LAST week I sat horrified in the Commons as David Cameron brazenly announced the assassination of Cardiff-born Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin, a Bangladeshi who grew up in Aberdeen. They were killed near Raqqah in Syria, when their vehicle was hit by a missile fired from an RAF drone. Don’t get me wrong – I’m prepared to take Mr Cameron’s word that these men were members of Daesh and that Khan had been plotting a terrorist attack on the VJ-Day commemorations in Whitehall last month. My parliamentary office (and that of other SNP MPs) is slap beside the Cenotaph and would have caught the blast.

However, that does not stop me believing that the Prime Minister’s main reason for ordering of the assassination of Khan and Amin had nothing to do with them representing an immediate threat to anyone in Britain, myself included. The VJ-Day plot had already been foiled. Anyway, the Americans have used drones routinely to kill UK jihadis – in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan – on the basis of British intelligence. So why call in the RAF now, and in Syria, where Parliament has vetoed British airstrikes?

Of course, it is precisely because Parliament voted to exclude British airstrikes on Syrian territory (in 2013) that Khan and Amin were assassinated. David Cameron is seeking deliberately to whip up public fear of terrorist attacks on the UK mainland in order to reverse that parliamentary veto. Khan and Amin are no loss to anyone but they died purely and simply as a casus belli to justify Britain wading into the already massively complicated Syrian civil war.

Last week, the Prime Minister lectured Parliament that the solution to the refugee problem is not to provide that tide of desperate fellow human beings with sanctuary in the UK. No, it is to “stabilise the countries where the refugees are coming from”, and in particular to “seek a solution to the crisis in Syria” while “pushing for the formation of a new unity government in Libya”. Stabilise Syria? By bombing it? Cameron tried that in Libya in 2011. Now he is reduced to spouting vacuous calls for a unity government in a Libya that no longer exits as a viable nation state. Ditto Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

Here is the reality behind the refugee crisis and the plague of religious wars that have engulfed the Middle East and North Africa: we are witnessing the unravelling of the artificial states, with their artificial boundaries, invented wholesale by the Western imperial powers at the close of the Great War. That great refugee tide is fleeing the final death agony of a flawed political settlement created by British and French politicians at the end of the First World War. A settlement that can’t be stabilised, restored, sorted or repaired – either with drones or diplomacy.

It is 1919. The Great War has ended with the death of 17 million people. On this mound of corpses, the victorious British and French regimes decide to parcel up the spoils. Chief among these is the decaying Ottoman Caliphate, then the political, religious and cultural leader of the Islamic world. It had joined the war on Germany’s side, in the hope of recovering territories and influence already lost to the West. First the Allies occupy Constantinople, deliberately precipitating the collapse of Ottoman government. Unhindered, the Brits and French now divide the Ottoman domains (including present-day Turkey) into a patchwork of new “independent” countries (easily dominated) and “mandate” territories (i.e. Western colonies). The new order is imposed through the Treaty of Sèvres, signed by some ex-Ottoman stooges in a china factory in France! For sheer rapaciousness and greed, the British and French economic rape of the old Ottoman Empire knows few exemplars.

Things soon go wildly wrong, as they have a habit of doing. The 1920s see a host of nationalist uprisings and wars across Anatolia (Turkey), Armenia, and the Middle East. These represent early resistance to the new Western order imposed at Sèvres. But they also sharpen ethnic and religious conflicts throughout the region – a sad by-product of Western divide-and-rule tactics. In retrospect, one can speculate that preserving the multicultural Ottoman Empire in some federal or confederal form after 1919 might have reduced ethnic and religious conflicts in the area, while allowing the possibility of independent economic modernisation. Of course, it was precisely to eliminate economic competition, and seize control of the oil wealth, that the Western powers carved it up.

The main resistance to the Western carve-up of the Ottoman Empire came from a new Turkish nationalism, which threw the Greeks out of Anatolia and quashed a planned independent Kurdistan. Local wars also consolidated an independent Saudi Arabia – this was pre-oil, so no-one took much notice. Yet the Brits and French were able to hang on to their influence in the ancient land of Greater Syria – largely because they had fragmented it into Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Syria. Post-World War Two, the decline of Britain and France allowed a new secular Arab nationalism to gain formal independence for these states. Fearful of democracy, the nationalist leaders maintained the old, artificial Western-imposed states as their fiefdoms. Lack of reform spawned popular resistance, which took on a religious tone. The end result is al-Qaeda and now Daesh, dedicated to reviving a pan-Muslim caliphate.

America and Britain continued to meddle, latterly trying to destroy or destabilise what remained of the secular Arab nationalists (Saddam, Gaddafi, and Assad) in the naive hope of stimulating pro-Western democracies. Result: Iran has filled the vacuum, annexing the Shia parts of Iraq as a protectorate. The state of Iraq no longer exists, with the non-Shia parts split between the autonomous Kurds and Daesh. The latter now dominates around half of the crumbling Syrian state. This Humpty Dumpty will never be put back together again, whatever David Cameron thinks.

I dare say that the Prime Minister could now win a parliamentary mandate to extend RAF bombing into Syria. But that will only increase the centrifugal political forces that are shredding the old political and ethnic map of the Middle East. Conducting RAF airstrikes in Syria runs the risk of clashes with Assad’s air force, even if the initial targets are Daesh. That might not sound much of a problem, but there is growing evidence not only that the Russians are supplying the Assad regime with more fighter aircraft (MiG 31s) but that they are also furnishing combat pilots to fly them. What happens after the first downed RAF pilot is beheaded by the jihadists on YouTube?

The religious and ethnic conflicts in the Middle East will take at least 50 years to burn out. The only realistic policy solution is patience, containment and compromise – all of which will cost Western money. We can’t bomb our way to a solution. In the interim, we need an understanding in Britain that we can’t conjure up the fantasy of imminent stability in Syria or Libya as a solution to the refugee crisis. Artificial Syria is no more. Invented Libya is no more. And the West is culpable. Which means it is our moral duty to take in those fleeing, suffering masses. It is the recompense we owe them.

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