Intervention in Syria comes not too soon, but too late

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Intervention in Syria comes not too soon, but too late

It's hard not to feel dizzied and bewildered by almost every aspect of the Syrian crisis – including the debate on intervention which has now engulfed the UK. Following it in recent days, I've seen a great many furrowed brows over the possible strengthening of Al-Qaida, frets over the risk of escalation and exhortations to 'Stop the War' and keep 'Hands off Syria'.

All good stuff, you understand. Except oddly, they all seem to be taking place now - in August 2013 – rather than in 2011 or 2012, when they were most sorely needed, as the original democratic revolution was being brutally put down by the Assad regime. Since then, 100,000 people have died, half of whom are civilians. Al-Qaida-linked elements within the opposition have been significantly strengthened. Things have escalated.

This has occurred at least in part because of Western failure in the face of human catastrophe to provide the necessary solidarity and support for moderate secularist factions in the Syrian opposition (all the while, funding for their more extremist counter-parts flooded in from Qatar and elsewhere). Or to take active steps, as in Libya, to protect the Syrian population from systematic slaughter. This was something neither left nor the right in either Washington or London were willing to countenance, stuck variously under their 'realist' or 'anti-imperialist' shades of isolationism.

The result is what we see before us today: a cramped and partial debate, confined to punitive strikes over a single chemical weapons attack. Should such strikes come, they are better than nothing, whatever their flaws. Hopeful cries for a 'political settlement' or to 'get round the negotiating table' tidily side-step the fact that the Syrian regime currently has little incentive to do so. It's a grim reality that it often takes the credible threat of force to even get tin-pot thugs like Assad to the table, as experience with Slobodan Milosevic twice showed in the 1990s.

But this narrow focus on chemical weapons has made the government's political wrangles yesterday evening rather predictable. When a mandate is sought on the back of one specific event, it is quite logical that more evidence will be first sought on that event. More importantly, though, this limited focus won't help protect the civilian population from murder by other means. The foreign secretary has been advancing a humanitarian case (publicly stating the aim to avoid further "humanitarian distress"). But what is being proposed militarily – precision strikes on chemical weapons facilities - will not achieve that on its own. He is setting himself up to fail.

The truth is the red line should have been set far short of chemical warfare, because intervention in Syria is horribly belated. As ghastly as footage from last week is – so much so I'm not even going to attempt the words to do it justice – from a humanitarian point of view it's not obvious why it's so much worse than any of the number of other civilian massacres Assad's militias have gleefully carried out since late 2011. Take Houla in 2012, for example, where they went door-to-door with guns and knives, executing children one-by-one along the way. These are at least analogues to the atrocities which triggered war in Kosovo.

Needless to say, piecemeal approaches to such butchery will not suffice. Assuming that Western powers are now serious about halting it, intervention must come in the form of wide-ranging efforts to both protect civilians and tip the balance of power in favour of moderate rebels against both Assad and Al-Qaida. The former should constitute humanitarian safe-zones properly patrolled by the Free Syrian Army and a No-Fly Zone. As well as air strikes on weapons facilities and army airports, the latter - possible under such protective cover – should see every effort taken to actively train, arm and build up the moderate FSA, as Michael Weiss forcefully argues.

None of which is to pretend this would be easy. Even if it went well, it would still be hideously imperfect, ugly and complex. To put it mildly, Nato power and influence is a less than ideal instrument through which to achieve progressive ends. But it's simply not true, as those on the far left contend, that its every move is always and only reducible to an act of imperialism. As Ian Dunt argues, few can explain through this prism why the West are acting now. The reality is states' interests are not fixed or neatly explained, but constructed and constantly in flux; a mesh of time, place, systems and personalities.

Very occasionally, that can and should be pressed into engineering the least worst outcome in a humanitarian emergency. That is all we can hope for in Syria. But it is better than what most Syrians have lived through for the last two years, or what awaits them if nothing more is done. Achieving even this, however, won't be possible unless we face up to our own failures and omissions, and recognise that the time for action came a long way back on the road to Jobar.

The left must find its voice on Syria

Piece for Shifting Grounds

The left must find its voice on Syria

On 26 March 1999, Russia and China tabled a UN Security Council resolution condemning the US-UK led intervention in Kosovo, which had been launched following the escalating massacre and ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians by Serb forces.

The resolution denounced NATO action as a flagrant breach of sovereignty and demanded its cessation. In an important moment, the motion was resoundingly defeated. By 12 votes to 3, Western and non-Western states, many of whom were not natural allies of the US, lined up against it and backed the war. Summing up the mood, the Dutch representative said:

“Today we regard it as a generally accepted rule of international law that no sovereign state has the right to terrorise its own citizens…Times have changed, and they will not change back…”

This consensus did not emerge out of nowhere. It was a norm built up throughout a decade that counted the costs of inaction in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and particularly in Bosnia at Srebrenica. But this was not some neo-con project. The idea that, in very limited circumstances and by very strict criteria, intervention could be justified to prevent an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe was pioneered by thinkers on the centre left, where it enjoyed broad support.

