Terrorist Sympathiser

I found out very recently that I am a terrorist sympathiser.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because I don't believe that a bombing campaign, or even a full-fledged all-arms military campaign, in Syria will actually get rid of Islamic State or reduce their ability to hurt us, which leads me to think that signing off on a bombing campaign is a bad idea.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because I don't believe that the Russian bombing campaign is achieving the goals we are being told it is, because the Russian air force is busy flattening targets identified by President Assad's loyalists. It's fairly likely, therefore, the Russian bombing campaign is busy killing everyone that isn't in Assad's camp - which includes the 70,000 on-the-ground fighters that our government has quoted as being the actual troops with which IS will be defeated.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because I don't believe that any other nation's bombing of targets in the region made anyone on Earth any safer, which is in part borne out by the fact that bombing has been occurring long before the terror attacks on Paris, the Lebanon and Iraq took place. In fact, it is perhaps up for debate that the bombing campaign conducted by the French air force may have led to Paris being targeted either directly or indirectly, having the opposite of the intended effect.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because the military situation as it stands is less like World War 2, with very clearly delineated battle lines and forces, and far more like the Vietnam War. Even with close eyes on the ground, we can guarantee that there will be civilian casualties. It is inconceivable that there won't be. Several nations are basically okay with this, and several people within this nation are likewise - I am not.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because every single time we interfere with the Middle East, we cause more problems than we solve. It's like a wound that we made, that we can't help but touch and scratch and toy with. The story repeats itself, constantly, over and over again. We arm and support the rebels, or we arm and support the establishment, and people die. More and more people die. Because everyone remembers that the Russians were the antagonists of Rambo 3, but everyone forgets that the good guys became the Taliban.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because every house we blow up, every school we implode, every building we collapse produces more people fleeing for their lives from a nation already riddled with war and death. Many of those people will try and come here. Shamefully, a significant amount of British citizens have shown themselves as finding this situation intolerable; they seem to be the same people who are very much in support of an action that would create yet more of those same refugees.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because the loadout of a single strike aircraft costs enough to house and feed a significant percentage of the homeless in this country. A single Storm Shadow missile costs almost £800,000. If we fire six Storm Shadow missiles, that is the cost of a brand new hospital, fully staffed and with all modern technology and equipment. At a time when the public infrastructure is (some might say deliberately) overtaxed and under-budgeted, it is sheer madness to literally throw away such sums of money on achieving - as mentioned before - very little.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because our Prime Minister is showing himself to be an insecure schoolboy, desperately trying to show off to his head-of-state peers, and is willing to risk lives to do so. He wants to prove he's just as tough and brave as all of his chums, and will bully his opposition and cajole them until they let him go along with his multi-million-pound ego trip. He is the one that labelled me a sympathiser, in fact; it's a label he has dished out to everyone not siding with him in today's debate. He claims that inaction is not a strategy, as do many others. I can name two dozen nations that have done nothing and not suffered terrorist attacks at the hands of IS. It seems to be quite an effective strategy.

Finally, I am a terrorist sympathiser because if the powers that be insist on using this kind of rhetoric to reinforce their power and control over the citizenry, then I cannot conscientiously align myself with them. The greatest threat to our way of life today is not a group of militants in a far-away country - nor is that greatest threat a group of individuals who have lived in their target country for a significant period of time, far away from the far-away country that it is proposed that we bomb.

The greatest threat to our way of life is people like David Cameron, who truly believe that the best way to govern a nation is to drive it into austerity - for whom the health and wealth of corporate entities is of greater importance than the population of the nation. IS will never control Europe; but significant parts of Europe are already under the control of people like David Cameron. A man who marries himself to toxic media empires and desperately finger-points and blusters to protect his friends in office, regardless of their evil and incompetence. A man whose political stance is that of doing harm to his citizens, over and over again - death by a thousand cuts.

If all of these beliefs, all of these logical processes make me a terrorist sympathiser, then I will wear that label, and I will wear it with a defiant pride. I will not be intimidated by those who use fear to try and achieve their political ends - David Cameron - into forsaking my morals and my conscience.

I am a terrorist sympathiser.

Just ask the terrorists.