Putin

When MPs vote this week on Syria, they will have to decide whether intervention is right in principle. But there is another question: Will air strikes actually make a difference? As a defence and security contractor who has spent much of the last few years in Libya, I have serious doubts whether anything can be achieved without boots on the ground. The combined use of all the countries’ air forces alone will never eradicate ISIS anywhere without a coordinated ground effort. Putin understands this: Russia is making airstrikes while letting Assad's Syrian Army mop up on the ground. By contrast, Cameron’s proposed involvement seems pointless and meaningless. He wants to act from behind, with a relatively insignificant number of aircraft compared to America, Russia and France.

The West has failed in its principal, post 9/11 objective: to deny terrorists sanctuary. Islamic State is a terrorist enclave in the heart of the Middle East. Yet, the West’s response to this has been strikingly, and shockingly, lacklustre, I argue in the magazine this week. Barack Obama’s main preoccupation seems to be stressing that US ground troops will not be sent in to destroy Islamic State. While the British response is even feebler, to bomb Islamic State—but only on one side of the Iraqi/Syrian border. Even, the French who are hitting IS on both sides of the border, aren’t sending in ground troops. This lack of Western leadership is creating an opportunity for Vladimir Putin.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3" title="Douglas Murray discusses what Isis might do next" startat=1814] Listen [/audioplayer]When the creation of a new caliphate was announced last year, who but the small band of his followers took seriously its leader’s prediction of imminent regional and eventual global dominance? It straddled the northern parts of Syria and Iraq, two countries already torn apart by civil war and sectarian hatreds. So the self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared to be just another thug and opportunist ruling over a blighted no-man’s land, little known and still less revered in the wider Islamic world.

Yesterday I argued that if it became clear that the Russian plane was brought down over Egypt by a bomb, Vladamir Putin may be forced to reassess his Syrian campaign – especially in light of a strong counterattack by Islamic State on the ground in Syria. Today, as the bomb theory became the only plausible explanation for the catastrophe, the Kremlin is strongly hinting that such a radical reassessment is already underway. Maria Zakharova, a Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, has today said on a Russian radio station it is no longer 'crucial' that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stay in power. 'Absolutely not, we've never said that,' she insisted when pressed, adding that Moscow only opposed 'regime change'.

It now seems fairly likely that an explosion brought down the Russian passenger airline over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula over the weekend. One Metrojet official has already suggested that the 'only explainable cause is physical impact on the aircraft' and they have ruled out technical failure or human error. If the ongoing investigation proves that to be the case, it will obviously have an immediate and catastrophic impact on Egypt's already decimated tourism industry. A jihadist would have been able to infiltrate one of the country's supposedly most secure airports to plant a sizeable explosive device on a specific airline.

It is too early, as the Kremlin admits, to assess how effective Russia's week-long military assault on the Islamic State in Syria has been. However, one thing is already crystal clear: Moscow is winning the propaganda war. While Barack Obama was apologising today for the disgraceful bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan, changing Washington's official version of events for the fourth time in as many days, the Russian Defence Ministry provided an extraordinary sleek video of its cruise missile barrage of Isis targets. The accompanying press release explained how the 26 missiles not only avoided civilians when they hit their targets, but even flew over non-residential terrain for almost the entire 900 miles after they were launched from the Caspian Sea.

At the outset of Syria’s brutal four-year civil war, I was an almost unique voice in the British media deploring the push to depose the secular dictator President Bashar al-Assad, especially in the absence of a genuinely popular uprising against him. Here in The Spectator I tried to point out that such a short-term strategy would have devastating long-term consequences. Assad, I argued, would not fall, because the people of Damascus would not rise up against him. The so-called secular rebels were in fact vicious Islamists in disguise. Western interests in the region would be dramatically undermined by Saudi and Iranian militias, who would fight a devastating proxy war. Syria’s extraordinarily diverse population risked annihilation as a result.

Homosexuality may not be tolerated in today’s Russia, nor political dissent. Polygamy, though, is a different matter. Ever since news broke this summer of a 57-year-old police chief in Chechnya bullying a 17-year-old local girl into becoming his second wife, Russian nationalists and Islamic leaders alike have been lining up to call for a man’s right to take more than one wife. Most vocal has been Ramzan Kadyrov, the flamboyant 38-year-old president of Chechnya (part of the Russian Federation), who advocates polygamy as part of ‘traditional Muslim culture’. Veteran ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhironovsky has long held that polygamy is the solution for ‘Russia’s 10 million unmarried women’.