There are two major problems with presenting Corbyn’s foreign policy as progressive and popular. The first being that his foreign policy demonstrably wasn’t progressive, the second being that his foreign policy demonstrably wasn’t popular.
While Iraqi Yazidis were facing genocide on Mt Sinjar, Corbyn was busy opposing the air campaign that saved their lives. A campaign that was *overwhelmingly* supported by the electorate. No, Corbyn was never “demonised” over this, his supporters don’t even concede he was wrong.
You can disagree with me all you want, but the strength of the polling at the time, even to extend air strikes into Syria, is irrefutable. He got it wrong both morally and politically. You can't learn lessons in politics if you refuse to analyse the evidence in front of you.
Skripal and ISIS are major examples of where Corbyn got it wrong and the public noticed. Corbyn also denied mass graves in Kosovo and invited a member of the Assad regime to parliament to deny chemical weapons attacks. These are times he got it wrong & the public didn't notice.
The reality is that, outside of Hamas/Hezbollah/IRA, and some occasional lines about Venezuela, the mainstream press never bothered to really scrutinise Corbyn's foreign policy history. Far from demonisation, he got off lightly, which is an astonishing thing to say in context.
Here is Corbyn sitting down with the Assad regime's Mother Agnes, who was in London to deny her regime's responsibility for chemical weapons attacks. I never saw this asked about on Newsnight or on the front page of the Telegraph. It should have been. He got off lightly.
The incident above was important enough for Owen Jones to pull out of a Stop The War Coalition event in protest at her inclusion, yet was never important enough for a single question to be asked about it to either of them during his tenure as leader.
Honestly I spend too much of my time worrying about what the foreign policy platform of the country's main opposition party is, but I really have spent years dedicated to this topic, because I passionately believe in a progressive & human rights focused FP thecritic.co.uk/issues/april-2…
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I want all dictatorships to be replaced with democracies.
As a liberal democrat, by definition, I oppose all regimes.
I support revolutions to overthrow regimes.
Put “regime change fanatic” on my tombstone, that’s fine.
I am a regime change fanatic & you @aaronjmate are an accomplice to Assad’s war crimes, who advocated for him at the UN, at the invitation of the Russian government, and you and your colleagues, for pay, were the propaganda wing of a regime engaged in industrial human slaughter.
@aaronjmate Both of us are still relatively young, but I need you to understand this, I promise you, I will spend the rest of my life making sure none of you ever truly know of a moment of peace.
And when I am in Syria, I will be searching through Mukhabarat documents for your names.
What is happening in Syria today is happening in spite of those foreign policy decisions, and in spite of those who presented Assad’s victory as the only possible resolution to the Syrian civil war.
Now the conflict is no longer in the hands of the western powers.
The US & Russia effectively came to an agreement that Assad should stay in 2015, and 9 years later, the consequences of that monstrous, despicable decision are rippling out across Syria.
These people always fundamentally misunderstood why Syrians tried to topple the regime.
Imagine having a discussion about Lebanese sovereignty vis-a-vis Hezbollah without even acknowledging Hezbollah’s very existence violates my country’s sovereignty.
I’m insulting you because you are no longer even attempting to disguise your deference to Hezbollah.
You aren’t talking about Lebanon in this, you’re talking about Hezbollah, no matter how much you want to backpedal when called out on it.
Yes, you are right that Israel violates Lebanese sovereignty and we Lebanese want that to end permanently, but you aren’t even paying lip service to the fact that our entire state has been hijacked by an Iranian proxy terrorist organisation, that has murdered our people for generations, launched a war without the consent of the country, which it then lost, at huge cost to the Lebanese people, and your only comment on this so far is to complain that Hezbollah don’t get favourable enough terms in their defeat agreement.
I’m so beyond respectful disagreement on this, if you want to have your arse kissed, go back on Owen Jones’ show, where you will get the kind of ill-informed ignorance that will never challenge anything you say.
Denying being deferential to Hezbollah/Iran while wholesale accepting Iran’s “resistance” narrative for financing, training and arming groups who brutalise and oppress their native populations.
There is such a deep rot in academia on this issue, it’s beyond absurd.
For context on how seismic Hezbollah’s decapitation is politically, from the perspective of most of the Middle East the Iranian “Resistance Axis”, of which Hezbollah is a critical component, has never “lost” a war, and have come out with some kind of victory in every conflict.
That image of invulnerability was bought and paid for mostly with Arab blood, with very little domestic impact on Iran, despite the vast sums it was pumping into its proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
Hezbollah was the crown jewel of the IRGC network.
The battle-hardened, totally asymmetric domination Hezbollah had over not just Lebanon but the wider Levant region, has had its entire command and control structure from bottom to top systematically liquidated in the space of a week. The people enforcing the status quo are gone.