British leaders feel the phantom muscle of empire twitch on Syria

This is not about being against war. It’s about being against making terrible wars worse

Cameron has made no real attempt to explain what, beyond killing very nasty people, he perceives as his strategic intent (Getty)

Whatever the weather, wherever you may be reading this, the metaphorical fog is lifting. It has hung densely over us for decades, denying generations of leaders the visibility to see Britain’s place in the world in clear perspective. Now we begin to see where we are. Nowhere.

The Nowhere Man of the hour, David Cameron, insists his U-turn over his latest masterplan for Syria is nothing of the kind. Technically he is right. Post-traumatic stress from the Commons defeat in 2013 led him to pre-empt this reverse by stating there would be no vote on bombing Isis (or Isil, or Islamic State, or Daesh, or whatever we’re calling them this week) unless he was sure of winning it.

Yet if it isn’t a U-turn, it is certainly another grave embarrassment. A Prime Minister supposedly cresting the wave of a sensational election win, and facing an opposition in turmoil, shies away from trying to convince the Commons that bombing Isis is a more spiffing idea now than bombing Assad’s forces was just two years ago.

The explanation for such stubborn scepticism goes beyond the obvious aftermaths of previous adventures in Iraq and Libya. Cameron has made no real attempt to explain what, beyond killing very nasty people, he perceives as his strategic intent. Since he is mute, we turn for guidance to the report of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee chaired by Crispin Blunt.

Until now, he was best known for a) leaving his wife to come out as gay, which for a Tory MP must have taken some guts; and b) being a strong contender for the catchy title of UK’s Leading Middle East Expert Moonlighting as a Hollywood Uncle (Emily Blunt is his niece). His only rival, for the record, is our own Patrick Cockburn, uncle to the glorious Olivia Wilde.

Crispin Blunt now emerges as a champion of both common sense and nominative determinism, by crisply and bluntly deconstructing the vacuity of Cameron’s warlord ambitions. “We believe that there should be no extension of British military action into Syria unless there is a coherent international strategy that has a realistic chance of defeating Isis and ending the civil war,” runs his report. “In the absence of such a strategy, taking action to meet the desire to do something is incoherent.”

Beautifully put. If you rendered Cameron to Damascus, had a couple of Assad’s gorillas strap electrodes to his cobblers, pumped whatever truth drug the CIA is peddling these days into his veins, threatened him with a little light waterboarding, and then courteously invited him to explain his thinking, what on earth could he say? What he couldn’t say is that the urge to bomb Isis stems from a craving to help the benighted of Syria. If that were so, after all, he would not have been so slow to offer those fleeing the horror (and then ungraciously for so few) sanctuary in Britain. All he could say is: “Gosh, um, it’s, erm... Look, isn’t it better to do something than nothing?”

No, it is not. Almost invariably in that region, it is better to do nothing than something. And doing nothing is the hard option. You can never show off an alternate timeline in which doing nothing resulted in a better situation. It requires strength because you know how easily it is mistaken for weakness.

Doing something, when something means dropping bombs with minimal risk of military casualties, is the cowardly choice.

He might also say this: “I know cuts to defence spending mean that any RAF presence above Syria would be largely symbolic. I know taking out Isis fighters from on high is a form of pest control, and that we have little idea what infestations would fill the void. I also know there is a danger of starting a proxy war with Russia should our fighter pilots bump into theirs in the skies.

“I know this is ill considered, foolish and almost inevitably counter-productive, but I need to feel relevant on the global stage. What I want – what I really, really want – is to be in the big boy’s game.”

And there, in a Spice Girls’ nutshell, is the story of British foreign policy these past 60 years. The crushing humiliation of Eden being ordered by a livid Eisenhower to remove his troops from Suez; the preposterous waste of human life to recover a barren rock in the South Atlantic in sovereignty’s name; the cataclysmic neo-colonial power trip in Iraq; the infantile error of judgment that unleashed hell in Libya...

Time and again, British leaders have felt the phantom muscle twitch in the amputated limb of Empire and lashed out to cling to the fantasy of Great Power status that was lost in 1945, when FDR and Stalin seated Churchill far below the salt at the post-war banqueting table.

Few seriously expect, or even want, Britain to be a pacifist nation. This is not about being against war, it’s about being against making terrible wars worse.

What we are entitled to expect from a Prime Minister is an appreciation of the world not as he dreams it should be, but as it is: an appreciation, in this case, that there can be no hope of a solution in Syria unless the West works with people it does not like in the forms of Vladimir Putin and Iran. Cameron probably isn’t mad about the Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev or President Sisi of Egypt either, but he seems content to host their imminent visits.

Having neither the materiel nor the public will, let alone the moral authority, to fight, we are entitled to a PM with the maturity to develop a doctrinal foreign policy predicated on Britain being an agent of diplomacy rather than destruction.

The age of inflaming conflicts of Byzantine complexity because doing something daft is better than doing nothing is over.

Cameron can try to disguise it with his empty swagger about huge phallic bombs, but for the impotence which afflicts Britain there is no blue pill.