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.’

Assassination has replaced interrogation

The Obama administration is launching a secret, undeclared war from the Situation Room in the basement of the White House.

The President himself has unprecedented authority over the ‘Kill List’, which literally sentences people, without interrogation or trial, to certain death.

The excessive use of drones is nothing short of acts of war, where US soldiers no longer fight in flesh and blood but are replaced by metal birds with a license to kill.

Every fourth day, a drone rises somewhere. Between 2009 and present, 283 missions have been authorised on Pakistani territory. In 2011, up to 27 percent of those eliminated were civilians and of the 148-220 casualties in 2012, at least one-fifth were non-combatants.

The total number of people killed remains unclear but what is known is that the current administration’s utilisation of drones is six times and the death toll four times higher than under the previous presidency. Bush authorised no more than 52 strikes during his eight years in office.

In all fairness, under Obama’s leadership top terrorists, including Osama bin Laden and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki have been taken out.

Those victories clearly strengthened the government in its choice of preferred method of killing. In total, however, the percentage of leading terrorist figures eliminated by drones is below two per cent, as a recent study by Stanford Law School and New York University’s School has shown.

Furthermore, according to the Democrat-leaning New America Foundation, under Bush’s leadership, a quarter of those killed by drones were al-Qaeda insurgents and 40 percent Taliban fighters. Obama, in contrast, has liquidated only eight per cent al-Qaeda members and roughly 50 per cent Taliban insurgents. And while under Bush’s command every third drone killed a militant leader, the number has now fallen below 13 percent.

What is fascinating is that this is happening under the watch of the man celebrated as the candidate of hope and change, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, the political messiah who promised a moral departure from years of warmongering.

The truth is that, while the President officially embraces a faint-hearted policy of ‘leading from behind’, he secretly became an executioner.

Drones have replaced Guantanamo Bay: suspected terrorists are no longer being captured. They are killed. No ifs, no buts. It is a cheaper and more discreet modus operandi.

But is what Charles Krauthammer calls ‘the assassination by remote control’ morally superior to enhanced interrogation? Are Obama’s drone strikes not as pre-emptive in nature as the war in Iraq he so fiercely opposed and denounced as unjust? Are they not causing long-term psychological damage to the residents of Pakistan’s tribal northwest region, who hear drones hover 24 hours a day?

This is not a statement against drones per se. They are a legitimate tool in the war on terror. The problem is that Obama has mainstreamed targeted killing, instead of considering it a last resort.

It is time to put an end to the moral amnesia and hold Obama to the same standards we hold Bush. There is no room for saints.