Dave has achieved two feats for the price of one defeat:
He became the first prime minister since 1782 to lose the parliamentary vote on military action.
And even more improbable, he made me side with Labour, Putin and Assad. What do you know, he may yet make a pacifist of me.
There’s much circumstantial evidence to support the view that Parliament was right and Dave was wrong. One bit of good news is that an Obama spokesman suggested that Britain is becoming isolated from her allies, both the United States and the EU.
Well, I know this may come as a surprise to our American friends, but every sovereign nation acting in its interests is to some extent isolated. After all, her interests may not always coincide with others’.
Presumably, not being isolated from the USA means joining her on any asinine adventure and paying with British lives for America’s ignorance of the outside world.
As to the EU, Britain has gone along with it on everything, apart from joining the euro. Had we done so, we’d no longer be ‘isolated’. We’d be bankrupt. As it is, we’re only staying afloat because we’ve been able to devalue the pound, a device inaccessible to, say, Greece or Portugal.
If this is what isolation means, then the more the merrier, I’d say.
The other piece of good news was provided by Lord Ashdown, who has announced that the vote made him “depressed” and “ashamed”. Anything that has such an effect on Paddy can’t be all bad.
Assuming that the Americans won’t go it alone, as they well may, the group with the greatest reason to rejoice is the Syrian Christians. For any action on the part of the West, which the Muslims mistakenly regard as still Christian, would certainly result in violent reprisals against this community.
Christians make up about 10 percent of Syria’s population, and there’s no denying that, should Assad’s regime be driven out by Western action, they would be hit by a double whammy.
First, Assad’s forces would abuse them on the way out, taking their resentment out on defenceless people. Second, the victorious Muslim fanatics, many of them associated with al-Qaeda, would do what comes naturally: spill Christian blood.
This is a matter of fact, not conjecture. For the rebels have already given us a taste of things to come by destroying dozens of churches and driving thousands of Christians out of Syria and into refugee camps.
Just a fortnight ago, 15 Christians were murdered in Wadi al Nasara, and only a victorious regular army can prevent such outrages from occurring on a massive scale.
If further proof is needed, it’s kindly provided by other countries where American purveyors of democracy über alles have succeeded in creating troubled waters in which Muslim fanatics could then fish.
In Iraq, about 800,000 Christians have been driven out of their homes and many have been killed. Ditto in Libya, where al-Qaeda groups have had a field day in the south of the country.
No Muslim country in the world has ever disproved this simple observation: the more influential the Sharia law, the more Christians will suffer. Provided that our parliamentary vote gives Obama some second thoughts, the advent of the Sharia law in Syria may be indefinitely put off – and surely any sensible Christian should welcome such a development?
Dave, of course, is a self-confessed “active member of the Church of England”. Nowadays this apparently doesn’t preclude being a passive Christian, for otherwise he wouldn’t have campaigned so hysterically for an action guaranteed to result in Christians’ misery.
This would have been suffered not only by Syrian Christians but also by the home-grown variety. For Syrians have promised that any British involvement in Western aggression against their country would result in suicide-bomb attacks on England. Experience suggests that this is one promise the Muslims tend to keep.
All that would be worth it if Britain’s national interests were at stake. Yet not even Dave and his fellow war-monger Tony claim that this is the case.
They want us to play poodle to the Americans as a way of punishing Assad for his alleged use of poison gas against his own people. This moral transgression has so far not been proven, but the Ba’athists do have form in using such weapons. However, one doesn’t recall too much American indignation at Saddam’s gas attacks on the Iranians during the 1979-1987 war.
So they object not to the use of such weapons in se, but to their use by those who aren’t upholding American interests, however misconstrued. Well, at least Parliament didn’t misconstrue ours.
In any case, Dave being such an active member of the Church of England, he should recall a saying from the book his Church still holds sacred:
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”