Today the Transparency of Lobbying, Non Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill goes to Parliament, as of course you already know.

The lengthy title and the highlighting of the word ‘transparency’ probably mean you are fairly bored but on the whole positive about this piece of prospective legislation at the moment: maybe you hope that it might represent Nick Clegg finally coming good on a promise to the electorate and cleaning up politics. If you’re a member of the Labour party, or a sympathiser, you might expect it to curb some of what you see as the egregious power, exercised through backroom lobbying, of Unite and the other big trade unions.

In reality, this law is a disaster. The statutory body that will be empowered to administer it, the Electoral Commission, has called it ‘impossible to enforce’, and Parliament’s own Political & Constitutional Reform Committee is seething because it is scheduled to host the consultation on this issue on the very same day the government introduces its bill. Our local MP, Andrew Smith, has called it ‘profoundly undemocratic’.

Why does one more piece of poorly written and rushed legislation matter, in a news cycle dominated by the unimaginable suffering of the people of Syria? This new law deserves your attention, Oxford student, because, believe it or not, it has the potential seriously to undermine the work of your student union. Under the new law, any expenditure by OUSU that could potentially be seen as relating to politics will have to be approved through a cumbersome process that will be administratively cripping for such a small organisation.

Of course OUSU shouldn’t be party political, and despite what some mutter in the back room of the KA, it isn’t. It must, though, engage with current political issues: as OUSU’s sabbatical offers go into bat for an increase in student support and bursary money from the University in Michaelmas, they must take into account, and use in their arguments, major events that have disproportionately affected students: the economic crisis means more people’s parents are less able to offer any financial support, and that vacation work is harder to get hold of; the increase in tuition fees could continue to have long term affects on access work; and the reduction in government financial support for higher education is, as you would expect, tightening budgets across the University. 

All these changes are political. They are covered by the new law-to-be. If OUSU wants, as it surely must, to raise awareness about this campaign among Oxford students; if it wants to involve Oxford students in its campaigning to make sure that the University spends as much as is humanly possible on securing the financial means for any student who is offered a place to take that place up and complete their course, then it will have to spend precious resources, both the time of sabbatical officers and the hard-won extra money granted by the University this year, on the ‘significant new burdens’ (again from the Electoral Commission) of form-filling and box-ticking this law requires.

Many Oxford students, often for very valid reasons, are suspicious of OUSU. In this case, though, if we don’t speak up and try and prevent the passage of this horror-story-bill, we will stymie any chance of really effective campaigning that could deliver more money to help the poorest of our fellow students. Such a failure to act would be negligent in the extreme, and in a University constantly under attack as a citadel of the posh and the privileged, a Student Union equipped to campaign for fair and generous student finance is a key weapon: we must not lose it. Write to your MP. Tweet. Blog. Act. Save OUSU’s ability to campaign for students.

“Never again,” we like to tell ourselves, again and again. Looking back, we know Thomas Hardy was right to anticipate “all nations striving strong to make red war yet redder”; the so-called “war to end all wars”, beginning in 1914 with Gavrilo Princip’s bullet of the century, would not really end until 1991. Outlived as he was by the old men who sent him to die, Wilfred Owen’s glib submission “dulce et decorum est” should represent more than anything else the grim legacy our generation inherited from the 20^th century. Our heroes showcase a grand hatred of war.

Except we see the world beyond through different spectacles. The student voice, which in the 1960s called on Britain to take a moral lead in the world, drops dead with apathy or sinks into “post-colonialist” hysteria whenever faced with foreign conflicts; the Labour Party has been mellowed by a populist sickness that chases after old Tory slogans; and Barack Obama, with his innocuous charm and Nobel Prize to think of, would rather pretend there is no war than bring it to an end.

The Arab world’s Franz Ferdinand moment was the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in 2011. He would cause the downfall of four governments and two civil wars. In Syria, a refugee crisis unparalleled in modern times and a death toll perhaps matching a decade in Iraq shows no sign of abating; and our moral obligation to act has grown with every passing day in which we have excused ourselves from doing so.

