The west has a duty to intervene in Syria | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer

The west has a duty to intervene in Syria | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer

clipped from article:Ignoring the sound of gunfire encapsulates the world's reaction to the atrocities in Syria to date. As so often, leaders who have said "never again" after the last genocide do nothing to prevent the next. But perhaps their indifference won't last. The ferocity of the regime's violence has pushed the Syrian National Council, an umbrella group for much of the opposition, from calling for civil disobedience and passive resistance to begging for outside help. As Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian dissident, put it to me: "In the fight of tanks against bare chests, the odds are not exactly even and bravery can only get you so far." The Syrian incarnation of the "Arab Street" we used to hear so much about now wants Nato planes in the skies.

Turkey has gone from being Assad's ally to his enemy and is talking of regime-change. The French foreign minister has called for Nato troops to protect relief workers. Syrian opposition leaders are discreetly trying to persuade sympathisers in the Obama administration to support the revolution.

The motives of foreign powers are not entirely humanitarian. The reason why is best explained by Michael Weiss, a remarkable man who is worth a column in himself. He is a combative and unstoppably talkative New York intellectual with a loathing for totalitarians and their apologists in whatever form they come. Somehow, he ended up in the London offices of the Henry Jackson Society. The pro-democracy thinktank does much serious work but even its best friends would say that it is not always at the forefront of global political debate.

From this backwater, Weiss compiled a report (http://www.henryjacksonsociety.org/content.asp?pageid=35) on how American, British and French air power might combine with Turkish ground forces to create a safe haven in northern Syria, where mutinous troops from the Syrian army could build a fighting force. Nato officials have studied it, while Burhan Ghalioun, chairman of the Syrian National Council, described the report as a "crucial resource for understanding how a humanitarian intervention in Syria can still be carried out responsibly". When I asked why a weary world should bother to help the Syrians, Weiss quoted from Czeslaw Milosz's "Child of Europe", one of the greatest satires of the fascist and communist era. The supporters of dictatorship, Milosz says, must:

Learn to predict a fire with unerring precision
Then burn the house down to fulfil the prediction.

The lazy talk about the Middle East being a unified "Arab world" or a part of a unified "Muslim world" ignores the real divisions. The region is a mess of competing sectarian and ethnic interests. In Syria, they have combined to produce an apartheid state, in which Assad's Alawite Shia minority controls the police, army and intelligence agencies. The first weeks of the revolution were joyously anti-sectarian as the Syrian National Council refused to become a weapon for the avenging Sunni majority.

To beat the opposition and survive, Assad has to play his equivalent of the race card. He has to rally the support of his tribe by telling the Allawite and Christian minorities that they must unite behind him or face extermination. To make certain his prediction comes true he burns down the house just to make sure. He is organising the sectarian cleansing of Sunni neighbourhoods and trying to turn his desperate bid to hold on to power into a Sunni-Shia civil war.

As in the Spanish civil war, when Britain and France preached non-intervention while Hitler and Mussolini sent arms and men to help Franco's fascists, so the "international community" does nothing in Syria today while Iran and Hezbollah pour in Shia troops to slaughter civilians. Contrary to Syrian state propaganda, Sunni terrorists from al-Qaida are not in Syria to fight back against the regime just yet. But I cannot see them staying out for long.

Intervention to stop a regional war carries vast risks. But we should be honest about the consequences of acquiescing to Assad. A failed state and nest for terrorism will sit on the edge of the Mediterranean. Foreign mercenaries and Alawite paramilitaries will continue to massacre a largely defenceless population and the conflict may spread into Iraq, Israel, Turkey and Jordan. As the news that escapes the control of the Syrian censors reminds us every day, those who say we should do nothing also have blood on their hands.Comments will be switched on at 11am [ read more at link]