LONDON: The former leader of the UK’s Labour Party has defended his 2013 decision not to support the government in taking military action against Bashar Assad in Syria.
The British Parliament voted against attacking Syrian government targets after it used chemical weapons against a rebel-held Damascus suburb.
Labour were in opposition at the time and its MPs were directed by Ed Miliband not to support Prime Minister David Cameron’s motion in favor of striking Assad.
The UK vote derailed the US military’s response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria — something President Barack Obama had declared a “red line.”
Without the support of its main Western ally, Washington held back. Many observers believe the decision emboldened Assad and opened the way for Russia to enter the conflict in support of his government.
The downfall of Assad last weekend has reawakened the debate over whether the UK should have taken action, with Labour cabinet ministers openly disagreeing over the course taken more than 10 years ago.
On Thursday, Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who was not an MP at the time, told a BBC politics TV show that “if the West had acted faster, Assad would have been gone.”
He added: “The hesitation of this country and the US created a vacuum that Russia moved into and kept Assad in power for much longer.”
Miliband, who is now energy secretary, said on Friday that his cabinet colleague was wrong.
Miliband said the decision not to support military strikes against Assad was grounded in the lessons learned from the 2003 Iraq invasion.
“The decision I was confronted with in 2013 was whether we did a bombing of President Assad without any clear plan for British military engagement, where it would lead and what it would mean,” Miliband told Times Radio.
“And I believe then, and I do now, that one of the most important lessons of the Iraq War is we shouldn’t go into military intervention without a clear plan, including an exit strategy.”
Miliband said that when President Donald Trump ordered bombing raids on Syria in 2017 in response to another chemical weapons attack, it did not lead to the downfall of Assad.
“So when people say that somehow if we bombed President Assad in 2013 he would have toppled over, frankly, it’s just wrong,” he said.
The fall of the Assad government after a lightning offensive by opposition militants has further revealed the extent of the suffering in Syria under his rule, leading to soul-searching in capitals around the world.
The Syrian War, which started in 2011 as anti-government protests, killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced more than 13 million.
