Sending aid to Aleppo is the very least we can do after our appalling inaction in Syria When the clownish figure of the libertarian candidate for US president, Gary Johnson, in a campaign interview asked “What is […]

When the clownish figure of the libertarian candidate for US president, Gary Johnson, in a campaign interview asked “What is Aleppo?” he was rightly lampooned. But more attention should have been paid to what he said next, once he got his answer:

“Well, with regard to Syria, I do think that it’s a mess, and the only way that we deal with Syria is to join hands with Russia to diplomatically bring that at an end.”

How many of those chuckling at Johnson’s ignorance have said the same? They wouldn’t be alone. For much of the nearly six year conflict, government policy here and abroad has been to ask Mr Putin to ask Mr Assad to stop killing people. Somehow this has passed as the height of political wisdom, and still holds its reputation as Putin and Assad make short work of anyone still breathing in Aleppo.

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“There was a big signature campaign asking UK forces to drop food baskets on Syria instead of bombs, and they just ignored it. At that time I really lost the last hope I had in the UK.” Zaina Erhaim, Syrian journalist

Jo Cox: ‘Syria’s been an orphan in geo-political strategy’

When I interviewed the now late Jo Cox MP back in February in her capacity as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Syria, she was scathing about government inaction, both here and in Washington. “The Obama administration has actually been appalling on this,” she told me. “They’ve blocked action, and they’ve completely focussed on first the Iranian nuclear deal, to the detriment of Syria … So Syria’s been an orphan in geo-political strategy, and that’s had massive consequences.”

But she didn’t accept this as an excuse to do nothing, “having seen other foreign policy crises where the UK working with the French have bumped America into a more aggressive position”. Of course there’s much we could do, with or without the US, (where president-elect Trump will likely strengthen Obama’s de facto alliance with Russia). Look how quickly parliament leaped into the Syrian fray when it wanted to strike ISIS.

We were asked to drop food baskets. We didn’t

The hypocrisy isn’t lost on Syrians. I spoke to reporter Zaina Erhaim, who has trained female journalists in Aleppo, while she was stuck in London in October. (Her passport had been seized at the airport after Assad reported it stolen.) When I asked what she thought of a recent parliamentary debate on Aleppo, her reply was admirably polite.

Spain is changing its clocks to reverse General Franco’s decision to synchronise Spanish time with that of Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, Putin and Assad are turning the clock back to the barbarity of the 1930s

“There was a big signature campaign asking UK forces to drop food baskets on Syria instead of bombs,” she told me, “and they just ignored it. At that time I really lost the last hope I had in the UK.

“You already have air force flying there, so instead of killing civilians by mistake while claiming to kill Isis, you can give food to those that are besieged, and this is the only source that they can get food from. And despite that they just did nothing about it.”

Turning the clocks back

I read today that Spain is changing its clocks to reverse General Franco’s decision to synchronise Spanish time with that of Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, Putin and Assad are turning the clock back to the barbarity of the 1930s.

The revolutionaries of those days had a slogan, rescued from history for a younger generation by the Manic Street Preachers: “If you tolerate this, your children will be next.” The violence in Syria has already reached the children of Paris, whose killers were forged by war (either directly or by example). Millions fleeing the war no-one wanted to “make worse” are a free gift for demagogues from Ankara to Washington. And still we wring our hands, send a few Tweets, and go to bed.

George Orwell closed Homage to Catalonia, his book on the war in Spain, with a line that always stops me cold. Surveying the green and pleasant land he so loved – the cricket, the red buses, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square – he saw them “all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”

You can help send aid to people in Syria through the Human Appeal, Doctors without borders, and Unicef.

Adam Barnett is a journalist and Staff Writer for Left Foot Forward. He tweets at @AdamBarnett13