There was a revealing moment on the Today programme this morning when Lord Dannatt was asked whether he accepted that the response from the British public to any further military involvement in Iraq would be uproar. His reply came quite gently, but the former Chief of the General Staff made quite clear that what should be uppermost in politicians’ minds as they considered the options for further helping the Yazidi people and other religious minorities being seriously persecuted in the country was not opinion polls in this country, but the risk of a genocide.
One of the most unedifying things about the decision that Parliament took almost a year ago on action against President Assad was that MPs seemed to be giving serious consideration to tweets and letters they’d received from constituents. By and large social media is a force for good in politics, bringing MPs closer to their electorate, but it was not encouraging that tweets or opinion polls should settle a matter of war so complex that many of those who hadn’t tweeted or written had not fully considered it.
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