The question on the mind of almost everyone who has followed the horror in Syria as it has unfolded over the past two years is, “What we can do?” The short answer, unfortunately, is not much.
When foreign minister of Australia, celebrated peace advocate Gareth Evans countenanced Indonesian slaughter in East Timor.
Anne-Marie Slaughter forgets that humanitarian intervention is frequently seen as a Trojan horse designed to smuggle imperial intent past the gates of state sovereignty.
Responsibility to protect (R2P) must focus on persuading militias to lay down their arms and commit to a political process.
Elias is Swedish and has buck teeth. These are two strikes against him at the Danish school he attends. The resident bully, along with his fawning entourage, calls Elias “Rat Face” and subjects him to endless indignities. That all changes, however, with the arrival of Christian, an exchange student who is appalled at the treatment of sweet-natured Elias. Christian follows the bully into the bathroom where he is about to inflict yet another humiliation on Elias. But this time it is Christian who metes out the punishment, hitting the bully repeatedly with a bicycle pump and threatening him with a knife if he dares to throw his weight around again.
The messaging used to sell the invasion of Libya to the American people — that NATO was taking up the ‘responsibility to protect’ — painted a thin veneer over lurking geopolitical motives.
Done properly, the U.N.’s Responsibility to Protect entails deployment of peacekeepers, provision of food and shelter, and democratic elections.
In the second part of our strategic dialogue on the Libya War, Robert Naiman and Ian Williams respond to their initial essays. You can read the original essays here: Naiman’s anti-intervention essay Surprise War for Regime Change in Libya is the Wrong Path and Ian Williams’ pro-intervention essay Armchair Anti-Imperialists and Libya.
Even if one can justify the war on Libya on humanitarian grounds, this is probably not why it’s actually being fought.
In its threat to use force against the Libyan government, the international community put Muammar Gaddafi into what chess aficionados calls zugzwang. This clever gambit traps the opponent so that any move worsens his or her position. Thus, if Gaddafi continued to battle the opposition in Benghazi, several air forces were at the ready to bombard his army. And if the Libyan leader pursued a ceasefire and political negotiations, he risked a further outbreak of protests in Tripoli from an emboldened population. Along either path lay probable checkmate.