Time to Act in Syria

The Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975. Pol Pot was there leader and over the course of a few years one to two million people were killed. The weapons for this destruction were a combination of communists zealots, many not yet in their 20’s, economic engineering and agricultural controls which resulted in successive and disastrous crop yields, and the inaction by the world community. The world watched. The world knew. The world did nothing. Gerald Ford was President.

In 1982 the Syrian president, Haffez Al Assad, the current president Bashir Assad’s father, conducted a scorched earth operation against the town of Hama in order to quell a revolt by the Sunni Muslim community against his regime. Amnesty International reported deaths of 5,000 to 25,000. Thomas Freidman of the New York Times who visited the sight weeks after the massacre famously created the term Hama rules for these circumstances. Friedman wrote, “Hama Rules were the prevailing leadership rules in the Arab world. They said: Rule by fear — strike fear in the heart of your people by letting them know that you play by no rules at all, so they won’t ever, ever, ever think about rebelling against you.” At the time of the massacre, the world did not know, but when Freidman visited weeks later the world did know. According to Friedman the Syrian regime wanted the world to see what they had done. Ronald Reagan was President.

The Serbian Nationalist government laid siege to Sarajevo from 1992 to 1996.  The Bosnian Muslims had declared their independence and the Serbs were determined not to allow it. 15,000 people were killed during the years of random shelling into civilian neighborhoods of the city which held the Winter Olympic Games just eight years earlier. Clinton was the President, and he resisted American military involvement even as Europe, especially Tony Blair, requested American assistance.

Overlapping these atrocities, in an orgy of ethnic genocide in Rwanda 800,000 Hutu & Tutsis, 20% of the country’s population, were massacred.  Clinton has called his failure to act one of the worst mistakes of his presidency. The world knew. The world did not act.

Towards the end of the siege of Sarajevo 1995 Serb Nationalists rounded up 8,000 Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica, boys and men, and massacred them. The horror of the mass graves finally caused Clinton to act militarily in Bosnia after years of prodding from Blair and the world community.

From 2003 to 2008 when a treaty was signed, the world watched and waited and did not act while the Sudanese government massacred or starved to death up to several hundred thousand people.  On Bush’s watch, while America fought for the ostensible freedom of the Iraqis, the world allowed Sudan to devolve into indiscriminate chaos and brutality.

Now in Syria we see the Hama rules playing out again. Multiple press outlets report the death toll at 6,000 or more and rising. The past few days the violence has escalated substantially and in shadows of Sarajevo in 1995 the government is bombing its own people without discrimination, lobbing missiles into civilian neighborhoods of Homs, since the elder Assad’s days the home of the Syrian resistance. Hospitals have been routed and the dead are buried at night. The government looks at both medical care and burials as symbols of the resistance.  This is ethnic genocide. Assad, an Alawite, is literally massacring the Sunni population of Homs. Along with the Asaad government the other villains here are the governments of China, and Russia. Both governments vetoed a UN Resolution over the weekend. Russia supplies arms to the Syrian regime.    

The world is paralyzed with inaction.

So we have seen this play before. I am no military expert, but I do believe that when good people know of wrings of this level, they must push their government for action. The time for that action is now. I know McCain and a few others have started to raise their voice on this, and I have also seen Ron Paul state specifically that the US has no business in the “Syrian Civil War”.  Therein we see the limitation of isolationist principles. In that world when the schoolyard bully kicks the smaller boy, we do not stop the fight, we do not even look. We simply walk on.

The world ignores evil at its peril. The time for action is now.