“It’s nonsense – we know he wants scrap Trident, abandon our allies and would rather talk to Daesh than strike its barbaric leader. We all want peace, but you can’t take tea with terrorists who order attacks on innocent civilians on our streets.”.
Mike Penning, an armed forces minister, has already emerged from the national security Establishment to fire off propaganda demonising Jeremy Corbyn as a 'national security threat'. The attacks are the rhetorical equivalent of Drone strikes, designed as character assassination designed to snuff out the messenger before any message is credible
Corbyn, as it happens, is anti-American in a more or less reflexive way, tending to oppose any war Britain has or could join as being one of Imperialism. As a consequence, Corbyn rarely involved himself as any genuine intellectual level with the arguments for or against 'liberal' or 'humanitarian intervention'.
Corbyn was 'anti-war' because war was always and everywhere bad and evil: he was against war and, therefore, he positioned himself with radical, largely London based radicals as champion of their in group righteousness from the backbenches of Parliament in his capacity as MP for Islington, preaching to the converted.
Consequently, opposition to wars mean opposition as a 'stance' and trying to find any facts or evidence that the British state was acting not for the highest of motives but for the basest. The idea of looking at more complicated and nuanced explanation for being drawn into wars in the Middle East, one more disturbing, did not happen.
Opposition to Trident on its own rationale, that it is not of much military use and is just about Britain's absurd status as Global Player, was not made by Corbyn : he would just avoid those grounds for not renewing it and make the usual platitudes about working towards a world of peace in which nuclear weapons would never need to be used.
Penning insinuates Corbyn has said things he has not: not unconditionally following the US into a war in Syria against Assad is not about "abandoning our allies". But so long as Corbyn could be portrayed as advocating that, so long as those allies mean the US and unmentioned others, no arguments further are needed.
These allies include Saudi Arabia, the globe's leading promoter of intolerant Wahhabi Islam which executes people for sorcery and witchcraft and helped bankroll and back with arms the Sunni jihadist militias within the FSA, that helped create the space and opportunity for ISIS to gain ground in Syria and storm into Iraq in 2014.
Corbyn's a flop on foreign policy, preferring to emit banal wooden platitudes about peace and love in a regional context of the Middle East where it's absurd. But he's right in challenging the equally absurd 'national security' pretext used to justify genuflecting before Riyadh on foreign policy. IS is a clone of the Saudi state in many ways.
Of course, nothing much on Saudi Arabia and the creation of the Jihadi threats that menace Britain is going to be discussed in this General Election for reasons of 'national security'. Corbyn would be under pressure just to stick to certain vacuous and populist riffs about the 'need for political settlement' and why peace is good.
The only way of opening up a proper debate would be to start criticising May's government for making Britain's streets unsafe by appeasing radical jihadism in aligning with the Gulf states over Libya and Syria, in the mistaken hope that 'democracy promotion' could be advanced over the geopolitical ambitions of their Arab clients.
The problem is that the Labour grandees who resent Corbyn being there are too firmly and unconditionally aligned with the US, that irrespective of President Trump being a bit politically incorrect, 'security is security, interests are interests'. These include the lucrative arms deals and collusion with the Saudi military and air force.
If Corbyn were to take on these interests and criticise Britain for being directly complicit in the slaughter visited upon Yemen, irrespective of its attempt to take a 'moral stance' on alleged gas attacks by Assad's forces in Syria, the Labour hierarchy, all connected to US funded think-tanks and trained in an Atlanticist doctrines, would conspire against him.
Lacking any real perspective of way of understanding how ISIS came into being, though aware Iraq had something to do with it, the majority of the British people will see Corbyn as 'soft on terrorism', not least as he is associated with a StWC which is seen wrongly as either as naively pacifist or rightly as dominated by shifty ideologues.
After the General Election, when Corbyn is removed, a new Leader will realign with the Correct Position, showing a certain amount of supposed 'independence' in criticising the choreography used to justify aligning shoulder-to-shoulder with the US over Syria. The usual platitudes will be emitted by PM May over Syria and the media will repeat them.
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