Syrians Are Dying At The Wrong Time

When looking at the pictures coming out of Syria, one must resist the temptation of resigning from the human race in disgust. Never again will we allow a crisis to escalate to the point where crimes against humanity are committed on a large-scale basis – so the promise of the international community following the tidal wave of atrocities in the conflict-stricken 1990s.

Yet we have a situation in which 30,000 Syrian men, women and children have already lost their lives and another 1, 5 million people have been wounded, tortured, detained and displaced over the past 18 months. There are not enough words in any idiom to encapsulate the shame the international community once more brought upon itself by standing by and remaining silent, while Assad is mercilessly butchering and raping his people and country.

The window of opportunity for the West to engage in principled humanitarian interventionism in the face of utter destruction is rapidly closing. We have long passed the point of a political solution and now the only way to stop Assad is by military action. The immediate enforcement of a NFZ and the creation of humanitarian corridors are essential to ensure the safety of civilians under siege. It is our ‘Responsibility to Protect’, in a situation in which the state on whose territory the assault takes place is unwilling or incapable of providing security for its subjects.

The idea that the hands of the international community are tied, as a result of the Russian and Chinese veto in the UN Security Council, must be wholeheartedly rejected as a hideous obfuscation for inaction. It relativises the moral responsibility of those who decided to endow Assad with a blanco check for killing with impunity. When in the past controversies over the question of legitimacy arose in the UN Security Council, coalitions of the willing never considered them as ultimate kisses of death for action, as for instance in the case of Kosovo and Iraq.

Syria’s on-going violence is the product of a lack of political will combined with an absence of leadership and moral authority. Apparently, the incentive to intervene cannot compete with a complex matrix of domestic and international political, economic and strategic interests.  The Obama administration’s ‘red line’ policy stands out in particular.  It is s a deeply cynical, reactionary, and risk-averse approach for righting a humanitarian catastrophe. Not only does it send out a message of indifference and incompetence but the logic behind is that it is acceptable for Assad’s crime regime to kill with conventional weaponry as long as no chemical or biological agents are involved.

Instead of pushing for a robust internationalism, the West has embraced an amoral isolationism: an isolationism the world cannot afford and for which the Syrian people pay the price in blood. For now, they are left to the mercy of their killers and the question remains how many more innocent lives will be lost.

Update: Golden Rules for Debating the Iraq War

I never understood why the anti-Iraq war lot so frequently resorts to pathetic and ridiculous conspiracy theories, since there are plenty of legitimate reasons against the invasion. I welcome open and challenging debates. However, I am tired of arguing with people who do not even know the basic facts required to distinguish between incontrovertible evidence and popular opinions.

Against the background of the recent “Blood for Oil” conspiracy and in preparation for the upcoming Chilcot report and expected new outbreak of PoPNI (Period of Profound National Insanity), I have composed a set of golden rules for debating the Iraq war.

* Tony on Twitter asked me to add: you’re wasting your time with anyone who uses the phrase ‘took us to war on a lie’

* Further amendments coming in from Peter : “you can’t drop democracy from 30,000 ft” and don’t debate “anyone who describes jihadi suicide murderers as the resistance”

* Livy  does not welcome: “the sort of people with the straight faced conceit to say, Not in My Name”

*Cathy says no-go is: Iraq war was “signed in blood”

* Jamie strictly bans: “referring to TB as a poodle, despite being an interventionist PM when Bush was still Gov. of Texas” and “complaining we invaded a ‘sovereign’ country – as if it were Holland and not a country held hostage by vile gangster regime”

* Thomas rejects: “anybody who shouts “it was illegal” without ever opening a single book on international law”

* I’d like to add:  anyone who greatly exaggerates casualty number aka. “one million (+) died”. Iraqi Body Count is only reliably source

*New rule coming in from Ian: “people who have never read Blair’s 18.3.03 Commons speech esp col 772″

* Max prohibits: anyone who asks ‘Why not Bahrain/Syria/Zimbabwe?’ without admitting they would be against attacks on Bahrain/Syria/Zimbabwe for identical reasons and using identical arguments

* Erik adds: anyone who “calls Britian W.’s peripheral poodle”

* It just does not stop: people who speaks of “sexing up intelligence” are now banned from the debate

* Ex-soldier on BBC Radio 5 adds another no-go: “We launched this war for all the wrong reasons”

* Latest IWGDR: everyone describing Brian Haw as “another war casualty” is immediately excluded

* “Bush is dumb” leads to immediate disqualification

Iraq: From Dictatorship to Democracy

Today, Britain finally concluded its mission in Iraq, roughly eight years after the invasion in 2003. The vast majority of troops were already pulled out in 2009, a handful however remained to help with naval training of the Iraqi army.

With hindsight, the war deeply divided the international community, the country and the Labour Party. Mistakes have been made, especially in the aftermath of the war, and it is important to acknowledge and learn from them.

176 brave British service personnel and 110,000 Iraqi civilians tragically lost their lives in the conflict – 110,176 innocent souls too many. Most of them were killed not by American and British soldiers but terrorists, the same fanatics we are fighting across the entire Middle East.

But it is worth remembering that less than ten years ago, Iraq was ruled by a brutal, genocidal dictator and his crime family, responsible for the death of almost two million people. Abduction, persecution, torture, rape and assassinations were common practices under Saddam’s reign of terror.

Despite the UN’s oil for food programme, Iraqis were starving and the country had an infant mortality rate equal to Congo with 130 per 1,000 children under the age of five. That equated to about 90,000 deaths per year. Today, the figure is down to 40.

Iraq is now a fragile yet relatively stable democracy. It has a new constitution, the first democratic one in its 80-year old history. Elementary rights such as the freedom of expression, religion and assembly are guaranteed by the constitution and generally respected in practice. The process of post-war recovery is expected to achieve annual growth of 11.7 per cent during the next five years.

Elections have taken place twice, in 2005 and 2010. International and domestic monitoring groups described them as free and fair, turn-out was extremely high (up to 75 per cent) and the government now represents people from all different religious and ethnic backgrounds. In 2008, the Iraqi parliament already passed legislation to bring Sunni Arabs back into the political process, former members of the Ba’athist party were permitted to retake their jobs, the largest Sunni bloc returned to government and six Sunni ministers joined al-Maliki’s cabinet.

John McTernan eloquently pointed out in Thursday’s Daily Telegraph that “there may be only one country in the world today where a majority – the vast majority – of the population still support the invasion of Iraq: but that country is Iraq itself.”

Taking all that into account, the Iraq war was – on balance – a success. It is something Britain should be proud not ashamed of. The removal of murderous dictators is morally sound. It would have been right in Rwanda and Bosnia, was right in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Iraq and is now right in Libya.

The narrative of the anti-Iraq war brigade has not quite turned out the way they predicted. The doctrine of humanitarian interventionism is not dead, it was not buried in the sands of Iraq and future political leaders were not demoralised by the carnage of the aftermath.

Dan Hodges was right: Libya isn’t an embarrassment for Tony Blair. It’s his validation.