This just in on Google news:
Syrian Government Denies Blame for Houla Massacre
The Syrian government has denied its troops massacred at least 92 people, about one-third of them children, Friday in the town of Houla…. The Houla massacre marked the deadliest single attack since Syria’s anti-government uprising began about 15 months ago.
The single strongest argument I’ve heard in favor of military intervention came from an anti-Syrian government spokesman on the BBC: “We all know that NATO or the global community will intervene after another 20 or 30,000 people have been killed. So why wait when we all see what’s coming?”
I’m personally conflicted on the use of military intervention for humanitarian purposes. From where I sit, it was easy (and correct) to oppose the invasion of Iraq, and difficult (and correct) to oppose the invasion of Afghanistan without more clearly defined goals, methods, and exit strategies. It’s much more difficult to come up with a cogent foreign policy view that combines appropriate use of military force and political measures when considering Rwanda, Bosnia, Libya, and Syria. Points to the Obama administration for apparently getting it right in Libya, but in the absence of an Obama doctrine it’s not entirely clear whether the new Libya meets our long-term foreign policy goals, or what the difference is between Libya and Syria.
Two things, though, seem obvious:
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The absence of a clear humanitarian intervention strategy has a lot to do with how the global community should view both the U.S. and NATO, just as we’d be concerned about any nation that possessed a million-ton shithammer they could use against us without a clearly stated policy on its use. Based purely on numbers alone, the United States has a military designed to fight a world war single-handed, and the absence of its use can be just as telling as where we decide to use it.
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As they say, nature abhors a vacuum, but the political corollary is that a filled vacuum is resistant to creating effective measures. We’ve collectively delegated the enforcement of human rights law to the United Nations, which is also stripped of any enforcement capabilities. I’m not alone in glancing at some of the whack-jobs in the General Assembly and thinking that I’m glad that the United Nations doesn’t have a standing or allocated army… but after 70 years it’s also clear that human rights enforcement is toothless and ineffectual.
I can’t say that I can see a way out of this bind. But it does seem to me that if our foreign policy goal is to starve terrorist organizations of the will to hate Western nations, the use of money and power for clear humanitarian goals—and the absence of a policy of American hegemony promulgated by neoconservatives—would go a long way in that direction.