It breaks my heart to watch Syria explode into violence. Let's face it: the international community has failed miserably in Syria, giving President Bashar al-Assad a "license to kill," in the words of the Qatari foreign minister. Over the weekend, Russia and China again irresponsibly used their veto power in the Security Council to block a resolution condemning Assad, abandoning innocent Syrian civilians who are being massacred daily. All 13 other Security Council members supported the resolution.
This is just the latest in a series of missed opportunities for the international community to step in and stop the violence of Assad's regime against peaceful protestors. The double-veto occurred the same weekend that the Syrian military massacred at least 300 civilians in Homs, bombarding neighborhoods with mortar shells and gunfire that wounded hundreds more. Unmistakably, Assad has been emboldened by China's and Russia's votes, knowing that as long as he has their support, there will be no international retribution for his crimes against humanity.
As the situation deteriorates, as the death toll rises and as the violence wages on, once nonviolent resisters to Assad's tyranny have increasingly taken up arms in what they now see as their only option to gain their freedom and basic rights. It is now almost impossible that conflict in Syria will end without more bloodshed or more unnecessary loss of life. International and regional institutions attempting to negotiate a peaceful solution have come to a complete standstill.
The failure of the Arab League's observer mission has greatly decreased the legitimacy of Arab League action in the region. Effective U.N. action is also all but out of the question. China and Russia have squashed Security Council action, knowing that acknowledging the right of Syrian opposition to exercise their rights to free speech and to protest would not sit well with the opposition leaders within their nations, sitting in prison because of their own resistance efforts. U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, said she was "disgusted" by the actions of Russia and China and that "any further bloodshed that flows will be on their hands."
As it becomes clear that the international community will not protect them, Syrians are increasingly concluding that civil war is their last hope. Omar Shakir, an activist from Homs, the city at the center of the protest movements, said, "Until now there is not civil war, but if the international community continues like this, just watching and doing nothing, there will be." Activists and rebel soldiers are increasingly becoming members of the Free Syrian Army, an armed resistance movement that claims to now have control of several towns throughout Syria.
Civil war in Syria would have serious repercussions throughout much of the region and even the world as a whole. First and foremost is the sheer loss of life. More than 6,000 people have died in the resistance movement so far and any escalation in conflict will mean an exponential increase in wounded and casualties. Further, any such conflict would likely quickly fall upon sectarian lines, with Assad's minority Alawite Shia sect pitted against the nation's Sunni majority. Rivals based on these alliances would cause repercussions in nearby Iraq and Lebanon, two nations with their own sectarian disunity, not to mention the economic ramifications as refugees flood these neighboring countries.
Perhaps even more seriously, any conflict within Syria would quickly disintegrate into a proxy-war, with Russia and Iran propping up Assad's government (they both have proven willing with recent arms deals, including a reported $550 million deal between Russia and Assad's government) and Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and potentially some NATO members backing rebels and opposition to Assad. Recent reports on Iran's development of a nuclear weapon has raised tension amongst world leaders, with Israel and even the U.S. hinting at military action against Iran, increasing the likelihood that the war would spread beyond regional borders. We could be talking about much more than the civil war of a relatively small Middle Eastern country -- we could be talking about the next World War.
The inability of both the Arab League and the U.N. to stop Assad's brutality is the frustrating result of a lack of global tools and mechanisms to rapidly prevent conflict and intervene when a government begins to use force against its own people for blatant political reasons.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said of the vote, "It undermines the role of the United Nations and the international community in this period when the Syrian authorities must hear a unified voice calling for an immediate end to its violence against the Syrian people." U.S. Secretary of State Clinton referred to the UN Security Council as "neutered," adding that the U.S. will seek international cooperation with allies outside of the Security Council to keep the pressure on Assad up.
When a nation's rule of law has broken down completely, the international community needs to know exactly how and when to step in to prevent human rights violations from occurring. We need to make it clear to dictators and tyrants around the world that the global society will not allow force or coercion to be a legitimate method of control. The ongoing conflict in Syria has pointed out just how far we are from truly fulfilling our Responsibility to Protect.
The failure of the international community to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity in nations like Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur led to a resounding affirmation of the Responsibility to Protect, the idea that we could "never again" let such atrocities occur. But how can we actually do this job when our international institutions are nowhere near strong enough to address these issues?
How can the global structure prevent crimes against humanity when any permanent member of the Security Council can veto action against their allies? How can international actors save lives when the U.N.'s Human Rights Council can only make recommendations that other institutions can continue to ignore? How can humankind stop mass atrocities when it takes months for an international peacekeeping mission to deploy?
I am not advocating for unilateral American action on these issues, although the United States should be leading such efforts to support democratic values worldwide. Rather, we need global institutions that actually have the might to prevent genocide and mass atrocities. Not that long ago, true world peace seemed like an unattainable dream. But we've taken significant steps in recent years to end conflict and prevent violence. Baby steps perhaps, but we're starting to realize that we can achieve that dream, if we work together to construct the mechanisms for protecting civilians.
