Although he is wrong about Rwanda, Tim Stanley writes:
At his awkward press conference with David
Cameron on Sunday, Vladimir Putin made an astonishing claim – the Syrian rebels
eat people. It
happens to be true.
Putin was presumably referring to Abu Sakkar, a rebel
leader who videoed himself eating a combatant’s lung. Sakkar explained that he
did it in revenge for footage he found on the dead man’s phone of the
government soldier raping women. “I swear to God we will eat your hearts and
your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog!” cried Sakkar.
For some Islamists,
dedicating such an act to God is not as sacrilegious as it sounds. Students at
Al Ahzar University in Cairo – an educational institution once graced by
Obama’s presence – have
access to a textbook that teaches it’s okay to eat apostates so long as the
meat is not cooked. Call it Jihadi sushi.
The story underlines how difficult it is to
choose the side of good in Syria: Assad’s men are rapists, the rebels are
cannibals. When deciding what to do, the West has to avoid two templates of
disaster. We don’t want another Rwanda, when the West stood aside and tolerated
a genocide and we don’t want another Iraq, when the West got involved and stayed
involved almost for a decade.
What Britain, France and America have decided to
do is something in-between. Ignore the hyperbole about intervention from some
in the press: at this stage all the alliance is threatening is to give
logistical support to the rebels through non-military aid and a no-fly zone.
Of
course, this could escalate. But no Western leader wants to put boots on the
ground and the goal of the sabre-rattling is actually to prod Russia into
dragging Assad to the negotiating table at the proposed conference in Geneva
(by the way, Putin might deliver on that but it’s far less likely that we’ll
get the rebels to play ball on our side).
We are deliberately
internationalising the conflict, turning it into a giant game of chicken
between America and Russia in the hope that they will resolve the war on behalf
of the Syrian combatants. It might be analogous to the 1973 Yom Kippur War,
when last-minute US support for the Israelis encouraged the Soviet-supported
Arab forces to back down.
But there was clear right (Israel) and wrong (the
Arabs) in the Yom Kippur war, whereas here we are dealing with a far more
complex situation. Consider the dangerous madness of the alliances involved.
Assad is supported by Russia and Iran – varying degrees of dictatorship that
span Shia chauvinism and Cold War-style Russian adventurism.
Against that we
might expect to see a coalition of light, but we’d be wrong. Alongside genuine
democrats, barbarous Islamists form the rebel front. If we aid these people, in
any substantial way, we are morally aiding the very people the War on
Terror was supposed to kill.
How
they run the opposition-held town of Jabhat al-Nusra is a frightening vision of
what could happen if the wrong Western-backed rebels win: radical
preachers, closed shops, Sharia law, women interrogated for having the temerity
to be alone with a man they aren’t married to, internecine assassinations.
There is the threat that if Assad falls there will have to be “a second
revolution” to purge the Islamists. Should purgation fail, we could find that
the West has aided the establishment of a giant training camp for al-Qaeda,
right on Israel’s doorstep.
This is not to say that Syria would be better off
if governed by Assad – he is a butcher of men, women and children. But it is
important to acknowledge that when meddling in the Middle East we are not
necessarily aiding the emergence of a secular, liberal democracy in the way
that we would have it but instead choosing between two versions of medieval
tyranny. Assad’s is the order of the gun; the rebels’ is the order of the holy
book.
Faced with this false choice, any kind of Western
military intervention is morally compromised before it has already begun. Yes,
we should provide humanitarian assistance, condemn Assad and support the Geneva
talks.
But, no, we should not take any route that ends up putting arms into the
hands of cannibals. Let those monsters find their own cutlery.
No comments:
Post a Comment