Our Generation's Rwanda?

Last year, President of the United States Barack Obama asserted in a White House press release that one of “America’s greatest goals must always be to foresee, prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities.” But last Friday marked the two-year anniversary of the Syrian civil war, a conflict that has taken between 70,000 and 90,000 lives and displaced one tenth of Syria’s 23 million citizens. President Obama’s response to this bloodshed has remained steadfast in its inefficacy. As Bashar al-Assad continues to indiscriminately slaughter his people at rates now surpassing 1,000 deaths per week and with tools now including chemical weapons, Obama merely raises his voice a couple decibels and furrows his brow with slightly increased disapproval. While the media’s fatigue regarding the Syrian conflict may falsely imply that Obama’s tactics calmed the bloodshed that dominated the news last fall, Obama’s finger-shaking and ineffective sanctions have only enabled increased chaos and carnage.

Two years into the conflict, it is now clear that the Free Syrian Army lacks the cohesiveness to successfully oust al-Assad independent of Western help. As sectarian and Islamist groups battle for supremacy among the anti-Assad forces, the Syrian conflict seems less likely to be resolved than to devolve into another Somalia composed of quarreling warlords and thugs. Western inaction has driven increasingly desperate Syrian rebels to trade their beliefs and goals for armament, and liberal Syrian rebels favoring secular democracy now slowly lose power to the better-organized Islamist militias receiving funding and weaponry from terrorist organizations. Unless America can work with the liberal Syrians who have repeatedly requested our help over the last two years, Syria will either return to al-Assad’s tyrannical and oppressive control, or become a safe-haven for the Islamist, anti-Western groups now threatening to dominate the conflict.

The United States must lead a responsible and clearly planned military intervention aiming to empower the Syrian factions amenable to Western aid and guidance. By training, arming and uniting these dependable partners of democracy, the West can prevent the continued power of Iran and Islamism in the region, while also ending one of the largest humanitarian crises of the 21st century. It may seem hypocritical for an anti-government-spending libertarian like myself to demand expensive military action, but when we spend trillions of dollars building the world’s most powerful military, we mustn’t be hesitant about intervening to end innocent bloodshed and encourage new democracy. Nevertheless, an American intervention must focus not on removing al-Assad from power through a military invasion, but instead on empowering and uniting Syrian rebels. We need to establish no-fly zones and corridors for humanitarian aid between Turkey and northern Syria so that the Free Syrian Army can have a stable and safe zone where they can solidify their political agenda and popular legitimacy. During the seemingly hopeless Bosnian genocide of the mid-1990s, a U.S. and NATO-led air strike bombed Serbian forces besieging Sarajevo and ended bloodshed in two weeks. The Syrian conflict will likely take longer to resolve, but as Senator Joe Lieberman testified to Congress, “civil wars we get involved in can be settled more successfully than civil wars where we don’t get involved.”

Certainly, the Syrian conflict is complicated, convoluted and unpredictable, with various factions fighting for supremacy and dozens of international actors vying to secure their own interests. But the complexity of such an atrocity should not be our excuse for remaining sedentary. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen sums up the effect of inaction the best: “Inaction spurs the progressive radicalization of Syria, the further disintegration of the state, the intensification of Assad’s mass killings, and the chances of the conflict spilling out of Syria in sectarian mayhem.” These trends must be halted. We cannot afford for Syria’s increasingly sectarian conflict to spread into Iraq, Lebanon or Israel. We cannot afford an Islamist government that tolerates al-Qaeda in the Levant. We cannot afford another 90,000 civilian deaths. But we can afford an intelligently planned military intervention.

There are, unfortunately, a plethora of conflicts around the world which merit American assistance and intervention, but few could have as great a consequence in a region as vital to global stability, and none hold the same potential to transform into a massive regional conflict. The longer the United States remains deskbound in our disapproval of al-Assad’s actions and support of the rebels, the less influence we hold over the future of Syria, and, more importantly, the longer the bloodshed will occur. One year ago, Senator John McCain declared: “We should be ashamed of our collective failure to come to the aid of the Syrian people.” President Obama needs to prove himself worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize he received four years ago. Our generation must not remember the Syrian civil war as a tragedy of inaction, just as our parents’ generation remembers the Rwandan genocide.