The hot issue du jour in international politics is Syrian intervention. If you haven't been paying attention to international politics for the past few years, there is a civil war going on in Syria. This civil war is an off shoot of the Arab Spring movement in the middle east. In countries like Syria and Egypt the populations have been rising up in protest of the ruling hegemony and trying to bring about political change. In countries like Egypt this has been successful, at least as far as regime change is concerned. In Syria, the movement has so far failed to bring about a change in power. Instead the protests have given way to an armed insurgency fighting running battles with government forces. This brings us to this week's G20 meeting and the debate raging about whether the international community should intervene in Syria.
The debate over Syrian intervention came to a head in the G20 due to evidence that chemical weapons were used on the rebel forces and civilians. A few years ago, when the Syrian situation first became a civil war, President Obama made a series of speeches in which he referred to the use of chemical weapons as a "Red Line". What he meant was that the use of these weapons to quell the insurgency would mean dire consequences for the Syrian government. Now that they have been used the President's hand has been forced and he must make good his threat or appear weak internationally. Unfortunately, there is no international consensus over who actually used the weapons. It is known that the Syrian government posses these weapons and has stock piles around the country, but it is also known that the rebels control a large section of the country and may well have secured these weapons for their own uses. It does not take much imagination to see how the rebel cause would be aided by international intervention and the Syrian government's would not be, so there is some debate over who actually released the Sarin gas.
Further complicating the debate is Syrian ties with Russia, a UN Security Council member and Veto holder, and Iran. Russia has long had military and economic ties with Syria and Russia has long had a military base on Syrian soil. Iran and Syria also have military and economic ties. Iran is also currently building up a supply of fissile material that the West thinks is for the purpose of making nuclear weapons, which is a problem because the Iranian government is hostile to Israel, a strong US ally. The end result of this is that Russia and many others are arguing against intervention, while the US and its allies are arguing for intervention.
So, with that scene set, I think it is important for us to discuss why it is the West feels it needs to intervene at all. For starters, the Syrian insurgency has been going on for years and has been largely ignored by the international community. Sure there has been some hand wringing about war crimes and civilian death tolls, but no one has cared enough to actually do anything about it until now. It seems mighty hypocritical to start caring now after 100,000 people or so have died and the country has fallen into ruin. The time for intervention was when the protests first turned violent and civilian lives were first put in danger. The reality here is that, if there were no broader concerns with Iranian nuclear weapons and Obama drawing lines in the sand, we would still be ignoring the situation.
Second, the world has a pretty miserable track record on intervening in foreign conflicts trying to keep peace and solving situations diplomatically. Even military intervention has a high rate of failure over the long run. We have good examples in both Iraq and Afghanistan of how a successful military campaign turns into a quagmire when it comes to nation building (i.e. we were very good at blowing up and conquering these countries, but not very good at building stable democracies afterwards). But the track record goes back further than that. Korea, Vietnam, South America... Even World War One can be argued as an example of how international intervention can lead to some pretty dire consequences (in this case World War Two). So why is it that this time we think Syria will be any different?
Third, we are all just starting to emerge from a global banking and real estate meltdown and most governments are running pretty untenable deficits as a result. These deficits and persistent unemployment mean that the world can little afford to spend billions dropping bombs on a foreign country that has little to no strategic or economic impact on the international community. A much better use of our money would be in providing refugees safe havens with humanitarian aide in neighboring countries. Essentially, cordoning off Syria and letting the government and the insurgency fight it out while allowing civilians to immigrate to other countries to live their lies in relative safety.
Lastly, even if we do bomb Syrian government targets and destroy its chemical weapons stock piles, it's not like that is going to end the fighting. The insurgency and the Syrian government will continue to fight it out until one or the other has been vanquished. Without the threat of putting boots on the ground as peace keepers, the fighting will just continue. And, as we have seen in previous interventions, putting boots on the ground just means we are putting our own people in harms way in a country we don't really care about. Intervention is pretty much a no win situation.
I think, in the end, that we would be a lot better off if we focused more on helping the refugees than bombing the Syrian government. In the long run, I think we would all be better off if we spent less money on foreign conflicts and more money on the home front. We have plenty of problems at home that could use billions of dollars that doesn't involve dropping bombs on people. But Obama was stupid, drew a line in the sand on both Syria and Iran, and now we are forced into yet another foreign conflict because we can't afford to look weak internationally.
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