Even if Iran, Russia and Syria’s neighbouring Arab governments hadn’t already turned the civil conflict into an international (and imperialist) war then it wouldn’t matter in the slightest. Chamberlain’s grisly dismissal of the “quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing”, with which he would justify his capitulation of the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938, would be as feeble a defence against fascism as the paper on which “Peace for Our Time” was written. The attempt to absolve ourselves of the common allegiances human beings owe to one another is a twin terror, morally and pragmatically.

So if it would be “illegal” to assist our Syrian comrades then the auspices of international law are not worth the hearing. This week, many are remembering King’s prophetic dictum that “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws”. To charge Putin and the Central Committee of the CPC with legal jurisdiction would be no less a farce than the proud “Anglo-Saxon” George Wallace, governor of Alabama, advising Kennedy on racial segregation. The UN’s failure to stop the wars in former Yugoslavia, its self-absolution of obligation in Rwanda, and the great negotiator Kofi Annan’s sleepwalk into the Darfur extermination can only point to two choices: the Security Council must either be democratised or be dismissed.

Those who agree with the moral imperative to intervene but who nonetheless remain sceptical of which road to take can be roughly summarised into: those awaiting the UN’s report on the attacks, those who know that jihadists are as bad as Assad, and those who believe that, given these variables, involving ourselves can only worsen the situation. All three concerns need to be chewed over – and spat out.

The first is irrelevant. If the rebels are responsible then chemical weapons are loose in a sectarian bloodbath. But if, as expected, Assad is indeed calling our bluff, then it’s worth remembering that the nadir of war criminality occurred quite some time ago as the exposure of torture chambers for “terrorists” – unarmed civilians and their children – by human rights groups has already revealed. Assad is simply becoming more promiscuous of his attraction to savagery. 

So whatever the case, annihilating a few weapons has little worth if the armed murderers remain in play. In the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell’s hatred of the Soviet forces did not choke his support for the Republican government. America is in a better position than he was then – it can fight both the regime and the clerical fascists who fantasise of replacing him. Britain’s resolution at the UN proposes “all necessary measures to protect civilians” which as a principle, though certain to be thrown out by Russia and China, is pretty strong: because it implicitly recognises that support for the opposition must be conditional on humanitarian essentials.

And, as policy-makers well know, a secular victory is not as mad as it seems. American cooperation with Turkey, Jordan and (possibly) Israel could enforce a no-fly zone to snuff out the last bases through which Assad gets his foreign supplies; it can provide better training and much more sophisticated equipment to the Jordanian-backed southern groups pushing against both the regime and al Qaeda affiliates. In the north, videos emerging of incredibly brave Syrian civilians standing up to jihadists are far from anomalous: five cities under the control of the Islamic State in the north have reported protests against their occupiers, their Sharia impositions more likely to horrify than convert.

The rise of the Nusra Front and Islamic State is a result of the collapse of the Syrian economy, upon which they have feasted, together with the total isolation of the FSA secularists when set against their religious rivals. Not only will bolstering the FSA encourage regime defections, but it might also lure back lost regiments. Vermin thrive in the dirt, just as fascists thrive in poverty; and to isolate the masters, you feed their slaves.

For socialists, the absolute midnight of the 20^th century was said to be the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the moment when far left and right totalitarianism collaborated against the free world. It is difficult to be sure of the exact hour in Syria, only that it is not yet too late; but that the moderate opposition is shrinking every day – and that midnight is coming. 

Even though the House of Commons seems to have halted the UK’s movement towards intervention in Syria, we cannot yet be sure that other Western countries will not choose differently. Even if the UN will not support it, and even seeing as the UK government is hamstrung by a rebellious Parliament, it looks as if the US is gearing up for some sort of substantial effort. However, quite what sort of form this action would take or what it would aim to achieve is still up for debate.

[I admit that I’m not sure that there will be an intervention. It seems that way to me, but I’m quite prepared to be proved wrong by the events of the next few days.]

