The escalation to world war appears to be in motion, just waiting for the first diplomatic row to explode into something considerably worse than fighting various hydra-like bandits in Syria. Countries are being slowly dragged into the continuing violence with ever greater weapons and destructive capabilities and vociferous verbal dogfights ever more frequent.
With Russia, Iran and China on one side and the US, France, Australia and Britain plus the GCC countries, Turkey and Jordan on the other and Iraq and Syria in the middle, a lot is a stake in the world’s tinderbox.
US president Obama promised no less than 15 times to the world that American troops would not be deployed to Syria. With intensifying U.S. military operations in both Iraq and Syria, dozens of bipartisan US lawmakers issued an open letter on Friday calling for Congress to fulfill its responsibility by voting “as quickly as possible” on whether to authorize a war that is well over a year old. In the meantime, Obama has just authorised the deployment of special forces troops to Syria as it intensifies airstrikes which has coincided with Washington’s shift in approach to the conflict. As Russia intensifies its efforts, Washington is spurred to take more effective action.
There is serious political unrest at the parliamentary level in Britain. Parliament unequivocally voted for no military action in Syria in 2013 yet PM David Cameron simply lied by omission and sent fighter jets in defiance.
Just yesterday the head of the British armed forces said “Britain is “letting down” its allies by not taking part in attacking Isil’s key strongholds in Syria,” General Sir Nicholas Houghton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, said it “makes no sense” that RAF airstrikes in Iraq stop at the border, when Britain knows Isil has based its stronghold in Syria. He seems to have forgotten that Britain is a democracy and its people are not answerable to the army.