Syria Alone

The international response to the Syrian uprising has been muted compared to those in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. Should the West be doing more?

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's promise to grant amnesty for all crimes committed during the Middle East country's three months of protests seems about as likely to curb the uprising as his army's continued use of force. The Guardian concludes that the response to Assad's speech yesterday is proof that the “uprising is indeed unstoppable. Assad can inflame passions, but no longer has the ability to quench them.” Protests have continued, even grown, in the face of at least 1,300 deaths, and thousands of citizens have fled for safety in Turkey. “Senior army commanders will eventually decide Assad's fate,” the editorialists say. “But they are not there yet, and Assad will continue to think all he has to do is to dangle vague promises of a brighter future.”

Doug Bandow, writing in The National Interest, worries that certain elements within the U.S. Senate (well, mostly just Lindsey Graham) are too keen on having the U.S. military intervene in Syria. “Of course, the United States could defeat the Syrian military. Though bombing alone might not be enough, unless it was far heavier and deadlier than that occurring in Libya. But the question is: 'Then what?'” asks Bandow, noting it went unanswered amid the rallying cries for intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Syria's links with Iran, its myriad ethnicities, and religious divisions make that question all the more difficult to answer than it was for the other wars. That alone ought to be enough to nip any notion of military involvement in the bud.

Any discussion of what to do about Syria inevitably leads to Libya, and why the West was so eager to help out the latter while passing on the former. The Globe and Mail suggests the Libyans just had better timing: “The simplest explanation is that the Libyan protests, and consequently the repression, came earlier than the comparable events in Syria. The West, in its flirtation with regime change in Libya, now feels overcommitted.” Because of concerns over how the Libyan mission has proceeded, there is significantly less unanimity from the big international actors for doing it again with Syria. Russia, in particular, felt scorned that its support of the no-fly zone was exploited into all-out regime change, hence its avowal to veto any harsh measures the UN Security Council introduces against Syria. Sadly, it amounts to a geopolitical case of the early birds getting the worm, and later ones getting the butt of a rifle.