In vetoing a Security Council resolution calling for Bashar al-Assad to step down in Syria, Russia and China have provided cover for the regime’s on-going brutal crackdown and, as such, criticism from the U.S., France, and a host of other countries and organizations was immediate and forceful.
So now what?
If the Security Council can’t even call for Assad to step down, it’s pretty clear that some more meaningful action isn’t forthcoming. Unless it comes from, for example, NATO. And some of the language we’re hearing today from Obama, Clinton, and Rice makes the possibility seem pretty realistic.
But the point of this post isn’t really to ask whether or not the U.S. — with NATO and the Arab Leagues as allies — will intervene militarily in Syria. Nor is the point to ask whether or not it ought to do so. If you want to know what I think, you can read some of my posts on Libya from last year (here and here, for example). Clinton has said, “military intervention has been absolutely ruled out and we have made that clear from the very beginning.”
But as I watched the social networking reactions to the Security Council proceedings, I started wondering about the reactions of progressives and (some) libertarians. From what I’ve seen from these groups, there’s condemnation of the Syrian crackdown and of the Russian and Chinese vetoes. But that condemnation doesn’t extend to a call for anyone to actually do anything. And that’s to be expected because these are groups who worry about what happens when people start thinking about acting rather than simply condemning. Indeed, I’m fairly confident that these strange bedfellows will resume their complaints about intervention as soon as planes are in the air; they’ll point out that the U.S. keeps targeting Muslims, they’ll insist that the U.S. has ulterior motives for its involvement, and they’ll point to all of the other places in the world in which the U.S. doesn’t intervene as proof for the first two arguments even as they demand that the U.S. stop dropping bombs on people entirely.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with those arguments, though it’s easy enough to disagree with them. The trouble is that it’s tough to want things you can’t have. In this case, it’s tough to want people to be able to choose their leaders and not to be murdered by their government while at the same not wanting to get too deeply involved when they can’t choose and when they’re being killed.
But let me be clear about this last point. I am well aware that, in the process of using force to help people in Syria, some of the people we intend to help will be harmed. This is the point on which my critics will hang their hats, as they did the last time we had this conversation. And so I’ll say again what I think is a pretty important point when it comes time to consider the costs and benefits of military intervention on behalf of people who are suffering under a murderous regime:
The choice we face is between people being killed and people being killed. I don’t want to sugar-coat that at all. In both instances, people die and it’s violent and bloody and awful. But in one instance — when we eschew intervention — the people who generally die violently are those who are attempting (and failing, due to inferior military capabilities) to throw off a tyrant. In those instances, it’s my position that to fall back on pacifism or isolationism because all warfare is awful or imperalistic or costly amounts to something of a moral failing insofar as it amounts to siding with the tyrant.
Choosing not to involve ourselves in what happens overseas doesn’t mean that people in Syria will suddenly be safe and happy and alive; it means that we can fool ourselves into thinking that we don’t have any blood on our hands because we didn’t directly harm anyone.
We can all be outraged with the choice that the Russians and the Chinese made today. And we surely ought to be outraged about what the Assad regime has been doing for months and months now. But if that outrage just means that we wag our fingers at Assad, the Russians, and the Chinese, rather than actually doing something about the terrible crimes being committed in Syria, then how outraged are we, really?
Most of the people who didn’t want the U.S. to get involved in Syria have gotten pretty quiet in the past six months because the U.S. hasn’t really gotten involved … at least not in the way that the U.S. got involved in Libya, to the endless breast-beating of these same people. In fact, there’s very little discussion of Syria from the non-interventionists these days, though the violence there continues apace.
![kohenari:
The International Criminal Court has just this morning handed down it’s first ever verdict, finding Thomas Lubanga guilty of conscripting child soldiers. Lubanga was the leader of the Union of Congolese Patriots and stands accused of being the military authority behind the abduction of children as young as eleven to serve the Patriotic Forces of the Liberation of Congo in the 1998-2003 war. Lubanga was handed over in 2006, the first suspect to be detained by the ICC, and has been on trial since 2009.
This guilty verdict is great for the DR Congo and wonderful for the International Criminal Court. Last year former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz told ICC judges: “Let the voice and the verdict of this esteemed global court now speak for the awakened conscience of the world.”
Photo: Ed Oudenaarden/AP.
[AJ English Twitter; Al Jazeera; AP]
I think the last time I wrote about the ICC proceedings against Lubanga was back in 2010, when the trial was suspended in order to ensure that proper procedures were being followed. As I wrote back then:
Regardless of Lubanga’s guilt (which really doesn’t seem to be in much doubt), the Court is setting an important precedent here: instead of proceeding with a trial that might later be decried as sham justice, the ICC is putting its foot down now … about the fair trial standards that must be followed. The prosecution cannot keep information from the defense and it cannot flout the Court’s orders, not if we’re to look back on these trials and confirm that justice was done.
With so much talk in the past week about Joseph Kony — another warlord indicted by the ICC for conscripting child soldiers — it’s good to see the the Lubanga trial brought to a close with a guilty verdict. International justice efforts, though still slow and selective, are beginning to take a toll on the long-standing culture of impunity for human rights abuses.
Of course, the only way to see more criminals in the dock is to arrest them …
What I worry about this is the media making a direct link from men like this to Joseph Kony.
Kony is currently an almost non-actor. He’s estimated to have about 500 in his force, which may be generous. They’re spread around in rough territory mostly outside of Uganda.
But by telling his name in the same place with Lubanga, they add legitimacy to a ham-fisted approach to Kony, rather than one of finesse.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0vcpapESn1qchhhqo1_400.jpg)
