ending the cold war without a shot being fired. The Berlin Wall came down when three months earlier nobody expected it. Not just bad things that come from nowhere. Suddenly diplomacy has got a good name."

He said: "Diplomacy has not had a very good reputation in recent times in the Middle East as a way of resolving problems. In the last three or four months we have had, in a way no one predicted, not one, but two diplomatic breakthroughs: the Syrian chemical weapons agreement and the interim deal in Iran.

"Don't underestimate the implications of that. Suddenly diplomacy has got a good name. The international community, in quite different ways, have got their act together and in two of the most intractable problems in the Middle East."

Rifkind says that in the immediate wake of David Cameron's defeat, he was very worried. "The vote left a very large vacuum where British foreign policy had once been. The vote had really been a series of negatives of what people didn't want and we were left with an inchoate outcome." His immediate concern was the impression would develop that Britain "had lost interest in the world".

But Rifkind senses that Barack Obama may have seen the surprise vote in the UK parliament as an opportunity. "I don't think anyone remotely believed that the consequence of the British decision was that Obama would say he had to go to Congress to seek endorsement for a strike. If you were being logical it was the exact opposite of what he should have thought. What we demonstrated is that if you go to parliament you may not get the answer you want. That opens up the question: what answer did Obama want?

"Part of Obama's strategy has always been to try to gently disengage the US from military operations – not from diplomacy, not from being in the Middle East but from the assumption that the only solution to every problem is for the Americans to use their military capability .

"So I think he saw the vote in the Commons not as a problem but an opportunity. Indeed he might have thought it was a no-lose opportunity. Either Congress would support the administration, in which case fine. But if Congress didn't support then he didn't need to take military action which he didn't want to take anyway."

Rifkind says he has been deeply disappointed by Obama's foreign policy. "It is not so much indecision. It is worse. He takes strong positions and doesn't then hold to [them].

"That in turn gave Vladimir Putin and the Russians a chance to grasp the initiative by promising to dismantle Assad's chemical weapons. It was an extraordinary demonstration of Russian relevance to Syria in particular and through Syria to the Middle East as a whole. It was a huge coup for Putin. We get a situation where out of the blue Russia says 'We think the proper course is for Syria to give up its chemical weapons'. Within literally hours, Damascus says 'Oh yes, we will quite happily go along with this, where do we sign?'"

But Rifkind argues: "We all were desperately worried that Syrian chemical weapons were not only ghastly in the hands of Assad, but if and when Assad collapsed, there were greater dangers – whether they went to Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood. Whatever scenario you concocted was almost equally grim. And the Israelis at any stage, if they had to, would have gone in. They would have sent as many of their soldiers as they needed to grab these weapons to prevent them falling into the hands of Hezbollah."

But at the same time he says the absence of military strikes has left Assad on the path to political victory in the civil war. "It is well known that Assad, right from the very beginning, has been trying to force the international community to choose between his regime and the Islamic terrorist extremists. I think that strategy was not working as long as the Free Syrian Army and the moderate Syrians, who probably represent the bulk of the population potentially, were a credible force.

"If the international community had given more practical help to the moderate Syrian forces then the extremists could have been kept at bay. But I regret to say it is probably now too late, and that is a fact that is difficult to ignore."

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