On August the 21st 2013, the Assad regime used rockets filled with Sarin gas to kill (at the smallest estimate) 500 civilians in Ghouta, a rebel-held territory in Damascus. A year earlier, Barack Obama had labeled any such attacks as a “red line” that would warrant US action against the Syrian regime. A war in the Middle East seemed imminent. Unsurprisingly, the American people and Congress opposed another intervention in the Middle East. Memories of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya began to spring to mind. Obama procrastinated, and no action was taken. Therefore, a vital opportunity was lost. It was Russia that removed the 1300 metric tons of Sarin gas possessed by the Assad regime, 50 times the amount the Colonel Gaddafi of Libya had claimed to have. It was Russia who sent thousands of troops into Syria, many in the guise of “volunteers”. It was Russia, whose support for the Assad regime allowed it to secure the warm water port of the Tarsus, giving it a foothold in the Middle East that the US in the Cold War, and the British in the 19th century, had fought for so long to prevent.
With one great refusal to take action, the Obama administration had disposed of nearly 200 years of western foreign policy. Teddy Roosevelt claimed his foreign policy was to “speak softly, and carry a big stick.” The Obama administration had spoken boldly and with empty threats (which brought us the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack on 4 April 2017, perpetrated by the Assad regime, killing at least 100 civilians) and its “red line” had reduced its credibility all around the world. The Syrian regime believed that since it was under Russian protection, it could act with impunity. Say what you wish about the chaotic Trump administration, but the launching of 59 cruise missiles at the Shayrat Air Base was finally a challenge to the Russian and Syrian authorities, which forced them to become increasingly cautious about their actions.
This is simply one example of mismanaged foreign policy. In 1994, the French and Belgian-backed Rwandan government began the ethnic cleansing of its Tutsi population, killing more than eight hundred thousand in a genocide that lasted only 100 days. The French government, despite its interest in Francophone Africa, failed to report to the UN the true scale of the violence, refused to encourage the Hutu government to end the genocide, and most damningly even delivered Tutsis who had sought safety in their para-trooper vehicles to Hutu checkpoints, where they were promptly massacred. The French had done their best to prevent a UN peacekeeping operation in Rwanda in order to maintain relations with the Hutu government, when hundreds of thousands could have been saved.
One must recognise that military intervention is often viable and defendable. In 2000, it was the decision of the British government to intervene in Sierra Leone that ended a war that had been raging since 1991. By its tragic finish, 100,000, mainly non-combatants had died, and over 2 million displaced, in a war that had seen extensive use of methamphetamine- or heroin-hooked child soldiers. It was the 12-year combat between the British and communist guerrillas in its former colony of Malaysia from 1948 to 1960 that has allowed the Malaysian economy to grow at an average of 6.5% a year for the last 50 years, and to possess and practice Common Law as well as one of the best education and healthcare systems in Asia, rather than succumbing under a socialist regime, whose guerrilla campaign had been marked by brutal attacks on the civilian population. Furthermore, the 1991 Gulf War (fought mainly by the US, UK and France) ended the systematic destruction of the Iraqi Kurdish population that, in its climax (during the Halabja chemical attack) left 4000 Kurdish innocents dead. However in a stunning military blunder, Saddam Hussein’s elite troops, the Republican Guard, were not captured, as the allies refused to venture further into Iraq. Had the Guard fallen, Saddam would have undoubtedly been toppled by the regular army, whose presence would stop an extremist uprising. There is much conjecture about US involvement in the creation of ISIL, but it was that failure to ‘carry a large enough stick’, that would eventually allow Saddam to torture the Iraqi population until 2003 -the invasion that destroyed the entire Iraqi army- providing the perfect breeding ground for the rise of Daesh.
I do not espouse a “boots on the ground” mentality whenever there is human suffering. However we must do our utmost to hold those responsible for war crimes (on a scale unseen since the Second World War) accountable. Foreign intervention is no science, and as mentioned, even the spectacular victory in 1991 failed to bring peace to the Middle East. But these failures can all be characterised by a failure to act – a western failure to intervene. The failure to recognise the extent of the Rwandan genocide, the failure to prevent the Syrian regime from wantonly massacring its citizens, and, finally, the failure to challenge Russia after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, that has left the West looking toothless and faithless to its allies.
Now as much as in the Cold War, we must be ready to defend our allies, our interests, and the innocent. War is truly horrific, and must never be embarked upon lightly, but even after the foreign intervention failures of the last 20 years, we must remember that only a select few countries have the ability to end the pointless destruction of human life globally, and that
we are one of them.
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