Much is being said about the reputational damage the political game of chicken over raising its debt ceiling has caused the United States in the international arena. But far too little is being said about the reputational damage its double standards for humanitarian intervention have caused.
Recall the categorical imperative President Obama cited when he announced airstrikes against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi a few months ago:
We cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people there will be no mercy… We must be clear: actions have consequences.
(FOX News, March 19, 2011)
Never mind that, four months later, it’s arguable that American/NATO bombs have caused more casualties in Libya than anything the tyrant Gaddafi has done or even contemplated doing. Or that, despite Obama and all Western leaders insisting that “Gaddafi must go”, he remains firmly in power – even mocking their feckless efforts to oust him.
The point is that, in the meantime, America and its NATO allies have stood idly by as Syria’s Bashir al-Assad not only “[told] his people there will be no mercy”, but actually showed them none as he systematically slaughtered hundreds (and made thousands more “disappear”) in a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that has been going on for over three months now.
Assad’s latest assault on his own people in this respect occurred over the weekend in the city of Hama:
The killings in the city’s residential Hamidiyah district brought to [125] the number of civilians reported killed in a tank-backed crackdown on the central Syrian city, where Assad’s father crushed an armed Muslim Brotherhood revolt 29 years ago by razing neighborhoods and killing many thousands of people.
(Reuters, August 1, 2011)
Given this, the claim that Western nations are waiting for an invitation from the Arab league to intervene – as British Foreign Secretary William Hague stated – is as specious as it is hypocritical. Not least because it is belied by the dark secret that Western nations have ignored an invitation from the African Union, which was issued over six years ago, to intervene to help stop the genocide still raging in Darfur:
It is the time for the AU, it is the time for the parties and it is time for the international community to secure peace in Darfur. We strongly believe the AU needs support because alone we cannot do it.
(AU Peace Commissioner Said Djinnit, IRIN Global, May 25, 2005)
In any case, it is beyond unconscionable for Western nations to predicate the exercise of their moral authority on a fatuous Arab League principle which holds that the killing of relatively few pro-democracy protesters in Libya warrants military intervention, but the killing of many more in Syria does not.
The international community needs to act quickly to prevent further atrocities in Syria. What are they waiting for? A million Syrians to be killed? It is shameful by any standard to see human beings being shot and killed and not a single condemnation from the UN Security Council. What message does that send to brutal dictators?
(Ausama Monajed, a leading exiled dissident, London Guardian, August 1, 2011)
Yet here, in that same Guardian report, is how Hague answered on behalf of the international community:
There is no prospect of a legal, morally sanctioned military intervention.
May God in heaven help pro-democracy protesters in Syria. Because it’s heart-wrenchingly clear that nobody on earth will.
Meanwhile over in Egypt
Pro-democracy protesters who toppled the dictator Hosni Mubarak are (still) insisting that anyone who had anything to do with the running of his well-oiled regime must be toppled as well. This has turned the country into a practically ungovernable mess.
In fact, these protesters seem determined to snatch defeat from the hands of victory by making Tea-Party like, all-or-nothing demands on the interim government to transition the country from dictatorship to democracy overnight. Even hauling a heart-stricken Mubarak into court this week (where he’s lying in the dock on his hospital bed inside an iron cage) to face a battery of corruption charges has done nothing to appease their defiant lust for retribution, humiliation … and change.
Accordingly, they have returned to Tahrir Square. Unfortunately, this has led to almost daily clashes with the police who are trying to prevent them from turning it into another Cairo “garbage village”.
Related commentaries:
Egyptian revolution II