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How Syrians are Bearing the Brunt of the Arab Spring

By Kyler Ong

It makes one wonder why after five months of impasse we are still convinced that Syria needs a transitional plan to win its civil war. Mere logic would have dictated by now that in order to execute Annan’s peace plan, curbing or ending the bloodshed itself would be fundamental before any headway can be made for talks. The peace plan did not work five months ago, it will not work now. The Assad regime has been notoriously stubborn in staying put, and economic sanctions will only seek to worsen the lives of Syrians themselves. This passivity of the international community begets one question – is our last gambit buying time to make it seem like we are doing something for the Syrian people by having spent the last five months hammering out the final details of the transitional plan and bickering over whether it should include the Syrian president and his “inner circle”? Or are we truly convinced that a concrete transitional plan alone will boot Assad out although that very similar ideology backfired in February?

In tandem with the voice of the international community, public opinion in the US is not favoring any sort of US military intervention either. Despite recent cases of high level defection from the Syrian regime that revealed the atrocities of Assad’s shabiba, we seem to still oppose military action, a pattern not witnessed in past intervention of similar situation (the public has often favored foreign intervention before withdrawing their support after the actual interference has started). Earlier on in the previous decade, the American nation was still taunted by the fresh memory of September 11 which then highly influenced public support for the War on Terror in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). In Libya, we intervened on the basis of American credibility and stability in the Middle East region (in other words, we sought to destroy another terrorist safe haven and a regime that actively supported terrorism) and also had wide international mandate for action. It seems that one possible explanation for such reluctance could be the close gap (less than a year after NATO ended its mandate in Libya) between the Libyan intervention and the current Syrian crisis. It is far too soon to call for another foreign intervention that will take a huge chunk out of our national defense budget.

Moreover, a second possible explanation could be accorded to Obama’s unwillingness to jeopardize his re-election by committing troops to a war which has already incurred public fear of another Iraq-type war so soon after the withdrawal of troops there last December. Yet, are we to wait till the death toll doubles in Syria before we decide to take any action? Is self-interest the death of international humanitarianism, the very doctrine we claim to espouse, the  forefront ideology that purportedly formed the cornerstone that justified the many other intervention we have led in the past? It is imperative we make the right decisions now and stop the Syrian people from bearing the brunt of the Arab Spring crisis.

 

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