We are living through great moments in history. For the first time since 1945 Britain, Russia and America are united in fighting a common enemy.
At the Yalta conference in the Crimea, which met to divvy up the postwar world, the Big Three were Winston Churchill, America’s Franklin D Roosevelt and Russia’s Joseph Stalin.
The Big Three today are David Cameron, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, joined by a fourth, French president François Hollande.
And they are now determined to destroy Daesh – as we must now call Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq.
Yet accomplishing this mission is likely to take much longer than the Second World War when our countries last got together.
Coalition against ISIS echoes the Big Three of World War 2 – but can it win?
5 Dec 2015
The Sunday People
by Nigel Nelson
Commentators say one day we will have to speak to the terror group to resolve the crisis – but it could be many years before we are in a position to do so
We are living through great moments in history. For the first time since 1945 Britain, Russia and America are united in fighting a common enemy .
At the Yalta conference in the Crimea, which met to divvy up the postwar world, the Big Three were Winston Churchill, America’s Franklin D Roosevelt and Russia’s Joseph Stalin.
The Big Three today are David Cameron, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin , joined by a fourth, French president François Hollande.
And they are now determined to destroy Daesh – as we must now call Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq.
Yet accomplishing this mission is likely to take much longer than the Second World War when our countries last got together.
And the mistrust of the British PM and American President for the Russian leader is as deep today as it was 70 years ago.
Formidable: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta
Not least because the Russians have as many spies in Britain trying to steal our secrets as they did during the Cold War.
At Yalta Stalin suggested the best way of subduing an already beaten Germany was to execute 50,000 of its army officers.
Roosevelt joked that perhaps 49,000 would do. Churchill thought such barbarity no laughing matter and stormed from the room.
Now the argument is over whether Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad should be allowed to stay in power as Putin wants, or removed as Obama and Cameron would like.
For Putin, foreign adventures like this one in Syria always go down well at home.
In a poll by the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre Putin’s approval rating was a whopping 89.9 per cent in October.
Blast: A Russian airstrike on an oil convoy
And that beat his previous all-time high of 88 per cent after the August 2008 war with Georgia.
Cameron does not enjoy the same level of support from the British electorate. Voters are still unsure whether bombing Syria is the right thing to do.
A United Nations resolution in favour should have settled the issue, but its legitimacy is contested by anti-war campaigners and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
To establish whether Syrian air strikes have moral right on their side we have to travel back nearly 800 years and the theologian Thomas Aquinas.
He set out the conditions for a just war to defend against aggression and it remains the blueprint that civilised nations use today.
Aquinas’s points were that it must be lawfully declared by a lawful authority, that the intention behind it must be good, and that there must be a reasonable chance of success.
It should be fought with only appropriate force, and every effort should be made not to harm innocent civilians.
By those criteria the violence unleashed against Daesh is justified. And Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn made that case for war in the Commons on Wednesday.
He also said, to Mr Corbyn’s evident discomfort, that such intervention is part of Labour’s tradition.
Stirring: Hilary Benn makes the case for airstrikes
It was socialists, he said, who joined the International Brigade in the 1930s to fight against dictator Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
They battled Hitler and Mussolini, and it was a Labour government which helped found the UN.
He added: “What we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated. It is time for us to do our bit in Syria. We must now confront this evil.”
But bombs alone won’t defeat Daesh, and Mr Cameron’s claim of a 70,000-strong army of freedom fighters on the ground now seems as dodgy as Tony Blair’s “dodgy dossier” for the 2003 Iraq War.
These fighters are made up of a ragbag of Syrian Free Army and Islamist and jihadi groups squabbling with each other. They are no friends of the West.
The Syrian Resistance are Marxists, while Shia militia Hezbollah fighting for Assad and backed by Iran are dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
Yet after winning the war Britain, America, Russia and France must win the peace.
Even when we rid the world of Daesh, which superior Western firepower surely will, then other equally dangerous jihadis will take their place.
Britain’s special envoy to Libya, and Tony Blair’s former Northern Ireland negotiator, Jonathan Powell says one day we will sit down with Daesh just as we did with every other terror group.
He adds: “Talking to terrorists is not the same as agreeing with them. But in the end we will have to talk to Isis.”
Negotiation: Jonathan Powell says we’ll have to talk to ISIS in the end
It is hard to see where dialogue would begin. Daesh has political goals which al-Qaeda did not, but they’re just as non-negotiable.
Daesh wants the return of the medieval Muslim caliphate which stretched from the Middle East, across North Africa, and into Spain.
This is only a marginally more sophisticated ambition than al-Qaeda’s aim to put the whole world under the brutal rule of sharia law.
So Powell favours opening discreet channels of communication with Daesh now, just as Britain did with the IRA in 1972.
But the proper talking to forge a Northern Ireland peace settlement did not start until 20 years later.
Which would mean it will be 2035 before an end to our present nightmare is in sight.
Online Sunday People Poll
Were MPs right to approve British bombing in Syria?
