Syrian dilemma – Death toll tops 60,000

The United Nations announced today that the total death toll in Syria has passed 60,000. In summer of 2011, roughly 1,000 people lost their lives per month. The figure has now risen to 5,000.  It is said to be a conservative estimate with the actual numbers likely to be far higher.

Compared to other conflicts, the number of Syrian casualties now equals the total killed in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948 or, put differently, Assad butchered half the number of people over 22 months that Milosevic killed between 1992-1995 in the Balkans.

Yet there are no signs of any potential intervention by the international community, as long as Assad is not resorting to chemical and biological weapons — also known as the ‘red line’ policy of the Obama administration.

But I am asking myself: shouldn’t tens of thousands of men, women and children not be a ‘red line’ in themselves? What is the acceptable human threshold of pain, given that we have said so many times: ‘never again!’

Some commentators suggest that we cannot do anything or that it is already too late to intervene effectively.

It is too late in the sense that the worst case scenario has already unfolded. What we see is that everything the Obama administration said would happen in the case of intervention, is actually taking place in the absence of leadership.

Islamists have hijacked the revolution and the opposition increasingly resorts to the tactics of terrorists.

Yet just because the situation on the ground is immensely bleak, and the post-Assad era likely to be chaotic, does not mean there is nothing we can do at all.

Damage control is still an option.

The Patriots along the Turkish/Syrian border could be utilised to establish a partial no-fly-zone without entering Syrian airspace. This is significant, as the Assad regime‘s preferred modus operandi is to kill from the air.

It would also allow us to establish humanitarian corridors to provide shelter. Right now, refugees are pouring into Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey, at a rate of up to several thousand a day, and they have reached a breaking point of capacity.

The violence in Syria has also spilled into neighbouring countries. For instance, it manifests itself in the noteworthy increase of terrorist attacks in Iraq over the last few months. The crisis in Syria allowed Al Qaida to slip back into the country and with US troops gone, Iraq once more is at risk of descending into chaos.

It would also make sense to consider arming parts of the opposition. Such undertaking would not be without risk but what is happening right now is that while we refuse to engage with the secularists, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arming the Islamist rebels with our weapons. The extremists grow stronger by the day. The people we should support, however, are side-lined.

The Syrian problem is not going away and the longer we wait, the uglier it will become. That is a lesson history has taught us many times.

We still have a choice. We always have one, even if it is a choice between the lesser of two evils.

Right now, Washington appears to be the major obstacle to intervention. No Western country has taken the full initiative but France, for instance, suggested the establishment of a no-fly-zone months ago.

With his inaction, Obama is betraying the core principles of American benevolence and is belittling his country’s power and influence in the world. Syria is one of his greatest failures and will haunt him throughout his second term.

As one Syrian woman put it:  ‘We will not forget that you forgot about us.’

IICRS Special: Shock, Horror and Disbelief as former MI6 head says Iraq war was right

My friend John Rentoul has an excellent blog post on Sir Richard Dearlove’s remarks on the post 9/11 period. In sharp contrast to Elizabeth Manningham-Buller’s view and in line with Tony Blair’s assessment of the threat, the  former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service MI6 outlined why invading Iraq was the right thing to do.

More below.

Excerpt:

Going into Iraq was al-Qa’ida’s mistake

Went to hear Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of the foreign intelligence service MI6 (right), speak today at the Henry Jackson Society about 9/11.

He said that the surprising thing about the decade since 11 September 2001 was the “relative failure of political Islamism”. He said: “The al-Qa’ida narrative is losing its purchase on the Arab Street.”

In answer to David Davis, the Conservative MP, Dearlove said that the Iraq war accelerated the decline of al-Qa’ida, because it made a strategic error in trying to fight the US in a guerrilla war.

Once again, Dearlove proved himself to be a political supporter of Tony Blair’s post-9/11 world view, which helps explain why they were so close over Iraq: “The right thing to do was to go out and meet that threat militantly – despite the risk of radicalisation of young Muslim men.”

He was not in favour of trying to negotiate with any part of al-Qa’ida, as it is “entirely rejectionist”.

And he ”resented” a question from The Times about the Labour government and his Service’s “cosy” relationship with the Gaddafi regime:

It was not a cosy relationship, it was a pragmatic one. It was a political decision, having very significantly disarmed Libya, for the government to co-operate with Libya on Islamist terrorism. The whole relationship was one of serious calculation about where the overall balance of our national interests stood.

Its success in disarming Libya was “phenomenal”, he said.

10 years on – a personal reflection

Picture: Time Magazine

On 9/11, 2001 I was at home – ill. I was watching television when the first plane crashed into the Twin Towers. It surely must have been a terrible accident, I thought. When the second plane flew into the building, minutes later, it was clear that it was not a tragic human failure but a deliberate act of terrorism.

I remember people jumping out of windows into certain death, desperately trying to escape the raging fire. I recall people covered in blood, dust and tears. It was almost as if I could feel their pain, physically, behind my television screen. It felt as if the terrorists had raped the very meaning of humanity, compassion and love.

I was only 14 years old; too young and too innocent to fully grasp the consequences of the atrocity. I could not see what possibly could have provoked so much hatred, bitterness and violence. But I nevertheless sensed that things would never be the same again and that, whatever it was, this had profoundly changed our world forever.

Ten years on, I have fully absorbed the impact 9/11 had on our way of life and things have indeed never been the same ever since.  This was not an attack on America. It was an attack on us – the free world – on everything we stand for.

On balance, the West has responded accurately and effectively. Some more than others have restlessly tried to ensure that our values are not being compromised by death-worshipping Islamic fascists.

In particular, our armed forces and, above all, those fine young men and women who have given the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan and Iraq – preserving our freedom, our democracy, our liberty – deserve praise more than anyone else.

We must stop apologising for our own position. We did not cause 9/11 and we did not give rise to the ideology and narrative represented by Al Qaida, based on the perversion of Islam. We have to be confident and prepared for a generation-long struggle. This battle is far from over but it is too fundamental to allow a defeat.

Osama Bin Laden once said that the West’s problem is to find people willing to die for our values, while his problem is to hold back people willing to die for his.

We must prove him wrong – let this be the memorial for all those innocents who died on 9/11, 2001.