A Syrian child sits at Altinozu refugee camp in the Turkish border town of Altinozu. Syrians have fled the country as violence spirals from a military crackdown on popular unrest. .
National Post Jun 10, 2011 – 12:59 PM ET
As the crisis in Syria escalates, the West seems unwilling or unable to take action, either immobilized by uncertainty over how to proceed, fearful of the consequences, or simply unwilling to engage in yet another intractable Arab hot spot in a spring full of them. Is there any useful function Western powers could engage in, or are we doomed to sit and watch what develops as the body count grows?
Barbara Kay in Montreal: I think the West should sit this one out. To get involved with Syria is to get involved with Iran. Who needs that at the moment? Assad is a tyrant and although he presents a westernized face to the world when it is convenient to, he is as ruthless and indifferent to his people as Gaddafi. Intervention to force him out is likely to foment more desperation to remain in power and more carnage.
In dealing with Arab dictators, one must always take into consideration the question of “face”. Losing face, looking weak: these threats tend to provoke escalating havoc, at least for a time, even against overwhelming odds. It’s tragic to see the human wreckage going on there, but the West didn’t cause it, and the West cannot end it without a serious investment of blood and treasure. It isn’t as if Western intervention is sure to bring about a democracy or anything like it. Given the risk of Iranian mischief-making, I think prudence is the obvious choice.
Matt Gurney in Toronto: We’re doomed to sit and watch as the body count grows, and we should be very, very grateful for that. The main disaster areas in the Middle East right now seem to be Syria, Yemen and Libya. Canada’s military capabilities are basically maxed out, with the navy and air force in Libya and the army busy in Afghanistan. Not much we can do.
The U.S. is bombing in Yemen after having pulled out of the fighting in Libya, so I have a hard time believing they’ll be eager to jump on the Syrians. And while the Europeans can, in theory, muster up some more firepower, all the countries willing to get involved in this mess are as involved as they’re going to get with Libya, and it’s wearing them out.
The only European aircraft carrier has exhausted itself against Libya and needs to go back home to France for a refit, and NATO is calling for countries that aren’t involved to step up their efforts. In other words, it ain’t working in the war we’re already in. Can’t imagine we’d get into another. (And let’s face it — I can’t really imagine Europe doing anything militarily that would make Israel’s strategic situation better. Even though it wouldn’t have anything to do with Israel, I just can’t see Europe getting involved in a war with Israel’s nearest military threat.)
So, yeah, looks like we’re watching this one from the nosebleeds. And that’s not a bad thing.
Kevin Libin in Calgary: Libya’s uprising was from the beginning more like a civil war and so, NATO’s military response, whatever its merits, was always more applicable as a strategy, enforcing no-fly zones that might stop Libyan fighters from strafing enemy positions, or bombing Libyan radar installations or rolling platoons of armoured vehicles. Syria, on the other hand, appears to resemble more of an urban massacre: there may be tanks, but they’re rolling not over open countryside, but through the streets of Homs, where they’re firing on people’s houses.
Is there a way to respond? Sure there is. We could — or our more available NATO allies could — start bombing strategic targets and Assad’s palaces just like they’re doing in Libya. It would be a tangential retaliation, rather unrelated to the actual problem of the urban butchery, but at least we’d get to deliver some kind of hurt to Assad, which would be satisfying on some levels, and, ideally serve to weaken his regime, if not bring pressure on him to stop his atrocities.
Yet here we find the West’s schizophrenic foreign policy: Assad is, in 2011, indisputably a greater menace and a more brutal despot than even Gaddafi, a man who for all his past terror had at least decommissioned his WMD program, whereas Damascus has one of the world’s largest stockpiles of chemical weapons and an underground nuclear program.
The Obama administration calls for, and fights for, Gaddafi’s ouster, but has yet to budge from its insistence that Assad is a “reformer” who can be brought around. Our critics in the world maintain that we only care to fight where there’s oil at stake and we do our best to prove them right.
Barbara Kay: But didn’t the U.S. start in Libya with the idea of bombing targets from the air? Once you do anything at all, you’ve committed yourself to getting the bad guy out. If he blinks from the bombs, great. If he doesn’t, it just gets messier, and you look like a coward (or you do to them) if you back away from anything that gets your boots muddy. And why is it always the West? Why can’t some of those Arab states get their hands dirty once in a while helping out their brethren? What are their armies and air forces for? Why are we doing their heavy lifting?
Who is Syria a menace to exactly? To Lebanon and to Israel. Israel has already knocked out what was to be a WMD site in Syria, and would knock out Damascus in a heartbeat if Syria attacked it, so it won’t. Lebanon is already a suburb of Damascus, what with Hezbollah having so much power, so that’s kind of a lost cause at the moment anyway.
Kevin is absolutely right that the U.S. seems a bit schizophrenic in the Middle East. Obama especially has no coherent plan because foreign affairs is not his interest and he has no deep knowledge of the Middle East.
But if the U.S. only went to bat when democratic ally Israel or its oil supplies were threatened, that would in fact be a coherent policy. It is a kind of kneejerk reaction to call it cynical when the U.S. rattles sabres only for oil-producing countries, but oil is crucial to our economy and our supply of it is worth protecting until we find a way to do without it. No power ever goes to war for mere people’s lives. Isn’t it always about territory, ideology or honour?
Kevin Libin: The trouble is, the U.S. claims to, and sometimes actually does, deploy troops for higher ideals than just economic interests (see: the Balkans, Somalia, Liberia). The importance of feeling morally principled — preserving the sense of exceptionalism — is just as critical to preserving the American way, and to a slightly lesser extent the Canadian way, as keeping the gas pumps primed. We can spend all day standing by and pointing fingers at the Arab League and insisting that it’s their turn to intervene, but whatever our fingers are doing, we’ll still be guilty of standing by as Assad mows down women and children.
