Britain won’t participate in any airstrikes on Syria but otherwise is ruling nothing out as it considers how to support President Barack Obama’s plan to root out the Islamic State group, the British foreign secretary said Thursday.
Obama on Wednesday authorized U.S. airstrikes inside Syria for the first time, along with expanded strikes in Iraq as part of “a steady, relentless effort” to root out the extremists.
“Britain will not be taking part in any airstrikes in Syria,” Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said in Berlin. He said London won’t be “revisiting” the issue after Parliament decided last year against participating in airstrikes.
Germany has decided to arm Kurdish forces fighting extremists, putting aside its usual reluctance to send weapons into conflicts. Asked about participating in airstrikes, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said: “We have neither been asked to do that, nor will we do that.”
Hammond said British officials “will look very carefully at the U.S.-led plan, and we will look at how the U.K. can best contribute to that plan, ruling nothing out at this stage.”
Both ministers said a regional alliance is needed against Islamic State fighters, but they made no new commitments.
France has invited officials from Europe, the U.S., the Arab region and Russia to meet in Paris on Monday to discuss strategy against the group. Steinmeier has invited his Group of Seven counterparts to discuss the issue on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York later this month.
Asked whether Iran needs to be involved in the drive to stabilize Iraq and Syria, Steinmeier said he has long made clear that “in the long run, Iran’s participation will be unavoidable” in resolving Syria’s conflict.
Hammond said that “the Iranians have shown themselves willing to engage pragmatically” in Iraq, although differences with the West over its nuclear program persist.
The Middle East is complex and “there will be shifting patterns of cooperation around different issues, but I hope we will all see over the coming months a sustained improvement in relations with Iran,” he said.
(AP)
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7 Responses
Britain may be going out of business next week. If it splits up, it isn’t clear what happens to its armed forces but some of the British politicians suggest that England without Scotland would be more of in a league with countries such as Netherlands, Canada or Sweden, rather than being a leading second-tier power such as France, Japan, or Germany.
Britain is afraid to upset its Muslim population.
akuperma: Scotland to Britain is like what New Jersey is to the U.S. The U.S. essentially remains the same U.S. if NJ secedes, even if it is a blow to prestige and not something we’d like. Scotland is a small part of the U.K.’s population.
Besides, it isn’t gonna secede. Stop believing pollsters until the last poll.
#3Foolish
Scotland is has been since James I thoroughly integral to the Britain’s identity
It will to devolve from once Great Britain to (Little) BRITAIN
The United Kingdom ranks as one of the most successful marriages in history. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have survived ancient hatreds, tribal rivalry and war. Each nation has been enriched by a journey of enlightenment, empire, shared energy and enterprise.
In eight days’ time, this splendid mess of a union, to quote Simon Schama, the British historian, risks being separated into its national parts..
Empires and nation states are not immune to break-up, but there is little precedent for a hitherto stable modern democracy splitting apart in peacetime, in the middle of an economic recovery. This is not the time for recrimination. For the moment, it is enough for this newspaper to declare that the path of separation is a fool’s errand, one fraught with danger and uncertainty.
Scotland is a proud and vibrant nation. Scots have contributed disproportionately to the union. They have played a leading role in arts, commerce, literature, the military, politics and sport. But a vote in favour of secession would be an irreversible act with profound consequences, not merely for 5m Scots but also for the other 58m citizens of England, Wales and Northern Ireland (including 750,000 Scots living and working outside Scotland who under the terms of the referendum have no say on the future of their country)..
A union born of a now-lost empire is one entirely suited to the world of the 21st century. The nation states that prosper in the age of globalisation are ones that bind themselves together in mutual endeavour. The experience of small states in the wake of the financial crisis is far from happy. Iceland and Ireland were left cruelly exposed. Further east, the Baltic states, brave and resourceful as the Scots, are members of the EU and Nato but still feel vulnerable to the bear’s paw of a revanchist Russia..
The debate about devolving power to Scotland goes back more than a century. Keir Hardie, the Scottish Labour leader, proposed home rule in 1888 but his call carried little resonance. Scots were playing a leading role in ruling one-quarter of the world’s population. Glasgow was famed as the “second city of the empire”.
The ties that bind have loosened over the past 70 years. The empire is gone, and the workshop of the world is no more. Scotland’s transition to a post-industrialised economy has been painful, though its overall economic performance over recent decades has been strong.
England and Scotland have grown apart politically. In the 1950s, the Conservative and Unionist party – to remind David Cameron’s party of its proper name – had an absolute majority of parliamentary seats in Scotland. Today, the Tory party’s representation has shrunk to a single MP, partly a legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s ill-judged poll tax and the benign neglect of a strong pound which devastated manufacturing north and south of the border. The discovery of North Sea oil in the 1960s further reinforced Scottish nationalism..
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From the red benches of the House of Lords to the most exclusive groves of academe, the British establishment has spent this week confronting the hitherto unthinkable: the break-up of a union that has long defined its view of the world…
Others, however, believe Whitehall was also too slow to wake up to the possibility of a Yes victory. One former permanent secretary said soundings among former colleagues suggested that, until recently, the civil service had been as complacent as the politicians about the outcome. Others report a sense of near-panic this week among officials who had assumed that No was virtually a foregone conclusion.
For Lord Hennessy, any dismembering of the UK will take Britain into territory for which it remains utterly unready, for all its past experience in colonial handovers. “This is not the extended family, as the empire used to be called, it is the immediate family,” he said. “This is flesh of our flesh. It is not severance in an ‘imperial disposal’ way; it is rending.”
The point is that as there is strong isolationist/pro-Arab/anti-military sentiment (note they have made it clear they won’t join NATO), it would be foolish of the current British government to get involved in anything military at least until the end of next week. As Britian is currently without an aircraft carrier and hasn’t owned long range bombers since World War II (they recently sold their last carrier-based planes to the US which is using them for spare parts), there isn’t much they can do at this time at least in terms of airstrikes.