Following the Paris attacks, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron pressed for the UK to join France in bombing terrorist bases in Syria, maintaining that Britain can contribute to the destruction of Daesh and while also enhancing his country’s domestic security.

Cameron’s problem was that his Conservative Party could not get sufficient parliamentary votes for military action without backing from the Labour Party. Labour’s left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, along with much of his party’s membership, is opposed to such action. But the prime minister was rescued by senior colleagues of Corbyn and Labour MPs who voted for it — with grievous consequences for the credibility of Corbyn’s leadership. The parliamentary vote regarding intervention in Syria on Dec. 2 gave Cameron a sizable mandate to initiate a bombing campaign which has been greeted with dismay by British Muslims and which appears to enjoy the support of no more than 48 percent of the wider British public.

Since the UK is already bombing terrorist targets in Iraq, there was, ministers argued, no logic in agonizing about whether to join the US-led coalition already carrying out air strikes in Syria. However, respected commentators believe that Britain is at risk of repeating its ill-starred interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, even though British airstrikes in Syria will of necessity be on a modest scale.

They doubt that Britain can help, as Cameron insists, to strengthen the alleged 70,000 strong Syrian ‘moderate opposition’; indeed they doubt that such an entity exists. Many are also skeptical about claims that the UK can bring a special precision to bombing, reducing the possibility of civilian casualties.

It is an unhappy circumstance that the British parliament debated the Syrian issue in advance of the publication of the delayed Chilcot inquiry report into the Iraq war, expected as it is to have vital lessons to impart for Britain’s conduct as a military power. In truth, the debate has been caught up in crude party politics. In 2013, the then UK Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government led by David Cameron was defeated over a motion to bomb Syria with the aim at that time of destroying not Daesh but the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad. Cameron was defeated because the Labour Party, under its former leader Ed Miliband, voted against intervention. The defeat was experienced as a bitter humiliation by Cameron and his party. Though some Conservatives were, and remain, opposed to intervening in Syria, the party has nursed a tribal hunger for revenge.

Jibing that Jeremy Corbyn is a ‘terrorist sympathizer’, David Cameron has sought to turn the Syria debate to blatant party political advantage. Over the Syria issue, there has, to be sure, been a sense of British politicians fighting their own petty private wars, though in the great parliamentary debate on Dec. 2 the impression was of an entire British political class united in a sense of its own high-mindedness. Steeped in their country’s imperial traditions, the very culture of the British parliament encourages politicians to regard themselves as heirs to a noble past, honor-bound to proclaim that Britain still matters greatly in world affairs. Ministers speak of the need to ‘punch above our weight,’ never stopping to consider why they are punching — or that punching is apt to be seen as an act of aggression, a provocation that may have complex and far-reaching repercussions.

Yet few will be surprised if UK participation in bombing Syria fails to eradicate Daesh or to provide an antidote to Europe’s security crisis. Many suspect that the West’s enemies will be delighted by British intervention in Syria. And after all, it is the palpable aim of Daesh to promote discord between Muslims and wider society in Britain and France and elsewhere, with the ultimate objective of convincing Europe’s Muslims that they face an inexorable choice: either to betray their faith and commit themselves to the secular west or to throw in their lot with Daesh. By all accounts, Britain already harbors a hard core of dangerous radicals. That British military intervention in Syria will lead to more radicalization seems all too probable. Far from delivering positive results, it may even nourish the very forces it seeks to destroy.