The horror in Syria, the cold realities of international action
Syria's civil war is horrific, with most of the crimes committed by the Assad regime and its supporters. This may lead to moral clarity, but not necessarily to international military action.
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Humanitarian interventionists insist the time has come for military pressure to be exerted from the outside and they're finding allies in major capitals. French President François Hollande fumed, "it is not possible to allow Bashar al-Assad's regime to massacre its own people," though he said military action would require UN Security Council approval.
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Staff writer
Dan Murphy is a staff writer for the Monitor's international desk, focused on the Middle East. Murphy, who has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and more than a dozen other countries, writes and edits Backchannels. The focus? War and international relations, leaning toward things Middle East.
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Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, who last July criticized President Barack Obama for supporting the NATO mission that helped drive Libya's Muammar Qaddafi from power (Mr. Romney fretted about "who’s going to own Libya if we get rid of the government there?”) wants arms shipments to the rebels and "more assertive measures to end the Assad regime." He blamed President Obama for "lack of leadership [that] has resulted in a policy of paralysis that has watched Assad slaughter 10,000 individuals."
He's not alone. The Washington Post's hawkish editorial page is on board too, sort of. In an editorial largely dedicated to ridiculing Mr. Annan's failed effort ("feckless," "one of the most costly diplomatic failures in UN history") it calls for Obama to do, well, something. The paper insists the time has come for US "leadership," but through what means, and exactly to where, it doesn't say.
The Post probably didn't intend to send a message with this vagueness, but the coyness on the specifics of what the US should be doing points to a reality that makes a foreign military intervention in Syria far more dangerous than the case of Libya. Syria's armed forces are better trained, led, and armed than Libya's were under Qaddafi, and they have held firm for over a year, whereas Qaddafi suffered major leadership defections from the moment the uprising broke out in February of last year.
More worrying still is the increasingly evident sectarian nature of some of the fighting. Libya has troubled divisions, but not much in the way of religious ones. Syria is home to Sunni Muslims, Christians, Alawites, Shiites, and ethnic Kurds.
Assad belongs to the Alawite sect, a Syrian minority that has benefited handsomely under his rule and his father's before him. The majority of the people fighting him are Sunni Muslims, and there is clear evidence that among them are Al Qaeda-style jihadis whose Manichean worldview frames the Alawites as apostates who deserve death for their beliefs. The country's Christians are fearful, well aware of the grim toll on their faith in Iraq. Tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians who were forced to flee their homeland still live among them.
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