“Yemen, Yemen, make us proud”…by making us all poorer. And helping Putin and his allies.
by Paul Goodman, Conservative Home:
In 2003, Britain sent ground troops into Iraq. A hundred and seventy-nine of our troops were killed, up to a million Iraqis may have died, ISIS rose up from the ashes of the conflict, and Iraq moved into the political orbit of Iran.
In 2013, the Commons voted against military action in Syria. Over half a million of its population has been killed during the civil war. Up to seven million have fled. A million or so are in Europe. Its fringe parties are prospering. And Syria’s dictator is winning the war.
Iraq and Syria represent the polarities of choice for British security policy. We’re damned if we intervene and damned if we don’t. This is what comes of the interplay between geography and politics.
Which is nicely illustrated by Freedom House’s map of the world. Countries coloured green are free. Those in purple are not. Yellow stands for in between the two.
Europe is entirely green bar six Balkan counties and Ukraine, all of which are yellow. The Middle East is entirely purple other than Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon and Kuwait (all of which are also yellow).
Only one country in the Middle East is coloured green on the map: Israel. What happens when countries that are unfree – in other words, without democratic government, property rights, independent judges, a free press and religious liberty – live near the free?
The answer is that there is a flow of migrants from the first to the second, speeded and worsened by war and conflict. Islamist extremism is a core exporter of both of those, backing, financing and arming Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.
One would therefore have thought that the rights and wrongs of what’s happening in the Red Sea are straightforward enough. The Houthis are attacked ships of all kinds passing through it.
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