Yes, We Really Can Stop the Slaughter in Syria
On March 28, 2011, President Barack Obama appeared on television screens across America and told his nation why he had authorized air strikes on Libyan government forces and installations.
“To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and—more profoundly—our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are,” he said. “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”
Less than two weeks earlier, anti-government protests had begun in Syria, which would eventually deteriorate into the Syrian Civil War, now entering its third year. As peace talks between Syria’s Assad regime and opposition groups have failed, the international community’s already-waning focus must not shift even further from Damascus and the ongoing atrocities Syrian civilians continue to face.
The case for a limited U.S.-led intervention in Syria, without “boots on the ground,” is as relevant as it was a year ago, and is now compounded with copious evidence of war crimes committed by the regime. Meanwhile, historically unprecedented numbers of Islamist fighters continue to flock to Syria to wage jihad, deadly spillover in the form of suicide car bombings continues to rock Lebanon, and hundreds of thousands of refugees continue to starve in Syria and pour into neighboring countries.
The call for intervention is predicated on two arguments. One of them is strategic. Allowing Syria to continue in the political purgatory it has remained in for three years allows jihadi groups to continue flourishing. The assertion that both the Iran-backed Assad regime and radical Islamist factions should continue battling each other is as myopic as it is bereft of humanity: as the conflict rages on, with potentially hundreds of thousands more being killed and potentially spiraling into a full-blown genocide, both sides will benefit from increased resources, foreign fighters, and battle experience, while the spillover will continue to seep into neighboring countries with increasingly deadly repercussions, to the point where the strategic interests of the U.S. and its allies will inevitably be directly threatened—and both sides will feel emboldened by the manifest weakness of the West.
The second—and the central focus of this essay—is the serious moral imperative to halt the bloodshed that has already claimed the lives of at least 140,000 people, displaced several millions more, and should shame the entire international community. The situation for Syrian civilians at this time is far, far worse than that of the Libyans in 2011; if there was a moral obligation to intervene in the former case, then there surely is in the latter today.
http://www.thetower.org/article/yes-we-really-can-stop-the-slaughter-in-syria/
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