Some people are just unlucky. They get born in the wrong place. Like the Syrian city of Homs, where at least 1,770 people have been killed since government troops began their relentless bombardment of the city three long weeks ago.\u00a0 Over the past year the killing machine of President Bashar al-Assad, in a brutal attempt to root out the uprising against him, has taken more than six thousand lives with \u201cmerciless disregard\u201d to quote the words of the veteran war correspondent Marie Colvin, speaking just before the Assad regime killed her too.<\/p>\n
Those who were born in the Libyan city of Benghazi proved more fortunate. Their dictator was Colonel Gaddafi. When he declared his determination to wipe his political opponents from the face of the earth the West decided to intervene. Nato took out Gaddafi\u2019s air force and tanks to prevent Benghazi being flattened and its people obliterated. Assad in Syria, by contrast, appears to be getting away with his murders.\u00a0 So let\u2019s ask the idiot question: why was it OK to intervene in Libya then but not in Syria now?<\/p>\n
The idea that Syria is like Libya, said Hillary Clinton the other day, is a \u201cfalse analogy\u201d. What then has Libya got that Syria hasn\u2019t? Oil is the obvious answer. But there is more to it than that. Gaddafi was a crazy maverick who had, over the years, alienated just about all his Arab and European neighbours to the extent that there was no-one to weep at his going. He did not have much of an actual track record of mass murder, unlike the Assad dynasty in Syria, but he was an easy target.<\/p>\n
Assad is a bigger boy in the international schoolyard. Syria has a standing army of a quarter of a million troops, nerve gas and chemical weapons. And it has even bigger friends in the playground. The foreign ministers of its two biggest allies, Russia and China, went on the phone to one another the other day to \u201creaffirm\u201d their \u201cjoint position\u201d. Both have just sent envoys to Damascus. Both vetoed a UN Security resolution condemning Assad\u2019s human rights violations presumably because they wouldn\u2019t want anyone scrutinising their own record in Chechnya or Tibet.<\/p>\n
Russia is the more resolute. Having lost most of its Middle Eastern allies it is determined to hang on to Syria, where it has its only naval base on the Mediterranean. Last year 10 per cent of Moscow\u2019s $3.8bn arms sales were to Syria.\u00a0 Russian investment in Syrian infrastructure, energy and tourism totals around $20bn.<\/p>\n
And then there is Iran. Last week it provocatively sent a couple of warships through the Suez Canal into the Med to dock in the Syrian port of Tartus where 600 Russian technicians are busy renovating the former Soviet base. Assad is often described as isolated because the Arab League has lined up firmly against him. But that is to forget Iran. In a region split between Sunni and Shia the latter dominate in Iran and now Iraq. They see Assad \u2013 whose family is from the minority Alawite Shi\u2019ite sect which rules over Syria\u2019s Sunni minority \u2013 as a key ally. He is their conduit to Hezbollah the Shia militant movement which terrorises Israel.<\/p>\n
This explains the political paralysis of the West on Syria. Most of the West\u2019s traditional Arab allies are Sunni \u2013 from Saudi Arabia, through the Gulf, to Jordan and Egypt. Most of the Syrian rebels are Sunni. But so too is al-Qa\u2019ida. Western spooks fear that the inchoate anti-Assad coalition could hide a potent cohort of jihadists \u2013 an anxiety that has just been fed by al-Qa\u2019ida\u2019s new leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who pledged support for the fight against the \u201cpernicious, cancerous regime\u201d of Assad. That has not helped the people of Homs one bit.<\/p>\n
Inside diplomatic circles there is, therefore, endless talk about the complexity and nuances of the Syrian case. Faced with the ruthless resolution of Assad and his allies\u00a0 we make excuses. The Syrian opposition is far weaker, and more fractured, than were the Libyan rebels. The best-known opposition group, the Syrian National Council, is a muddle of intellectuals, liberals, activists, Islamists and sectarian minorities who share little beyond hatred of Assad. They are split over whether to negotiate with Assad, whether to ask for outside military intervention and much else.<\/p>\n
Arming them is premature, Washington says, mindful of how it gave ground-to-air missiles to insurgents to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan \u2013 and then found good mujahideen turned into bad Taliban before their very eyes. The British are no less confused; one of the key liberators of Libya turned out to be someone we had handed over to Gaddafi as a terrorist.<\/p>\n
There is another problem. The Syrian insurrection is breaking out everywhere, on the outskirts of a dozen big cities and in territory near the borders with Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey which Assad can retake but not keep. That is good. But it means there are no clear battle lines and no large contiguous rebel-held area that can be protected by a Libyan-style No Fly Zone.<\/p>\n
The killing in Syria is being done in densely-populated urban areas by some particularly nasty special forces with long counter-insurgency experience. French jets and US drones will be far less effective against them than Gaddafi. Airstrikes would run the risk of significant civilian casualties. And Nato planes would be targeted by advanced Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles and aircraft probably piloted by Russian \u201cadvisers\u201d. It could all take on the dimensions of a proxy war, not just between Shia and Sunni, but for an unpopular Putin government eager to win support back home with a few easy hits against the United States.<\/p>\n
This all looks big scary stuff to Western leaders. Moral outrage, they fear, is not a sufficient basis for serious foreign policy. It is far easier to let the people in Homs die to the accompaniment of loud wailing and impotent hand-wringing from Europe and America.\u00a0 We have done it before in Rwanda, Srebrenica and in the Syrian city of Hama when President Assad\u2019s father wiped out 20,000 people for exactly the same reasons 30 years ago last week.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo one here can understand how the international community can let this happen,\u201d Marie Colvin fulminated the day before she died. Indeed. We could arm the rebels, as the French and Qataris did in Libya, or we could stand by and wring our hands until a Syrian Sunni embrace of al-Qa\u2019ida becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Either way it now looks as if, for the people of Homs, whatever happens will come too late.<\/p>\n
The world is full of people who lacked the good sense to chose parents in Surrey rather than Syria. Just a few are privileged to chose where they live or, in the case of courageous colleagues like Marie Colvin, where they die. But the helpless citizens of Homs have no choice at all. Unlucky that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some people are just unlucky. They get born in the wrong place. Like the Syrian city of Homs, where at least 1,770 people have been killed since government troops began their relentless bombardment of the city three long weeks ago.\u00a0 Over the past year the killing machine of President Bashar al-Assad, in a brutal attempt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,37],"tags":[384,712,715,383],"class_list":["post-4851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle-east","category-politics","tag-arab-uprising","tag-middle-east","tag-politics","tag-syria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4851"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7282,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4851\/revisions\/7282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}