It is clear that the main justification for an intervention would be humanitarian. Before Parliament voted to block the principle of intervention, the UK Government outlined its legal position – “the legal basis for military action would be humanitarian intervention; the aim is to relieve humanitarian suffering by deterring or disrupting the further use of chemical weapons.” This is a view presumably shared by the US and its potential allies. However, it does not present a clear scope for intervention. Quite what is needed to deter or disrupt the use of chemical weapons is left up to the imagination of the foreign policy official.

It seems unlikely that such action will be minimal. If the US decides that it must remove the Syrian government’s capability to use such weapons, it will have to engage in serious bombing of strategic targets. It is however, the deterrence issue that is most likely to commit the US to a serious intervention. It is unlikely that the US will do anything less than fully throw their weight behind opposition forces on this front, or else they risk looking like they’ve done nothing to stop the slaughter of civilians by their government. The only deterrent factor that would really stop that would be serious US military backing for the rebel forces.

There should also be another objective. The Weapons of Mass Destruction that Assad possesses (the very certainty that the regime at least possesses these puts the lie to those drawing parallels with the Iraq War) must be seized or destroyed. This is not just in order to protect Syrian citizens – it involves a level of enlightened self-interest. Syria is by far the most unstable state out of the family that constituted the “Arab Spring”. We cannot be sure which faction will come to rule the country, or, indeed if the country will be governable at all, come the end of the current battle of attrition. In this context, it is deeply troubling that there should be chemical weapons facilities within the country, as we cannot be sure that these will not fall into the hands of militants who may use them against whatever target takes their fancy, whether it be the new regime in Cairo, the West’s most prominent ally, Israel, or perhaps even mainland Europe. It is a matter of pure pragmatism to prevent these weapons from belonging to a failed state, and one that should not be overlooked in the rush to prevent human suffering.

It is, however, far too easy to get involved in the world of the hypothetical and neglect the facts on the ground. Whilst the majority of the debate in the press has been well-argued, (bar a couple of lefty-types muttering about imperialism and some right-wingers moaning about it not being our problem), politicians have reverted to a simple narrative whereby there are two teams, one of which is the Bad Guys, headed by Assad (who is presumed guilty of a chemical weapons attack on his own people) and the other of which is the Rebels, who are presented as a homogenous group. This narrative leads to many assumptions, some of which are plainly false.

The most important of these is that there is one group that can be called “the rebels” in some meaningful sense. Whilst there is still an amount of support for the sort of liberal secularists who allegedly characterised the beginning of the Arab Spring, the majority of the rebels now belong to a patchwork quilt of Islamic fundamentalist militias, bankrolled by questionable states in the Middle East and including notable Al-Qa’ida franchises Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS. These forces are fighting a Sunni sectarian war against Shi’ites and Alawites, rather than a war of emancipation from tyranny. Their actions during the last two years of fighting have included suicide bombings, the imposition of violent misogynist laws on conquered territory and the mass shootings of secular protestors. To lump these militants in with the secularist rebels is madness, yet politicians continue to pledge unconditional support for “the rebels”.

There are no quick and easy answers here, and no good guys either. To support either side against the other is to get into bed with some really disgusting partners. If America really wants the rebels (the democratic, secularist subset thereof) to win the war, they will need to do some really tough work – a no-fly zone will not stop the country falling to Al-Qa’ida in the event of a rebel victory, and other, more limited forms of intervention may not even result in victory at all.  The problem that the US faces now is that there is very little appetite for the full-scale, boots on the ground, nation-building exercise that would be necessary. However, anything less seems to leave Syria to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea, which may be equally unpalatable to the American public in a few years’ time.

(It is perhaps just as well that the House of Commons voted to block the government’s proposed principle of “limited intervention” – it is likely that that is not what they would have ended up with.)

Every dalliance that Western powers have had in the Arab world has been marked by a total lack of curiosity, nuance, or sophistication. We can only hope that leaders take these few days to reflect on a strategy that recognises the tensions and problems on the ground and throughout the region, rather than blundering into another unfamiliar country. It should be clear by now that this doesn’t preclude intervention, although it serves to complicate it. However, if a potential intervention is to serve the needs of the Syrian people, it must be effective, as well as well-meaning. It is important that US leaders are clear about what it is to which they are committing their country should there be an intervention.