Plastic sabre-rattling on Syria?
David Cameron is devoting a lot of time to his most difficult customer at the G8. Vladimir Putin will get a one on one chat with the PM in No. 10 this afternoon before the two head for Northern Ireland (read about the setting in Faisal’s blog).
President Obama is expected to have a one on one chat with President Putin on Monday at the golf resort. I hear that the Russian officials preparing the way for these chats have given absolutely no indication that Russia is about to change its mind on Syria. The only hope (and it is not a strong one) is that when a leader rules at his own whim, as the Russian President does, there’s always a chance you might just get him to moderate his views when you get him on his own in the room.
Both leaders will be trying to get President Putin to accept that though President Assad may have momentum right now in Syria’s civil war he will never again hold supreme authority in that country and to address the need for an exit strategy now and reduce the crisis over-spill into the region.
Inside No. 10, there’s alarm about just how anti-interventionist their own Tory backbenchers have become. Having threatened to arm the rebels, David Cameron risks looking like he is waving a plastic sabre if he can’t persuade his own MPs to back anything that constitutes greater UK involvement in Syria. And he can’t rely on Labour or the Lib Dems to rescue him from his own backbenchers on this one.
Nick Clegg’s first words to Jeremy Vine this morning on BBC1 were that the current assistance the UK is giving to Syrian rebels – armoured 4 by 4’s, communications equipment, body armour – is about right and going beyond it with lethal weaponry is wrong. Nick Clegg emphasised he was talking with David Cameron “on an ongoing basis” on this subject. This was the DPM waving to his own party and saying ‘don’t worry, I’m not going to allow the PM to send UK arms into Syria.’
It is a long distance from David Cameron’s words in The Guardian yesterday when he was emphasising that to have purchase in shaping the new Syria he hopes will emerge, the UK has to have greater involvement in the civil war at this stage. Whether that means the 700m tonnes of military hardware that the Syrian rebel leader Gen Idris has been asking for or a quarter or a third of that, the PM seems to have crossed a rubicon in his own mind that his Deputy PM and his own party are nowhere near crossing themselves.
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