And yet whether we like it or not we share at least some of the responsibility for what’s happened in Syria. We condemn our politicians for the debacle in Iraq, yet if we were consistent we would be just as damning of those leaders who have failed to act in the face of bloody slaughter in Syria. The carnage in places like Fallujah rightly discredited those gung-ho enough to believe that parliamentary democracy could be transplanted onto societies from the hatch of a B52 Bomber. As the French writer Pascal Bruckner has put it, people who “hope to see local versions of the parliament in Westminster established in Kabul, Riyadh, Algiers, and Moscow will have to be patient and learn to accept necessity”. Yet despite all of that, the bloodshed in Syria demonstrates that inaction is often just as bad as intervention on the side of the aggressor and against the victim. Syria is, to put it bluntly, the anti-interventionist’s Iraq. This isn’t a particularly novel observation. There are plenty of examples of unnecessary and bloody Western intervention; but just as many instances where enormous numbers of people have needed to be rescued because the consequences of doing nothing have been too atrocious to contemplate. Reeling off the casualties of war without accepting any responsibility for what happens as a result of inaction is simply to stop thinking at the point where one’s worldview jars with reality. After the horrible lesson of Iraq it’s easy to rail against the idea that military intervention could ever have a positive outcome. But such a black and white interpretation of history means erasing from memory the experiences of Bosnia and Rwanda. Tony Blair will forever be hounded by placard-wielding protesters for taking the country to war with Saddam Hussein, but John Major was prime minister at the time of the infamous Srebrenica massacre in 1995, Europe’s worst war crime since the Second World War. At the time Britain pursued a policy that would have been music to any anti-war activist’s ears: we sat, arms self-righteously folded, while 8,000 Bosnian Muslims from the town of Srebrenica were rounded up and killed by the Bosnian Serb army under the command of Ratko Mladic. NATO did eventually intervene to stop the killing, but in the face of much resistance from the Major government, where little Englander Toryism cautioned against the creation of a ‘level killing field’. ...That said, while the death toll in Syria creeps steadily towards 200,000, we should be quite clear about something: it isn’t only hawks and Neo-Cons who have some explaining to do. Those willing to turn away when confronted with human catastrophes like Syria should also be held to account. independent.co.uk/voices/comment/syria-after-three-years-of-horror-the-wests-kneejerk-peaceniks-have-some-explaining-to-do-9208413.html
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 12:56:12 +0000