Thirteen years on, Dutch pronouncements look horribly premature. Bashar Al-Assad’s militias rampage through Syria, shelling and slaughtering his own people en masse – gouging out the eyes of children while they execute them, one by one – to see that his dictatorship retains power. As UN monitors withdraw, Russia and China shield the regime from any meaningful recourse, just as with Kosovo – except this time there’s little or no will to defy them. Times have changed back.

What is striking though is how relatively little we on the mainstream left have to say about all this. I am not for a second accusing people of not caring about events. But there is little of the pressure on William Hague to help find a solution that Robin Cook or Tony Blair felt, and which played its role in the decision to confront Milosevic. There is instead a sense of paralysis, a fatalism that nothing can be done. If this silence is ever broken, it’s usually to warn of the perils of action, rather than inaction.

But it doesn’t necessarily have to be like this. That’s not to argue that the model used in the Balkans or Libya will work in Syria. Ill-judged actions could easily make things even worse; each case is different with its own complexities, and should be treated as such. But there remains a host of at least plausible options far short of occupation or even air-strikes which could help make a horrendous situation in Syria a bit less so, and stem the bloodshed. One is a no-fly zone. Another, the most comprehensive, is a proposal for humanitarian safe havens (‘No Kill Zones’) put forward by Anne-Marie Slaughter in the US (here and here). These, as she outlines, could be defensively patrolled for instance by the Free Syrian Army, with the conditional logistical support of Arab League states, Turkey and the West.

Such plans may not in the end stand the test of scrutiny, though they have so far, and something like them is favoured by the French. But at the moment they are not even being countenanced by those on the centre-left in the UK; they are not even being discussed, let alone pushed for. Instead most seem to have succumbed to the gloomy assumption – until now the preserve of the far left – that all and any action involving Western power is reducible to an act of imperialism that can only end in disaster. If humanitarian intervention ever appears in our discourse, it’s rarely without inverted commas and a sneer.

What lies behind all of this, of course, is Iraq. The disastrous invasion and occupation has made it easy to tar all Western intervention with the same brush (helped further by proponents of war with Saddam cynically appropriating humanitarian language after initial rationales had been exposed). One opened the door to the other, so the argument goes. The histories of the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and lately Libya are constantly being flimsily re-written to fit this neat worldview.

But whatever you think of those wars, it is possible and necessary to separate them out from Iraq and Afghanistan – or to support one but not the other. The former were wildly different interventions, prosecuted in totally different circumstance and for totally different reasons. Iraq met few of the criteria set out under R2P, for instance, or even Blair’s own Chicago speech. Similarly, there was no oil in Pristina, and very little geo-strategic benefit to Benghazi. Life is more complex than that.

More to the point, the interventions of the mid-to-late 90s and in Libya actually worked. They were enormously imperfect, complex and bloody (and in the case of Bosnia, belated), and occasionally horrible mistakes were made in the course of them. But they ultimately helped end conflicts which at one point had promised butchery, ethnic cleansing and human misery on an infinitely worse scale. Western influence and power remains a very blunt object indeed, and people across the left are right to treat it with suspicion. It will always be selective, and of course is sometimes the author of brute realpolitic. But occasionally, it can be pressed into engineering the least worst outcome.

Again, what is possible in Syria is likely very different to before. But progressives urgently need to address this mental block to any outside action at all, which seems to have set in among many of us, because at the moment it’s leaving an eerie silence in the face of immense brutality and suffering. The situation is not simple, and as Rory Stewart has said, “we do not have a moral obligation to do what cannot be done”. But we do have a moral obligation to open our minds, and at least arrive at that conclusion honestly.

Humanitarian intervention redux: lessons for Libya from the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq

Humanitarian intervention is fashionable again. Well, not quite. But as events unfold in Libya, the number of commentators suddenly spilling ink over a concept widely presumed buried alongside the dead of Iraq has led many a po-faced columnist and Question Time audience member to ask indignantly: “have we learnt nothing from the last ten years?”