YES: 57%
NO: 43%
Coalition against ISIS echoes the Big Three of World War 2 –Â*but can it win? - Nigel Nelson - Mirror Online
At the Yalta conference in the Crimea, which met to divvy up the postwar world, the Big Three were Winston Churchill, America’s Franklin D Roosevelt and Russia’s Joseph Stalin.
The Big Three today are David Cameron, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, joined by a fourth, French president François Hollande.
And they are now determined to destroy Daesh – as we must now call Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq.
Yet accomplishing this mission is likely to take much longer than the Second World War when our countries last got together.
Coalition against ISIS echoes the Big Three of World War 2 – but can it win?
5 Dec 2015
The Sunday People
by Nigel Nelson
Commentators say one day we will have to speak to the terror group to resolve the crisis – but it could be many years before we are in a position to do so
We are living through great moments in history. For the first time since 1945 Britain, Russia and America are united in fighting a common enemy .
At the Yalta conference in the Crimea, which met to divvy up the postwar world, the Big Three were Winston Churchill, America’s Franklin D Roosevelt and Russia’s Joseph Stalin.
The Big Three today are David Cameron, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin , joined by a fourth, French president François Hollande.
And they are now determined to destroy Daesh – as we must now call Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq.
Yet accomplishing this mission is likely to take much longer than the Second World War when our countries last got together.
And the mistrust of the British PM and American President for the Russian leader is as deep today as it was 70 years ago.
Formidable: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta
Not least because the Russians have as many spies in Britain trying to steal our secrets as they did during the Cold War.
At Yalta Stalin suggested the best way of subduing an already beaten Germany was to execute 50,000 of its army officers.
Roosevelt joked that perhaps 49,000 would do. Churchill thought such barbarity no laughing matter and stormed from the room.
Now the argument is over whether Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad should be allowed to stay in power as Putin wants, or removed as Obama and Cameron would like.
For Putin, foreign adventures like this one in Syria always go down well at home.
In a poll by the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre Putin’s approval rating was a whopping 89.9 per cent in October.
Blast: A Russian airstrike on an oil convoy
And that beat his previous all-time high of 88 per cent after the August 2008 war with Georgia.
Cameron does not enjoy the same level of support from the British electorate. Voters are still unsure whether bombing Syria is the right thing to do.
A United Nations resolution in favour should have settled the issue, but its legitimacy is contested by anti-war campaigners and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
To establish whether Syrian air strikes have moral right on their side we have to travel back nearly 800 years and the theologian Thomas Aquinas.
He set out the conditions for a just war to defend against aggression and it remains the blueprint that civilised nations use today.
Aquinas’s points were that it must be lawfully declared by a lawful authority, that the intention behind it must be good, and that there must be a reasonable chance of success.
It should be fought with only appropriate force, and every effort should be made not to harm innocent civilians.
By those criteria the violence unleashed against Daesh is justified. And Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn made that case for war in the Commons on Wednesday.
He also said, to Mr Corbyn’s evident discomfort, that such intervention is part of Labour’s tradition.
Stirring: Hilary Benn makes the case for airstrikes
It was socialists, he said, who joined the International Brigade in the 1930s to fight against dictator Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
They battled Hitler and Mussolini, and it was a Labour government which helped found the UN.
He added: “What we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated. It is time for us to do our bit in Syria. We must now confront this evil.”
But bombs alone won’t defeat Daesh, and Mr Cameron’s claim of a 70,000-strong army of freedom fighters on the ground now seems as dodgy as Tony Blair’s “dodgy dossier” for the 2003 Iraq War.
These fighters are made up of a ragbag of Syrian Free Army and Islamist and jihadi groups squabbling with each other. They are no friends of the West.
The Syrian Resistance are Marxists, while Shia militia Hezbollah fighting for Assad and backed by Iran are dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
Yet after winning the war Britain, America, Russia and France must win the peace.
Even when we rid the world of Daesh, which superior Western firepower surely will, then other equally dangerous jihadis will take their place.
Britain’s special envoy to Libya, and Tony Blair’s former Northern Ireland negotiator, Jonathan Powell says one day we will sit down with Daesh just as we did with every other terror group.
He adds: “Talking to terrorists is not the same as agreeing with them. But in the end we will have to talk to Isis.”
Negotiation: Jonathan Powell says we’ll have to talk to ISIS in the end
It is hard to see where dialogue would begin. Daesh has political goals which al-Qaeda did not, but they’re just as non-negotiable.
Daesh wants the return of the medieval Muslim caliphate which stretched from the Middle East, across North Africa, and into Spain.
This is only a marginally more sophisticated ambition than al-Qaeda’s aim to put the whole world under the brutal rule of sharia law.
So Powell favours opening discreet channels of communication with Daesh now, just as Britain did with the IRA in 1972.
But the proper talking to forge a Northern Ireland peace settlement did not start until 20 years later.
Which would mean it will be 2035 before an end to our present nightmare is in sight.
Online Sunday People Poll
Were MPs right to approve British bombing in Syria?
YES: 57%
NO: 43%
Coalition against ISIS echoes the Big Three of World War 2 –Â*but can it win? - Nigel Nelson - Mirror Online
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