British Prime Minister David Cameron took his case against the Assad regime to the House of Commons and was met with a rather rude reception.
The UK Parliament will later vote on whether to back the principle of military intervention, but the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Ed Miliband, has said MPs should not have to decide on what he called an “artificial timetable”.
Speaking in the Commons, he insisted any UK action should be based on the principle that “evidence should precede decision; not decision precede evidence”.
“I do not rule out supporting the prime minister,” Mr Miliband added. “But I believe he has to make a better case than he did today on this question.”
The debate in parliament was spirited and skeptical. But the main problem was the lack of evidence, with Cameron conceding, “Let’s not pretend there is one smoking piece of intelligence that can solve the whole problem.” Rather than a smoking gun, Cameron laid out a circumstantial case based on the Joint Intelligence Committee’s assessment (pdf). And, to put it bluntly, the assessment was poorly supported and relied on what we call in philosophy a logical fallacy called “begging the question.”
Here, the question is “who perpetrated the chemical attack on August 21st?” Cameron spent considerable time trying to prove that any attack had occurred at all, pointing to the plethora of YouTube evidence and the testimony of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) that thousands of people were treated who exhibited symptoms consistent with a chemical attack.
He argued the scale of the attack was large, that the regime had carried out 14 previous small-scale chemical attacks (who knew?), that we know that the regime has chemical weapons, and that we have no evidence that the rebels do. He argued that the fact the regime was attacking the area with conventional weapons at the time is evidence that they must be responsible for the non-conventional weapons. Finally, he relied on the following excerpt from the assessment:
It is being claimed, including by the regime, that the attacks were either faked or undertaken by the Syrian Armed Opposition. We have tested this assertion using a wide range of intelligence and open sources, and invited HMG and outside experts to help us establish whether such a thing is possible. There is no credible intelligence or other evidence to substantiate the claims or the possession of CW by the opposition. The JIC has therefore concluded that there are no plausible alternative scenarios to regime responsibility.
We also have a limited but growing body of intelligence which supports the judgement that the regime was responsible for the attacks and that they were conducted to help clear the Opposition from strategic parts of Damascus. Some of this intelligence is highly sensitive but you have had access to it all.
This is not enough. It begs the question.
It argues that the rebels did not carry out the attack because they could not have carried out the attack. But their argument is limited to the fact that they have no evidence that the rebels had access to a chemical agent that hasn’t even been positively identified, yet.
The problem is that the rebels quite possibly did have access to chemical weapons (including, potentially, sarin), as the Russians have alleged for months, an allegation made even more likely by revelations reported by the BBC in June that al-Qaeda in Iraq was making chemical weapons. In any case, the world is asking a question, and the response is that there is no question.
Furthermore, the question of motive is not addressed. The rebels had the motive, but the regime did not. If this were a murder case, we’d be prosecutors who have no murder weapon and no motive, who are relying simply on opportunity (the suspect could have done it) and a process of elimination that hasn’t eliminated another prime suspect who did have a motive.
Granted, they wave classified information in front of us as buttressing their case, but they won’t let the public see it.
This is not even close to good enough.
