Wes Streeting hits out at Ed Miliband over Labour's failure to stop Assad

13 December 2024, 13:33

Wes Streeting has hit out at fellow Labour MP Ed Miliband for his failure to support military action against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2013.

Miliband, the current Energy Secretary, was Labour leader when he attempted to block David Cameron’s military action in Syria, over fears of chemical weapon use.

The House of Commons ultimately voted against military action 285-272, a decision that bolstered the United State’s decision to avoid intervention.

A decade later, Assad’s regime has been toppled by rebels - but Streeting believes his brutal dictatorship would have fallen sooner had the UK acted earlier.

He said: “If the West had acted faster, Assad would have been gone.”

Read more: NATO fighters scrambled as Russia launches major attack on Ukraine’s energy grid

Iain Dale pushes back against caller who claims Syria will become 'a terrorist superstate'

The UK’s hesitation “created a vacuum that Russia moved into and kept Assad in power for much longer,” he added.

Responding to the comments, Miliband said it is “just wrong” that the West could have hastened Assad’s fall.

The energy secretary added he has “no regrets” over voting against joint UK-US strikes in Syria.

He told Sky News: “No, I don’t… I welcome the fall of president Assad.

“Back in 2013 we were confronted with whether we should have a one-off, potential one-off, bombing of Syria but there was no plan for what this British involvement would mean, where it would lead and what the consequences would be and I believed that in the light of the Iraq war we could never send British troops back into combat unless we were absolutely clear about what our plan was, including what an exit strategy was.

“To those people who say that president Assad would have fallen if we had bombed him in 2013, that is obviously wrong because president Trump bombed president Assad in 2017 and 2018, so he didn’t fall.

“I welcome the fall of a brutal dictator but I think the view that some people seem to be expressing about history is just wrong.”

Miliband added that it was crucial the UK learned the “right lessons” from its invasion of Iraq.

He said: “I think it is very easy for people to say that the answer to the problems of the world is British military intervention.

“But as I said earlier, in this case we have a clear understanding of what the consequences might have been because in 2017 and 2018 there was military action against president Assad and it certainly didn’t precipitate the fall of his regime.

“I took the decisions I did because the British involvement in Iraq led to the deaths of our troops and was, rightly in my view, seen as a very serious error and so without re-going over all of that history, I think we drew the right lessons from that.”

Wes Streeting said the UK’s hesitation caused a “power vacuum” that Russia was able to benefit from.He added: “I think if the West had acted faster, Assad would have been gone.

“Would that have led to a better Syria? I don’t know. We know from our own foreign policy history that inaction is a choice, but so is action, and we’ve seen in other cases, like Libya, that it did not lead to a better future.”