It's something of an unfair line of attack. Throughout the 90s, the idea that states could intervene in situations of “extreme humanitarian emergency” slowly, painstakingly gained legitimacy – though not before thousands had been allowed to die in Rwanda and Bosnia. The culmination of this was NATO's imperfect but timely intervention in Kosovo to stop the slaughter of ethic Albanians at the hands of Slobodan Milosevic's thugs. For many of us the Kosovo war – and later Sierre Leone - shows that intervention genuinely driven by humanitarian objectives is possible in international relations. But by using humanitarian language as a drape for the illegal and illegitimate catastrophe in Iraq - which failed almost every pre-condition for humanitarian intervention ever set out - Blair appeared to have killed dead a doctrine he'd done so much to forge.

Yet strangely much of the debate over no-fly zones in Libya is playing out in an eerily similar way to the coverage and literature surrounding the Kosovo war. Many have asked whether we've entered a strange political time warp. But though it may theoretically be legitimate - as well as altogether more comfortable - for those of us not in principle against humanitarian intervention to dis-entangle Libya from Iraq and Afghanistan, it would be a terrible mistake. It would allow the opposition to claim the last decade for themselves and if replicated by officials lead to significant errors in approach and execution.

Instead we should take from past military successes, learn from past catastrophes and build this in to the really specific set of circumstances before us. While the facts are still being considered in Libya, as Michael Walzer says we should start thinking about what happens if Gaddafi regains control, particularly over Benghazi – as it looks like he will. What if he starts taking revenge on those who have defied him? What if once again we see the systematic extermination of a select portion of the population? If 'humanitarian intervention' in Libya goes ahead, in whatever form, it will be a decisive historical moment for the concept – a chance for resurrection that if squandered or botched would probably prove fatal.

With all this in mind, here's five pieces of advice to be drawn from the recent history of military interventions which should be considered by those advancing the case for a no-fly zone (or more) in Libya.

1. The UN route is vital

Trendy as it is to disparage the UN as useless or dysfunctional, the US brand of unilateralism over Iraq showed that bypassing it nevertheless has massive implications for perceptions of legitimacy. In a region where there is already great (and justified) suspicion of the West, any action in Libya that hasn't received wide international support would be catastrophic. Any half-successful humanitarian intervention in history has been multilateral.

A UN Resolution backing a no-fly zone would obviously be preferable. But it's easy to forget that under a strict interpretation of the UN Charter, the Kosovo war was illegal (the UK and US failed to get a UN Resolution justifying military action owing to the cynical threat of veto from Russia). But crucially, among most scholars of international law the Kosovo war is still judged legitimate, or at least 'not illegal'. This is because of the support the intervention gained from states from a wide variety of regions – a Russian proposed resolution opposing the intervention was roundly defeated by 12-3 – and because a legal norm allowing for intervention in cases of genocide or mass extermination had evolved throughout the 1990s.

The lesson from this experience for Libya is that any attempts to install a no-fly zone must not under any circumstance jettison the UN or international community, even in the event that the threat of veto makes an enabling Resolution impossible. There is a half-way house that is preferable to blind unilateralism. Leading NATO countries should propose a resolution, even if it's rejected, to establish that it is just China and Russia that oppose; they should secure the vocal support of the Arab League, the African Union, explore the possibility of a 'Uniting for Peace' resolution from the General Assembly – draw as many states as possible into the cause, while smoking out the extent of the opposition and their justifying arguments. Ten years ago the idea that sovereignty was sacrosanct had declined significantly, few states felt politically able to use the language of sovereignty regarding states who had turned on their citizens. It'll be interesting to see if and how Iraq and Afghanistan have changed that.

2. The hard left will go berserk, probably best to ignore them.

'Humanitarian' intervention is an anathema to the vast majority of the hard left. Most believe no such thing is possible, given that the structure of international relations/capitalism (take your pick) determines all state behaviour in favour of imperialism, with morality at all times just providing a guise for advancing material interests (i.e, oil). Many of them will pivot their opinion to make sure it maintains the maximum distance from the US in particular, even if this leaves them taking up some quite ludicrous positions. In the Balkans in the 1990s a shameful number (including Chomsky) indulged in the late 20^th century equivalent of Holocaust denial. They claimed among other things that the Srebrenica and Racak massacres in Bosnia and Kosovo respectively were invented or exaggerated by the West to justify intervention, that hey! these things happen in wars anyway and Milosevic was just a big cuddly bear*. Fittingly, Diane Johnstone (whose work on Kosovo was among the worst examples of such filth) has recently penned an article making many of the same accusations about Libya. Expect more of this. More intellectual acrobatics and more revisionism. If Gaddafi escalates the massacre of his own people as he reasserts control, the question that has to be levelled back at John Pilger and the like is this: do you think the international community should just sit by? If so, fine, but face up to it. The West is anything but perfect, but sitting on the sidelines and opining about the structural iniquities in global power isn't much comfort to those being slaughtered.

