Utopia, you are standing in it!

Jeremy Corbyn wants to use about the only good guys in the Syrian civil war as a bargaining chip with President Assad.

Corbyn said overnight that he doesn’t want to sit around the negotiating table with ISIS but he wants a political settlement that defeats ISIS and bring an end to the civil war in Syria

by the unity of the people of Syria. That is a good step forward.

Corbyn is a man who claims to have studied Middle East politics all his life:

Jeremy is someone who genuinely understands international political situations, especially those of the Middle East. Not just in a superficial way, but in terms of the history of countries like Syria, Iran and Iraq. He has studies them all of his political life.

Corbyn doesn’t seem to have noticed that the Syrian Kurds do not want to be Syrians – they want their own country.

The Iraqi Kurds don’t want to be Iraqis – they want their own country too. The Kurds already have a fair degree of autonomy in northern Iraq and northern Syria respectively. Much of it achieved in the field of battle.

Any call for a political settlement with Syria that involves a united Syria betrays the aspirations of the Kurdish people for national liberation. Turkey is also waiting on the wings, sternly opposed to any Kurdish autonomy and willing to intervene in the Syrian Civil War with its army and air force to those ends.

With Jeremy Corbyn & the comrades @ Portcullis House, Westminster. http://t.co/A6Vgmaglsa—
Gerry Adams (@GerryAdamsSF) July 21, 2015

Jeremy Corbyn is a seething hypocrite because he was a fanatical supporter of the Irish Republicans despite the fact that they are a tiny violent minority of Irish Catholics.

Corbyn wants peace talks. Political settlements are challenging in wars of annihilation and wars of succession. The American Civil War had to be resolved in the field of battle because the North would not accept succession. The Arab-Israeli conflict is a war of annihilation. Israel expects there always to be two states. Hamas and the other terrorists want to destroy the state of Israel. There is no middle ground.

ISIS is leading a war of annihilation. The Kurds are leading a war of succession. There is little room for compromise.

It’s harder to get out of even the most ordinary of wars than get into them. The problem with peace settlements is credible assurances that the peace is lasting rather than is a chance for the other side to rebuild and come back to attack from a stronger position.

A warring state would think that another state’s promise not to start another war is credible only if the other state would be better off by keeping such promises not to start another war than by breaking its promise once it has rearmed.

For example, in World War I, making sure that Germany and its allies did not restart the war a few years later, fed and rested, is why the peace treaty in 1919 totally disarmed Germany and split-up the other Axis powers.

One side will think that the other’s promise not to re-start a war is credible only if the other state would be better off by keeping its promise not to re-start a war than by breaking its promise.

France fortified its border with Germany in the 1920s because of a lack of trust that the peace would endure. Germany was disarmed after 1918 so that the day which it would be a threat again was well into the future.

Neither side of World War I were interested in peace feelers when they thought they could either prevail in the field of battle or would be in a stronger negotiating position by fighting on for a while.

The same goes for the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars and that is before the fact that the terrorists are highly decentralised. There is no one central party able to make and keep a peace settlement by dealing with renegade elements within their own ranks.