Syria has had a sorry state of affairs for the past two years. Two years in which the world focused on other things. Two years in which a civil war which has killed 100,000 people raged unabated in the Middle East nation. A worsening refugee situation continues to grow as 6 million people have been displaced. There was a focus on Syria when the civil war began, but it lasted a short while. Syria must have drowned in the cacophony of voices that was the Arab Spring. The shots that led to the fall of strongmen Mummar Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak in Libya and Egypt must have rang louder than I previously thought.
However, since the Syrian President Bashar Al Assad crossed the red line, Syria has been inundat- ing the airwaves. The red line was set by Barack Obama, but he claims the international community set it. I agree with that statement. The rules of combat ever since World War I have tended to frown up any nation that engages in chemical warfare. The Germans used chlorine gas in the trench warfare of World War I with disastrous effects, and Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurdish ethnic minority in Iraq in the 1980s. The Chemical Weapons Convention is the international treaty that bans the use of these weapons by nations.
I will say why I support intervention. Syria is Darfur. Bosnia was Rwanda. Rwanda was the Holocaust. All were conflicts the world saw and did nothing. It was after the Holocaust that people said never again. Yet we still let these conflicts flare up. The loss of life continues because there is nobody to stop the carnage. And when somebody steps up to stop the carnage, we don’t trust them.
The kind of intervention that needs to be taken in Syria is to wipe out the chemical stockpile that Assad’s regime has accrued. This includes any raw materials too that can be used in their manufacture. I support a quick surgical strike that would eliminate Assad’s chemical stockpile. I am wary of boots on the ground because that would make it a full scale war. If Assad is foolish enough to retaliate on a US attack by sending missiles to Israel, the Middle East could plunge into even more turmoil. The question of Syria is not the case of intervention. To be honest, I want intervention in Syria. I want Assad’s regime to be punished and nothing more. I don’t want the mess of Iraq. I don’t want America to do the punishing, but I have no choice. I’ll take it.
And this brings us to who should do the punish- ing. In 1945, after the end of the second World War, the great powers formed the United Nations (UN) to replace the League of Nations. The League had failed to prevent another great war. This time it was hoped the UN would be up to the task. While we have not had World War III, I don’t credit this achievement to the UN. World War III never happened because the Soviet Union collapsed all by itself.
The question we have been asking: should the US intervene?
The question we should be asking: should the UN intervene and when?
The argument for US intervention is that the US has the moral authority to do so. This takes into ac- count American exceptionalism. I believe in Amer- ica’s exceptionalism. I believe in it, if you mean to say America has the largest military on the planet and biggest economy. I agree if you say the US dwarfs its rivals in technological superiority. I do not believe if you say America is a special country with special responsibilities. The UN should have the re- sponsibility of policing the world. It is too much task to leave in the hands of a single nation. How did the Greeks, the Gauls and Jews feel about Pax Romana? They felt the same way colonies of Great Britain felt about Pax Britannica. Pax Americana just feels the same way. No matter how responsible and grown up the US feels. If the toothless bulldog that is the UN were given some teeth, we would never have been in this mess in the first place.
Presently, the UN is not able to police the world. It has a structure that is fundamentally flawed. The idea of have having five permanent members on the Security Council is pure hogwash. The Russians are always vetoing whatever resolution that has Western backing. China and Russia generally have each other’s back. And the notion that a country like France with its population of 65 million has a veto while India is laughable and downright unfair. Syria should be the wakeup call; serious reforms need to be undertaken at the UN.
