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If the brave reporting of the late Marie Colvin and her colleagues wasn't enough, an analogy may illuminate the moral cowardice of the international community's response in Syria.
Imagine a team of heavily-armed police officers in a park witnessing an unarmed woman being raped by a smaller group of lightly-armed men. She resists and cries out for help. Instead of intervening to save her, the police officers seek advice on whether coming to her aid would be legal; debate amongst themselves whether this might put their own lives at risk; and ponder whether other members of the assailants' gang might view their actions as 'taking sides'.
Due to their own humanity and external pressure to act, they speculate that assuming the correct legal clearances, they might at some stage in the future create a fenced off area into which the woman could crawl to avoid future attacks. They rule out immediate prosecution of her attackers but say that a decade later they might establish a special 'Rape Crime Tribunal' to deter future wrongdoing. The former Mayor of the town visits the rapists in an attempt, through exclusively diplomatic means, to end the rape and prevent any provocative intervention by the police. The assailants refuse to desist as long as the woman insists on her right to resist.
Now back to the reality of the pomp of the White House lawn this week. Had Obama and Cameron's words been translated into Russian and Chinese, they might easily have been mistaken for those of President Putin and Premier Wen Jiabao. Cameron referred vaguely to humanitarian aid and said that the US and UK are "trying to achieve transition not trying to foment revolution". Obama talked of the need to "facilitate a soft landing" and how it is "a difficult situation".
Cameron's warning to the Assad regime that "people have to remember that international law has a long reach and has got a long memory", is hardly a credible deterrent, given that it has taken the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 18 years to secure 69 convictions for a genocide which killed 1 million.
These are the same leaders who rightly state that the diplomatic track on Iran is only successful because of the credible threat of military force. By so clearly removing this option from the table, by pouring water on the very flames of freedom they had fanned elsewhere during the Arab Spring, and by not more robustly challenging the diplomatic cover provided by China and Russia, our leaders show that Western resolve and moral leadership is voluble but practically ineffectual.
The civilians of Syria are not living in an analogy; they are paying in blood and suffering as this brutal realpolitik unfolds. Inaction is a form of action and we are failing the brave defenders of freedom in Syria and sending a message to the world that dictators and their allies can be the arbiters of human progress, not people power. This is a tragic indictment of the failure of the international system and the fabled transatlantic alliance to bolster the 'responsibility to protect' and it shames us all.
Follow John Slinger on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohSlinger
Rami Jarrah: Syria: Not Until We Are Free
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we ( Syrians ) are waiting for 2 things really :
1- taking the fruits home ( Assad Removal peacefully or forcefully ).
2-Accountibility for all who killed civilians in a cold blooded fashion .
all the other objectives of the revolution have been reach in one year only ..and i say only when you realize that this regime has 18 security systems spying on each others .
One year to uproot all that is quit an accomplishement .
That said, the Responsibility to Protect can only be fully understood is you hold the view of sovereignty as a responsibility rather than a right. Many would argue that to do this could undermine the foundations of international law, which still relies heavily on preferencing states rights over individual rights; the UN itself could not function without some sense of individual representative governments holding the right of authority to legislate and negotiate for a given state.
There are no defenders of freedom and liberty in Syria, that's just fiction. A better analogy would be the police force in a say Mexico, fighting drug dealers and you advocating that the US police force intervenes on the side of the drug dealers. Because make no mistake, the Sunni religious fundamentalists who make up the bulk of the opposition are as much our enemies as drug dealers.
In Syria the recognised civil power is fighting a civil war against various tribal and religious factions. There is nothing in international law that says we have a duty or right to get involved, nor is the transatlantic alliance supposed to police the World. Liberal intervention is a completely discredited doctrine and you should be ashamed of yourself for promoting yet more death and destruction in the ME at the hands of the West.