BRISTOL, July 4 (RIA Novosti), Mark Hirst – A former senior British military officer and graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College has told RIA Novosti that arming and training 100,000 Syrian rebels would have been a better option than the situation that has emerged in the region today.
Retired Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Crawford told RIA Novosti, “We’re not talking about good or bad, we’re talking about least worst options."
“Possibly with hindsight, arming and training the conventional Syrian opposition to President Assad would have been a better option to what we have now,” Crawford added.
Crawford was responding after the BBC revealed a previously secret plan by the head of the UK armed forces, General Sir David Richards, to arm and train a 100,000-strong army of Syrian rebels to overthrow President Bashar Assad.
The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, directly considered the plan, along with the National Security Council and US Government officials, but ultimately decided such a move carried too many risks.
“I was generally pro-intervention,” Crawford told RIA Novosti. “The fact that others, like General Richards, were thinking along the same lines perhaps shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.”
Crawford told RIA Novosti that he believed implementation of Richards plan, known as “extract, equip, train," would not have reduced the number of young Muslims from Britain travelling to Syria, becoming more radicalized then returning home and posing a security risk to the UK.
“The people who have been radicalized, not surprisingly, join the radical elements out there,” Crawford told RIA Novosti. “Would there have been any difference to that had we gone down the root of conventional support to the Syrian political opposition? I don’t think we can say it was an either or.”
“It could have been perfectly possible for the Richards plan to be implemented and still young radicals would have gone out to join the more radical elements like ISIS,” Crawford added.
The West’s plan to intervene in Syria was ultimately frustrated after the UK Government lost a crucial vote in the British Parliament when parliamentarians rejected proposals to back rebels. Many MPs feared it would repeat the mistakes of the Iraq war.
But Crawford suggested that had military intervention in Syria by the West proceeded, as the political leadership of the US and UK had wanted, then the rise of radical Jihadi groups, such as ISIS, which are currently sweeping through Iraq, might have been curtailed.
“The interesting political question is, had the Richards plan been implemented would ISIS have been able to flourish? I think with hindsight, given what we see now, that we had a moral and ethical obligation to intervene in the Syrian conflict, if only to protect those who cannot protect themselves,” Crawford added.
