Wednesday 2 December 2015

Lotus eating

Today is the day Parliament has to make a decision as to whether we are going to bomb Syria. I am glad not to be part of that process because the sad truth is that I still don't know!

I have listened to all the arguments on the radio and the television. I still remain to be convinced either way! Gong to war with something so indiscriminate as a bombing campaign seems brutal in the extreme and the people it will affect most are the innocent whose homes and way of life will be destroyed.

To call anyone who is against bombing a terrorist sympathiser is just crass...it is to doubt any humanitarian or Christian motive in those who are examining their consciences.

I remain unconvinced that bombing will do any real harm to IS. It seems obvious that it will only strengthen their determination to build a Muslin caliphate. But I also want to wipe the brutality off the face of the earth!

So we can't have it both ways....sending in ground troops seems the best way but that as we saw in trench warfare in the past is very hard on the young people involved and I couldn't easily live with that either.

I am an unconvinced spectator of all this horror...I will be listening to the debates today....and praying that the political arguments in the Commons don't descend into bullying, unpleasant jibes against people who stick to their principles in the face of massive criticism.

There is no easy way through all this and I am conscious that here tucked away in rural Cornwall we are all living the equivalent of the lotus eater.

As a fully paid up eater of the lotus all I can do is pray. That the decision being made today, to bomb or not to bomb is made by people of principle who have thought through the whole thing and listened to every side of the argument.

Once more Lord, hear our prayer! And let our cry come onto Thee!

 

1 comment:

UKViewer said...

The issue of bombing targets is need to have accurate intelligence about valid targets. IS will by now be experienced enough to disperse their HQ and communicate with them by radio. These assets will be dispersed among the local population, as human shields. IS have done this in the past, and I see no reason to believe that they won't do so again. Innocent lives are at risk and will probably be lost, no matter how accurate the targeted bombing hopes to be. We don't have a particularly good track record in the past few years on this.

Our US allies describe this as 'Collatoral'' damage, to try to push away criticism of the many mistakes made in Gulf War 2 (Including targeting a British Armoured Warrior and killing many soldiers from a Northern Regiment).

The only way to end this war is to invade and destroy IS by conventional military tactics. If we fail to do so, the bombing is a total waste of time - killing without any end plan in sight. That was the mistake of Gulf War 2 and in places such as Libya where we bombed the regime out, to replace it with extremist regimes and civil war.