The "cavorting charlatan" whose record has been ignored

One important difference between Donald Trump and Boris Johnson is that Trump was a political outsider, who made a great play of his promise to ‘drain the swamp’. By contrast, Johnson is very much a ‘swamp creature’. For this reason his record in high office deserves far more rigorous scrutiny than it’s had up to now.

A student of UK media output in recent weeks might conclude that during his two-year stint as Foreign Secretary, the only blot on Johnson’s copybook was his mishandling of the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Certainly, giving the authorities in Tehran an excuse to prolong the Iranian-British national’s imprisonment was stupid and thoughtless. However to pretend that this was his worst offence is like fulminating against Al Capone for his failure to pay income tax.

In early 2017 a top British diplomat told the BBC’s John Simpson:

“I feel deeply let down by Boris. The FCO used to be the best in the world. Now he’s made it absurd.”

It isn’t just that by persisting in the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, Johnson knowingly implicated himself in war crimes in Yemen, as serious as that is. Nor is it solely that his resignation in July last year enabled him to duck responsibility for hosting a long-planned Balkans summit, leaving senior dignitaries including the German and Austrian chancellors in the lurch. The real nadir arguably came barely two months after he took office, when he authorised UK participation in a textbook war crime in Syria.

A key part of the difficulty in discussing this dates back to the initial phase of the Arab Spring. In early 2011 it was an article of faith among western elites that we were witnessing a sort of re-run of the fall of communism. Democracy would sweep through the Middle East and North Africa, just as it did in central and eastern Europe twenty years before.

As happened with Tunisia, Egypt, Libya etc, when the movement to depose Assad began in Syria, British journalists were handed a hymn-sheet. All too many remain to this day anxious to avoid the damage to their reputations which would follow from admitting they’ve been singing crass, Whitehall-vetted nursery rhymes ever since.

For instance, western news organisations relied heavily for their coverage of the conflict on the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Astute observers had known for some time that the SOHR was actually nothing more than a lone anti-Assad émigré with a mobile phone, living in Coventry.

In May last year though, Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday went a stage further, exposing Rami Abdulrahman as a UK government employee. Yet the mainstream media establishment responded by closing its eyes and putting its hands over its ears. This is the truth-allergic environment which has allowed Johnson to get away with murder.

Deir ez-Zour is a city in eastern Syria, on the banks of the Euphrates. Islamist terror group Jabhat al-Nusra had its headquarters here from 2012 until 2014, when it was displaced by ISIS-Daesh. Damascus however retained control of a military base on the outskirts, supplied by air from more secure government-held areas further west.

On 17 September 2016, this base came under sustained attack (lasting about an hour) from warplanes and drones belonging to the US, UK, Australia and Denmark. 106 Syrian troops are believed to have been killed, with over a hundred wounded. The official line from the countries involved (none of whom had any legal entitlement to undertake military operations in Syria) was that the bombing was a “mistake”. Before accepting this narrative at face value, it’s worth trying to get a clearer picture of the immediate context.

A week earlier, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov announced they had agreed a ceasefire after 16 hours of talks, to come into force two days later. Details of the agreement were kept under wraps, but it was subsequently revealed that Washington had been obliged to disengage the so-called moderate opposition from known terror groups.

If it had held for a week and adequate progress had been made as it were in ‘detoxifying’ the opposition, the agreement called for the commencement of joint US-Russian air operations against hard-line Islamist groups such as al-Nusra and ISIS-Daesh. Deir ez-Zour’s “accidental” bombing came less than 48 hours before this part of the agreement was due to be put into effect.

The brutal massacre of Syrians defending their own country from ISIS terrorists was in fact calculated to mortally wound a ceasefire which hawks like Johnson in western capitals couldn’t stomach. Two days after it took place, a horrifying assault on a UN aid convoy near Aleppo (in the presence of forces on the ground with a vital stake in consigning the ceasefire to history) was the coup de grace.

In 1986 Tam Dalyell MP was so exercised by an aspect of the Westland Affair, he launched into a tirade against then PM Margaret Thatcher which some people thought went too far:

“The prime minister is a sustained, brazen deceiver, now hiding behind cynical performances. She is a bounder, a liar, a deceiver, a cheat, a crook and a disgrace to the House of Commons”.

An irony of today’s politics is that more or less the same litany is considered by many, including some of his most adoring fans, to be “priced in” when assessing Johnson’s suitability for the top job. The ‘scary clown’ whose gratuitous Russia-bashing made a mockery of genuine diplomacy, a ‘nasty piece of work’ (in Eddie Mair’s memorable phrase) and an inveterate dealer in falsehood, Boris Johnson is also a war criminal. He’s the bullet we can’t afford not to dodge.