When the people of the future look back at our time, there will be much wringing of hands at the West’s failure to stop the slaughter in Syria. Liberal writers will bewail our “guilt” and “shame” (bewailing is what we liberals are best at, after all). Readers will pat themselves on the back and say that they would never have behaved as we behaved; just as we look back on World War II and imagine we would never have collaborated if the Nazis had invaded.
Look at what the generation of the 2010s ignored as they admired their iPhones and took their selfies, they will say in shocked voices.
As of this year, the Syrian civil war had lasted longer than World War I. Hundreds of thousands had died and 11 million had been driven from their homes — 4 million of them as refugees to foreign lands.
On the one side is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, chief capo in a hereditary tyranny. He joined former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in becoming one of only two leaders to have used chemical weapons against civilians since the end of World War II.
In 2013, US President Barack Obama, the leader of the free world, no less, boomed: “What kind of world will we live in if the United States of America sees a dictator brazenly violate international law with poison gas and we choose to look the other way?”
He then looked the other way. As did the British Labour Party, which joined with the Tory right in defeating British Prime Minister David Cameron’s attempt to punish al-Assad.
On the other side is the Islamic State. If you want a comparison to shame you, consider that at least 700 religious fanatics have left the UK to rape, murder and enslave in Syria at a time when the British government was pulling every trick it could think of to stop Syrians fleeing rape, murder and enslavement finding asylum here.
Here is a taste of the condemnations we can expect from the future. Western leaders interpreted the “silence” about the massacres in Syria “as an indicator of public indifference.” They reasoned that they “would incur no costs” if they did nothing, but “face steep risks if they intervened.” For all their cries of “never again,” they accepted genocide and pretended it had nothing to do with them.
Except those quotes are from the past, not the future. They come from Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a bleak account, published in 2003, of how, from the Turkish massacre of the Armenians to Saddam’s genocide of the Kurds, the unwritten rule of the US Department of State was that the US should look the other way.
I was hugely impressed by her breadth of scholarship, how she showed that it was always unpopular to state clearly that Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Kurds, Bosniaks and Tutsis were victims of the greatest of crimes; how there were always authoritative voices warning us against “overreaction” and insisting that the situation was more complicated than it seemed.
Those who blew the whistle lost their jobs, but in their determination to speak out, they proved the truth of George Bernard Shaw’s maxim: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Obama was impressed too. He made Power the US’ ambassador to the UN, where together they became reasonable — depressingly, shamefully, criminally reasonable — and stood by as the Syrian massacres escalated.
For understandable reasons, a half-truth became established during the presidency of George W. Bush: The US was the main source of conflict on the planet. If it stepped back and refused to intervene, the “root cause” of violence would vanish. Obama and Powers have tested that theory to destruction.
They have shown that, when the West does not intervene, other powers do. Russia and Iran have ruthlessly pursued their national interest in keeping al-Assad in power: Iran because it wants a client Shiite state; Russia because it wants to keep its Mediterranean base and show the world that no one messes with President Vladmir Putin.
No one in the West, or, rather, no one but the reckless, wanted an invasion of Syria. They wanted no-fly zones and safe havens. A few realized that the Kurds had as much right to a state as the Palestinians and wanted Western support for a Kurdistan, not least because the Kurds were doing most of the fighting against the Islamic State.
They have got nothing. The Kurds are now being attacked by NATO ally Turkey. Safe havens remain a fantasy. And while Western air forces are bombing Islamic State fighters in a desultory war that seems to be doing no good at all, they allow al-Assad to drop barrel bombs on Syrian civilians. Although Cameron has behaved more honorably than Labour and has clearly agonized over the Syrian crisis, his agonies have not extended to providing the money that the UK’s dilapidated armed forces would need to intervene.
Before power made her “reasonable,” Samantha Power knew why: Western electorates do not care. The mood in the UK in particular is now isolationist: anti-immigrant, anti-intervention, anti any measure that does not put “our own people first.”
I see no sign that the flood of refugees fleeing into Europe is changing minds. Liberals rightly criticize Cameron for not allowing enough into Britain, but hardly any have shown that they have the smallest inclination to tackle the “root cause” of their flight.
Now Western governments hint that they are about to commit the final treason. They will either drop their demands that the butcher al-Assad must go or, more probably, quietly accept that he is a man they must do business with.
There is an old argument between supporters of an ethical and of a “realist” foreign policy, but it does not arise on this occasion. The Sunni people of Syria will not turn on the Islamic State so they can suffer again at the hands of a man responsible for gassing their families. The Islamic State will be able to say — with justice — that the West wants to turn you over to Shiite, Hezbollah and Iranian militias. It will be able to say, again with truth, that the West is now the de facto ally of an Iran that wants to encircle and oppress you.
Sometimes, the ethical is also realistic: dealing with al-Assad is never going to work.
President William Lai (賴清德) recently attended an event in Taipei marking the end of World War II in Europe, emphasizing in his speech: “Using force to invade another country is an unjust act and will ultimately fail.” In just a few words, he captured the core values of the postwar international order and reminded us again: History is not just for reflection, but serves as a warning for the present. From a broad historical perspective, his statement carries weight. For centuries, international relations operated under the law of the jungle — where the strong dominated and the weak were constrained. That
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
On Wednesday last week, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) asserting the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) territorial claim over Taiwan effective 1945, predicated upon instruments such as the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation. The article further contended that this de jure and de facto status was subsequently reaffirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promptly issued a statement categorically repudiating these assertions. In addition to the reasons put forward by the ministry, I believe that China’s assertions are open to questions in international
The Legislative Yuan passed an amendment on Friday last week to add four national holidays and make Workers’ Day a national holiday for all sectors — a move referred to as “four plus one.” The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), who used their combined legislative majority to push the bill through its third reading, claim the holidays were chosen based on their inherent significance and social relevance. However, in passing the amendment, they have stuck to the traditional mindset of taking a holiday just for the sake of it, failing to make good use of
RSS