Warnings emerge over backlash of UK strikes on ISIL

Reactions have emerged to an announcement that the British Prime Minister David Cameron is preparing to present a plan to launch military strikes against ISIL terrorist in Syria to lawmakers. Analysts are speculating that Prime Minister Cameron is set to go ahead with his plan for military intervention in Syria, but are already warning that Britain will have to face a backlash from this that will affect the country for many years to come.

Anna O’Leary, a journalist and political commentator based in Ireland, has told Press TV that the costs for Britain to go to a new war in the Middle East will be high.

O’Leary said the British public is against Cameron’s decision to take the country to fight ISIL terrorists.

Nevertheless, she emphasized that the government is determined to go ahead with its plan for military action in Syria regardless to whether there is any public support for this or not.  

“Britain is going to war regardless of the public opinion. And they will use the UN Security Council resolutions asking nations to combat by all means the ISIL (or Daesh) as an excuse,” O’Leary told Press TV’s UK Desk in an exclusive interview.

She added that while the British public has learned from the lessons of the war with Iraq in 2003, the government has proved that it has not learned much from a campaign that eventually put the former premier Tony Blair under fire.         

Britain will end up in a war with ISIL, O’Leary said, stressing that there will be a backlash from which the country’s future generations will suffer.  

“There will be a backlash. Our children’s children will be paying for this,” she said. O’Leary added that any military action against the terrorists in Syria and Iraq will radicalized a limited population of minorities in Britain, but warned that the same group will be dangerous enough to cause harm to Britain.    

“A backlash will go for a hundred years perhaps.  We are going to do something like what the Crusaders did long time ago again and it is very testing times.”

Other analysts believe that taking military action against ISIL terrorists, a plan that Prime Minister Cameron is apparently pushing ahead, will only deteriorate the problem of terrorism.  

Nigel Flanagan, a political commentator based in Switzerland, has told Press TV that the world needs to specifically address propaganda tactics by ISIL terrorists to create its supporter base around the world. 

An example of such tactics, he said, is the so-called “Crusader narrative” used to provoke Muslims around the world against the Western countries.   

That narrative, Flanagan further warned, is already leading to a surge in support for ISIL thanks to the military actions by Western states against the terrorists in Iraq and Syria. 

“An incredibly complicated situation has a simple solution: Stop the bombing, stop the military involvement, and destroy the Crusader narrative,” he told Press TV’s UK Desk. 

“We need to end the sectarianism in Iraq, we need to stabilize in Libya, we have to deal with Saudi Arabia and its funding of terrorism, we have to help close the Turkish border,” Flanagan added.  

But most of all, he added, we have to stop the bombing. That’s an intelligent, a humanitarian and a democratic way we resolve the issue of terrorism.

“The current British government does not have those humanitarian and democratic ideals,” Flanagan added. “It simply wants to protect the British, American, and French and Western imperial and economic ingestion of the Middle East.”            

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