3. All or nothing thinking is useless

“Well if we intervene in Libya, why not Zimbabwe or North Korea?” may sound like a clever line but it isn't - and it shouldn't be pandered to by those in favour of intervening. The reputation of humanitarian intervention in the 90s and R2P beyond that suffered from the at times almost messianic tone of its supporters - talk of a “new world order” and so on. 'No-fly zones' and the like are imperfect, practical, piecemeal interventions that should be considered on a case by case basis and weighed against wider repercussions (in the case of North Korea, nuclear war!). They do not herald a new era of world government where all is harmonious, universal and consistent. Intervention will always be a political art. It will always be messy and selective, based around old colonial ties, geographical proximity or public affinity with one group of people in light of specific events filtered through the usual partial media lens' – accept it. It doesn't make humanitarian intervention a worthless concept, but it will always be shaped by the subjectivities of the most powerful states and their publics. The question must therefore always be: what are the motivations of the states involved? Do geopolitics outway genuine humanitarian concern?

It's worth adding that by genuine humanitarian concern, of course, William Hague is not and should not be expected to be a paragon of selflessless and virtue. International relations is a cynical business, afterall. But history (especially of the Balkans) shows domestic pressure and the political anxiety – in the age of wall to wall 24 hour media – of being seen to have innocent people slaughtered on 'your watch' can spur genuine humanitarian action divorced from covert grabs for land or oil, or any of the other old 'realist' explanations of state action. Again, this will have to do. It's evidence of overwhelming ulterior motive we should be looking for, not altruism.

4. Can we do good? What are the limits of our power?

Rory Stewart's book Occupational Hazards is among the best of all the literature dedicated to post-mortem of the disastrous Iraq war. His day-to-day account of life as Deputy Governorate Co-Ordinator of Maysan province in the initial years after the invasion carries one important theme: that the US and the UK were intervening in a highly complex political eco-system that they did not understand and were not welcome in. No amount of reading T.E Lawrence, flexible military tactics “or giving lollipops to children” would ever change that fundamental weakness, he says. NATO has the same struggle in Afghanistan. Even in more welcoming circumstance in Kosovo, NATO were left red-faced by the slightly 'off message' (to say the least) actions of the Kosovo Liberation Army they had intervened to support (revenge attacks on Serbs, general crime and corruption).

The point we should take from all this is one of humility. Do the UK, US and France in particular understand the complex web of tribes, allegiances and agendas in which they are embroiling themselves in Libya? Do they have an idea how their intervention will change that dynamic? Do they understand 'the rebels' they are supporting, or even Libyan civil society (in so far as it exists)? Are we 100% sure of the facts on the ground?

Neither should we assume that a no-fly zone will be effective - the initial raids on Serbia were not. What if Gaddfi, as the Serbs did, actually escalate ground violence against civilians and rebel forces? Are the US and UK willing to start an air-campaign 'down town'? If so, innocent civilians will almost certainly get caught in the cross-fire and die. These are all things that should weigh heavily on the minds of advocates of intervention. Humanitarian intervention is war, war isn't glorious. We cannot bomb our way to utopia, we can only aim for the least worst – and bloody – outcome.

All of which, paradoxically, brings us to...

5. No more 'virtual war'

Interventions in the 1990s were severely restricted by, in the words of Michael Ignatieff, the tendency to “talk the language of ultimate cause while practising the art of minimum risk”. If we are going to intervene, it has got to be done properly and it has got to represent a lasting mulitlateral commitment. The bombs dropped on Belgrade in 1999 during the initial NATO campaign were done so from such a ludicrous height, in order to minimise the risk to the pilots, that they proved completely counter intuitive. By virtue of the task at hand, intervening forces will have to be put at risk for anything they do to be effective. Again, something that should at all times be considered by pro-interventionists.
There is also a lesson for Cameron among all this. Media and public opinion is fickle. The groundswell of US media pressure and public support for intervention in Somalia in the 1990s soon went sour once US lives started to be lost – the 'CNN effect' turned into the 'body bag effect'. He may be enjoying the role of an international leader, but things will get difficult and because he will have tied his reputation to the outcome, pressure will mount to almost unbearable levels (Alastair Campbell says the Kosovo campaign was the most testing moment of New Labour's first term – at one point Blair's entourage were even convinced it would break the government). Any intervention cannot be a half hearted affair, and the moment the first allied plane takes off, Cameron has got to see it through no matter the political damage back home. The coalition of political support behind any intervention in Libya will likely be fragile and Gaddafi will feed off any weakness, as Milosevic did - any vacillations could prove disastrous.
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*For anyone interested in a proper debunking of revisionist rubbish over Kosovo and a discussion of its implications, here are two useful links:

http://eastethnia.blogspot.com/2005/10/long-post-anatomy-of-denial.html
http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/wuttke.htm