Right. So Parliament has just voted to send airstrikes to bomb Syria in the hope of obliterating the disgusting totalitarian fascist monsters that are Daesh/Isis. I do hope their information is right and that we don’t live to regret it. I hope that airstrikes and more bombs falling on innocent civilians as well as terrorist targets don’t end up doing more harm than good in both the short and the longer term. My fear is that this escalation will make the conflict and bloodshed worse and further drawn out.

I am not a pacifist, as you know,  but I had severe misgivings about this airstrike policy. It doesn’t seem to have done much good wherever we’ve engaged in it in the Middle East in the last few years. I’m not anti-war per se, I can see why military action is sometimes necessary. Sometimes it is impossible to reason with people but if we came across one of these people on an individual level, we’d walk away. I don’t really think that doing nothing and pretending that it’s someone else’s problem is an option for us but it’s difficult to know exactly what to do for the best.

There are no guarantees that even the best thought-through strategy would work to destroy these people and my sneaking suspicion is that airstrikes, far from being a strategy considered in depth at length, is clutching at straws. And I hugely resent being labelled a terrorist sympathiser for having misgivings, for a lack of blind faith in the pronouncements of any political party.

I also feel disgust for people who are calling people on “the other side” names and making threats against them. To me, the decision seems finely balanced and there is no justification for taking an extreme view to the extent that one insults the other side. After all, the other side is supposed to be those bloodthirsty murderous hoodlums, isn’t it?

I’m sorry for the lack of coherence of this post. My mind has been on other things this week, as you know. I wanted to say something, but it’s late and I’m tired.

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