On a lazy Monday last week I watched Shooting Dogs – one of those films I’d always wanted to watch but never gotten around to. For those who don’t know it, the film documents one of the worst atrocities of the Rwandan Genocide at the Ecole Technique Officielle, near Kigali. Following a lengthy siege of the school by extremist Hutu militia, the film ends with the meagre UN contingent evacuating to the airport, conscious that in doing so they were condemning the 2000 Tutsi to a machete massacre at the hands of the militia – which duly occurred.
The poignant aspect of the film is that officially, there was no dereliction of duty on the part of the UN soldiers – their mission was based on observation; they had undergone no commitment to protect anyone. But when Tutsi families sought refuge in the school grounds, the soldiers became their de facto guardians.
The story, I think, is morally analogous to the West’s relationship with the Syrian freedom-fighters.
The struggle of the Free Syrian Army is an embarrassment. Not to Bashar Al-Assad, to whom the revolutionary movement has now become a mortal threat, pushing the Red Cross to officially designate the conflict as a civil war. The Syrian people’s struggle is an embarrassment to the Western and UN leaders, who stand by limply as the Assad regime orchestrates indiscriminate slaughter.
‘If we can act, we should’ is not the only consideration that should apply before launching into conflicts abroad, but it should be the main one. Inaction can be as morally reprehensible as ill-fated action. I get riled up when anti-Iraq war advocates take the moral high-ground because, as the late Christopher Hitchens put it excellently, to oppose the war on strict moralistic terms requires one to defend the preservation of a tyrannical, murderous, brutalising dictatorship.
Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t the only reasons that the doctrine of interventionism became discredited under Blair/Bush. The political requirement for Bush to do something, and Blair’s acquiescence, were used to justify the principle, rather than the principle being used to justify the action. Consequently the doctrine was applied inconsistently. If a principle is applied in a haphazard manner it breeds cynicism – in this case characterised by a retreat to national concerns, less fraught with moral dilemma.
The losers in this are the Syrians. Whilst a Cameron-led coalition intervened to provide air and artillery support to Libyan rebels, more would be required to topple Assad – possibly even ground troops.
The lazy opinionator will chastise me for my naivety: ‘how can you justify blundering into Syria after the catastrophes of our other Middle Eastern misadventures!?’ The truth is that the mistakes we make after a period of national distress are often characterised by caution rather than belligerence. We would not have been as patient with 1930s Appeasement were it not for the terrors of WW1. Food for thought.