Today we are all Syrians. The violence inflicted in the name of power is a lash across all of our backs. Humanity has spent centuries developing the tools for war, pouring billions of dollars into building missiles and nuclear weapons. I'd say it's high time we spend even half that effort developing the tools for peace.
Jayshree Bajoria: Syria's Deepening Crisis
Saad Khan: Syria: The Final Solution
George A. Lopez: So Much Worse Than Civil War
Dozens More Die in Syrian Violence, Activists Say - NYTimes.com
US Searches For Strategy To Halt Syria Violence | Fox News
Rockets, mortars rain down on Syrian city, opposition says - CNN.com
http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5550/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=9515
Doesn't it break your heart?
Uh, no, we most definitely do not. Nation states have armed forces, not international organizations. And that is the way it should stay. The concept would be alarming, were it also not a total fantasy. The amount of military power necessary for successfully invading a country like Syria is huge. There is no way the UN could field such a force.
The Clinton administration did not actively consider U.S. military intervention [in Rwanda], Why?
We have a foreign policy based on our amoral economic interests run by amateurs who want to stand for something ... but ultimately don't want to exercise any leadership that has a cost.
What is most shocking about America's reaction Pol Pot's reign of terror, Iraq's slaughter of the Kurds, Bosnian Serbs' mass murder of Muslims, and the Hutu elimination of Tutsi is not that the United States refused to deploy US. ground forces to combat the atrocities.
For much of the century, even the most ardent interventionists did not lobby for U.S. ground invasions.
What is most shocking is that US. policymakers did almost nothing to deter the crime.
Because America's "vital national interests" were not considered imperiled by mere genocide, senior U.S. officials did not give genocide the moral attention it warranted.
Indeed, on occasion the United States directly or indirectly aided those committing genocide.
It sided with and supplied U.S. agricultural and manufacturing credits to Iraq while Saddam Hussein was attempting to wipe out the country's Kurds.
Along with its European allies, it maintained an arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims even after it was clear that the arms ban prevented the Muslims from defending themselves.
Shall we assume you prefer the Assad is bombing himself story too?
US officials blaming Al Qaida does not fit into the narrative very well.
Believing the corporate media these days is precious. Endearing almost. Almost.
How to prevent NATO intervention as it happened in countries like Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and so on is the issue.
Let us imagine a scenario that destroyed millions in Iraq and destroyed an ancient civilization by the brutal policies of the foreign intervention.
The USA has a false self-image supporting democracy:
Their policy is : If it can engage in promoting democracy, that's all the better. If not, promoting dictatorship to serve their interests
This is because the objective was never to create democratic regimes, but compliant ones.
Do the Syrians want to proceed from the best interests of, say, American foreign policy establishments and their proponents?
Downfall of authoritarianism is in some countries is rational and just. ( no second thoughts on this) But we must be necessarily very suspicious when there is ulterior motives and hidden agendas by the Western powers..
Supporting the demise of the Syrian regime by any means, including external military intervention, is extremely reckless if the objective is to save Syrian lives or set the stage for a post-regime path of self-determination.
Creating no-fly-zones is a technical term for more active American military intervention in practice, as the world saw the case of Libya
The Shah was the best example of this but there are many others.
Again, it is the Syrian regime's brutality since March 2011 and before that has created the conditions for the street's increasing support for foreign intervention to stop the killing.
Certainly, some may have had ulterior motives, connections or designs and supported intervention all along. We have thousands of Ahmad Chalabis in the name of dissidents through out the West, But the majority of those calling for intervention have been brutalised into doing so. They are not thinking in terms of supporting or opposing imperialism at this time.
Let us imagine a wild scenario where the United States is going to intervene to stop the massacres.
This is similar to the problematics of the United States' self-image supporting democracy: if it can engage in promoting democracy, that's all the better. If not, promoting dictatorship to serve its interests (as is the case in the Arab world) will do just fine. This is because the objective was never to create democratic regimes, but compliant ones.
Or does it proceed from the best interests of, say, the United States' or Israel's foreign policy establishments and their proponents?
This is not to mention an entire coterie of actors like Saudi Arabia and their minions, various European countries and what is left of the Lebanese March 14th movement.
the likes of Elliot Abrams behind the call for democracy is a dubious one.
In other words, Syria is being used by various powers, including the United States and Saudi Arabia and their chorus, as an occasion to accomplish their own objectives in the region - reactionary ones, to be sure, in terms of the interests of most people in the region as the decades behind us attest, and as the current uprisings against the "fruits" of such objectives make clearer even to some skeptics.
That does not mean, that we should withdraw our opposition and halt the struggle against dictatorship in Syria. It only serves to remind us how not to do it.
Since the mid-20th century, when mainly European designs for dominating and influencing the countries or politics of the region through schemas such as the Baghdad Pact, Syria was an important regional prize, but mostly in a passive manner.
But for the United States, Israel, some European countries, Saudi Arabia and its minions in Lebanon and the Gulf, it is the Syria-Hezbollah-Iran axis that constitutes the most formidable challenge.