In an exclusive interview with Middle East Monitor this week, UNA-UK Chairman Sir Jeremy Greenstock describes how the legacy of Iraq complicates the decision facing policy-makers with regard to intervention in Syria, and the importance of the West cooperating with Russia to find a solution to the crisis.
Sir Jeremy asserts that the memory of Western involvement in recent conflicts, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, constitutes a difficult obstacle for policy-makers attempting to justify intervention in Syria:
“People are suspicious of governments' assertions about things. They can't see the raw intelligence. It's secret. They've been misled in the past. Iraq WMD [weapons of mass destruction] was a big turn off of people's trust in government assertions and that can't be put back in the box."
Emphasising the complexity of the Syrian crisis, Sir Jeremy also points to the possibility that intervention could have unintended consequences, both for Syria itself and for a region which is notoriously volatile and unstable.
During the interview Sir Jeremy also stressed the importance of international cooperation and the need to engage with Russia in order to provide diplomatic and political exit from the civil war:
"They [Russia] are the ones to persuade the Assad regime to give up or do something different…We need the Russians for the final exit. Hitting Assad on the chemical weapons in the face of Russian opposition doesn't make that next stage any easier, it makes it harder."
Click here to read the interview in full.