Stuff happens, I guess. We’ve managed to live with the guilt of not stopping mass murders before (Darfur) and we’ll live with this, likely much smaller one, that much more easily.
But the refusal to intervene for Syrians over Libyans exposes what a chaos the White House has lately made of its Mideast foreign policy. Obama has sacrificed relations with Israel to appease the Palestinians, who have rewarded him by signing up with Hamas; he has tried smooth-talking Iran only to find, as we reported this week, that it may be just months away now from becoming a nuclear threat; he vacillated on his support for Egyptian protesters, went to war to support a Libyan uprising (which appears not to be working), but seems bound to the delusion that Assad might yet prove a decent world leader, standing pat as the Syrian strongman slaughters his own people, just like his dad used to.
It’s the mixed signals that are the problem. When dictators can’t tell where America stands, they’ll find out by testing it. And after Syria, I can imagine a lot of the world’s tyrants are anxious to see what they can get away with. It doesn’t bode well for a more peaceful world.
Matt Gurney: You’re too right about that last bit, Kevin. Would not recommend basing your retirement plan on those nifty peace dividends we heard about when the Cold War ended. Oh, and Barbara, to add to your list of reasons why countries go to war, I’d suggest “weird historical flukes.” Sometimes things just happen and a whole heap of people end up getting killed to leave the world no better off for their sacrifice.
Kevin says that the U.S. does sometimes deploy troops for humanitarian reasons, and he’s right, but deploying troops is not always the same thing as going to war. Sometimes deploying troops is enough to send a message and restore sanity, and that’s great.
The cost of that is measured in dollars and time the troops have to spend away from home. But are we prepared to go to war to save Arabs (or Africans, or Asians, or whatever)? Like, a real war: Bomb their command facilities, neutralize their air force, sink their navy and then invade their countries and defeat their ground forces so that we can restore order for them by controlling their territory as an occupied zone under our rule? Of course not. That’s why no one has even suggested a ground invasion of Libya.
Dropping bombs is the perfect balance between taking no risk and looking really concerned about the situation. For NATO, smart bombs and Libyan collateral damage come cheap.
It’s all well and good to talk about how all lives are equal, but I bet if you did anonymous polling about how many Syrian lives you’d need to put at risk before most of us would sacrifice a single Canadian soldier, the results would be shockingly imbalanced. We’re kind of going through the motions, pretending otherwise in Libya. But if a magic geopolitical genie popped out of a bottle and said to us, “You can stop the fighting in Libya and Syria, but it’ll cost you 50 dead Canadians”, I have a hard time believing many people would take that offer.
And that, my friends, is why it sucks to be in the sights of the world’s madmen. People are really sorry for you. Just not quite sorry enough to risk their own friends and family to help you. But good luck and all, guys. Mind the tanks.
National Post.
Posted in: Canada, Full Comment, U.S. Politics, World Politics Tags: Arab Uprising, Assad, Barbara Kay, Gaddafi, kevin libin, Libya, Matt Gurney, military, NATO, Syria, Yemen .
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Qua tình hình Trung Đông và Bắc Phi, cụ thể Libya và Syria trong những tin tức gần đây conbenho "post" vào đây cho các anh chị cùng đọc, các anh chị có suy nghĩ, chia sẻ gì về những ý kiến phê bình, nhận định trên ???
Người VN bị MẤT NƯỚC vào tay bè lũ phản quốc CƯỚP NƯỚC diệt chủng BÁN NƯỚC ĐỘC tài ĐỘC đảng Việt gian csVN nghĩ gì trước Ngọn Lửa Cách Mạng LẬT ĐỔ bè lũ cầm quyền độc tài bạo ác đã và đang lan rộng trên khắp thế giới ???
Và hiện tại, đồng bào trong nước nhất là giới trẻ VN đã và đang "phẩn nộ" trước sự việc "xâm lăng" lãnh hải của Tổ Tiên của tàu cộng, đã xuống đường chống tàu cộng "xâm lăng" với cờ máu đỏ sao vàng và những chiếc áo đỏ với búa liềm, hình ảnh biểu tượng cho sự giết chóc, hủy diệt của chủ nghĩa cộng sản không tưởng đã bị thế giới văn minh nhân bản vất vào sọt rác từ lâu ??? Tại sao tuổi trẻ VN vẫn còn bám vào những hình ảnh PHẾ THẢI đó để làm NHỤC Tổ Tiên VN ???
Ngày nào những con chim đầu đàn trong Công Cuộc Tranh Đấu CHUNG, không xác định rõ lập trường, CHÍNH bè lũ phản quốc csVN là CĂN NGUYÊN của mọi TỘI ÁC , căn nguyên của mọi sự HỦY DIỆT cả dân tộc và đất nước VN thì e rằng khó có thể huy động tòan nội lực của cả dân tộc Việt để bảo vệ sự tòan vẹn lãnh thổ và cứu dân cứu nước vốn đã bị bè lũ thú vật csVN BÁN ĐỨNG cho tàu cộng và ngọai bang .
Một trong những điều kiện tiên quyết để có thể bảo tòan được lãnh thổ và duy trì nòi giống Việt, đưa đất nước Việt đi lên cùng những quốc gia khác trên thế giới khi bè lũ thú vật buôn nòi bán giống phản quốc bán nước diệt chủng Việt gian csVN bị trục xuất khỏi cơ cấu cầm quyền trên đất nước VN .
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog"
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
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CSVN là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
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