Historic Parallels

Paddy Ashdown has said that the decision to not take action against the use of chemical weapons in Syria will make England “be a country that shrugs its shoulders and says ‘nothing to do with me’”. I agree. Of course I understand that there are many well-intentioned people who disagree with Syrian military intervention, mainly because they do not fully understand the difference between the Iraq conflict and that which is going on now – i.e. U.N. democracy, or lack thereof – and I fully accept that British democracy has been proven functional in its resistance to warfare. But unfortunately, Syria now stands alone, just like Britain once stood alone, and tyranny will have to take its toll before decent human beings realise that allowing Assad to commit torture is almost as bad as when America refused to fight dictatorship in 1939. This is not sensationalist, it is historical relevance that many people have seemingly forgotten.

The Red Line Is About Time

Most people I speak to about the news (and most politicians that I see on the news) tend to be rather tentative about getting involved in the ongoing Syrian civil war. This mainly stems from the unnecessary war with Iraq, but I think there is a significant difference between the conflicts. Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Hans Blix and his U.N. weapons inspectors were doing a good job, albeit a little slowly; they would have eventually determined that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and rendered him militarily impotent. I know that it wouldn’t have been particularly moral to leave a previously brutal dictator like Hussein in power, but further political measures would hopefully have been deployed (e.g. harsh economic sanctions) that may have forced a new Iraqi dawn – as in Egypt and Tunisia – without having to resort to warfare. But Syria is different: it is the U.N. Security Council that has been rendered impotent this time with Russia / China and Britain / America / France in a seemingly permanent stalemate that prevents political implementations. So now that today it has been revealed that President Barack Obama’s ‘red line’ has been crossed (proof has been shown that Bashar al-Assad has been using chemical weapons), I’m pleased that the U.S. government has taken the decision to arm Syrian rebels; in fact, it’s about time. Just because Russia and China have their own immoral agendas to keep Assad in power, doesn’t mean that the rest of the world should sit idly by while tens of thousands of people are massacred, many of them innocent civilians. As much as it may be reasonable to avoid sending in the soldiers (so that we don’t get dragged into another Afghanistan) we still have a moral duty to intervene somehow. We were able to get rid of Colonel Gaddafi by helping rebels in Libya (though that was with more political consensus), and that country is certainly better off without him. So I hope that Obama is strong in his decision-making, and forces Assad to back down from genocide.