The lesson of the West’s failure to stand up to Assad in 2013 was not lost on the tyrant’s most powerful ally. Vladimir Putin became still more convinced of his enemies’ weakness and indecision, reinforcing his conviction the following year that he could get away with his first invasion of Ukraine, igniting the war that has since become Europe’s bloodiest since 1945.
Miliband’s hand in this tragic litany should have been enough for Andy Burnham to exclude him from consideration for the position of foreign secretary. Now, apparently for reasons of party management, the new prime minister has placed British diplomacy in the hands of a discredited politician with no moral right to involve himself in foreign policy ever again.
The horror of what took place in the early hours of August 21, 2013, still has the power to shock. Assad’s forces fired rockets laden with sarin nerve gas at suburbs of Damascus then held by rebels in the country’s civil war. People in these areas were used to sheltering in basements whenever they came under attack.
On that night, they gained no protection because sarin is heavier than air, so the gas sank and followed them to their hiding places, inflicting deaths that defy description. Sarin plays havoc with the body’s central nervous system, causing internal organs to go into overdrive, leaving victims to vomit, froth, convulse and suffocate.
“Survivors,” reads the restrained report of United Nations inspectors, “described seeing a large number of individuals lying on the ground, many of whom were deceased or unconscious. These individuals reported observing laboured breathing and excessive salivation among a large proportion.”
The report adds: “Many survivors reported deaths among family members. Two brothers from Zamalka reported that, of the 40 family members who lived in the same building, they were the only survivors.”
Chemical weapons were banned as long ago as 1925 with the signing of the Geneva Protocol, reinforced by the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997.
Yet any ban is meaningless without enforcement. After Assad’s atrocity, David Cameron, then prime minister, proposed enforcing the international prohibition on chemical weapons by joining America and France in destroying as much of Syria’s stockpile as possible.
After equivocating for a few days, Miliband decided to oppose the necessary motion in the Commons. His speech on August 29, 2013, was a masterpiece of moral evasion and vacuity.