Arming the Rebels

It has come to the point now in Syria that many are calling for the rebels to be armed by Britain and the European Union. I don’t think we should go down this route at all.

Firstly we don’t actually know who these people are. The Syrian rebels are essentially everyone in the country that doesn't support Assad from liberal students to Al Qaeda. The later are not the sort of people we should be arming. Also their numbers specifically are growing as terrorists from across the Middle East are journeying to Syria to destroy Assad’s regime. We don’t really know the strength of each of the Syrian Rebels groups, we can only pick out individuals who are in some way leading the civil war.

Also do we really need to arm the rebels? The Saudi’s and Qatar are already doing so and sure they are only sending hand held weapons but it’s not like we’re going to be sending over tanks to the rebels. Also the Turkish are very key to this. They were very close to going to war with Syria last year and its likely tensions will rise again. They have been indirectly helping the rebels for ages in as many ways as they can and it’s possible they may set up ‘safe’ zones in Syria where the rebels can safely stay. This would allow for a base to be created from where they can launch attacks in a very similar way to the no fly zone in Libya, which allowed ½ of the country to be controlled with little violence by the Free Army.

I won’t pretend that everything is going well in Syria for the rebels. This is a civil war and they are always long  and brutal. This will make the country of Syria and is likely to start a path in the future to a more democratic country. But should we help them to the extent of arming them. No, it’s too dangerous on our behalf. Even if we did do this the path to freedom for Syria will be just as long and bloody, even after the war is over.

The Not So Recent North African Terrorism

With things going on in Mali and Algeria recently some journalists seem to be going along the line that Islamist terrorism is very recent in North Africa and growing exponentially from its source in Libya, which is largely the West’s fault due to our intervention. This isn’t really something I buy into.

Libya on the whole is a very moderate Islamic country. Gaddafi deliberately made Islamists the enemy in Libya during his rule. This was so prevalent that people, even after the dictator’s death, are slow to trust the new democratic government in Libya because Gaddafi told the people they were Al Qaeda. As a result the Muslim Brotherhood only won 17 seats in the new Libyan Parliament. William Hague is thus mostly right that the West helping Libya is not the main cause of the war in Mali as on the whole these people are not from Libya. Although I bet that they are using the weapons that the Rebels took from Gaddafi.

These Islamists have been around for ages, at least since the Algerian Civil War in the 90s, but most likely in some form or another for longer than that (see permanent state of war half of Africa has been in since the end colonialism). During the Civil War in Algeria these terrorists were slowly kicked out to Mauretania, Mali and Nigeria (to name but a few countries).

There has been for a long time underlying Islamic Terrorism in North Africa and the recent attack in Algeria and taking over half of Mali has only been able to take place because of misfortunate circumstances (mostly weak governance in Mali). The West have not a lot to do with this. Al Qaeda is mostly interested in taking over countries rather than attacking the West in Africa and we did not unwittingly let forth a flood of terrorists from Libya. I suppose you could argue though that the West is to blame for giving up colonialism in Africa, although I doubt the leftie media are going to argue for a New British Empire. They're not that mad.