Ambassador Kanwal Sibal, India’s former
Foreign Secretary and a distinguished scholar of international affairs, in his
article “Two-faced in West Asia”,
published in The Hindu (New Delhi),
September 4, 2013, comments upon the US case for intervening in Syria as “legally weak, internationally divisive and
morally hollow”. For the benefit of our readers, we reproduce the article
below:
President
Barack Obama’s case for intervening in Syria is legally weak, internationally
divisive and morally hollow
President Obama’s
plan to take military action against Syria can be legitimately questioned on
legal, political and moral grounds. Syria has not, strictly speaking, violated
international law in using chemical weapons against its own population. It has
not signed the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which Egypt too has not signed
and Israel has not yet ratified. Syria adhered to the 1925 Geneva Protocol on
Chemical Weapons in 1968, but that instrument applies to armed conflict between
states, not to use within a country’s borders.
Syria has not
used or threatened to use chemical weapons against the United States or other
western powers. The U.N. Security Council has not passed a resolution
authorising the use of force against Syria. The right of self-defence or
collective self-defence cannot therefore be invoked to attack Syria militarily.
The legal case being weak, the U.S. is accusing Syria of violating the “norms”
against the use of chemical weapons. Violation of “norms” can invite
condemnation or even non-military sanctions by individual countries, but not a
unilateral military response by a third country against an errant one. The U.S.
or the United Kingdom, it can be argued, have not been designated by the
international community to enforce “norms” militarily or otherwise on their
behalf against recalcitrant states.
Contradictions
President Obama
has announced his readiness to act without U.N. Security Council approval,
recalling post-Cold War U.S. unilateralism, an era assumed to be over, not the
least because such unilateralism imposed forbidding military, political and
financial costs on the U.S. The argument that Russia and China are responsible
for blocking decisions in the Security Council, compelling the U.S., the U.K.
and others to therefore act alone, implies that non-western P 5 members have an
obligation to always concur with invariably principled, lawful and constructive
U.S. and British positions as against their own self-serving, morally skewed
obstructionism. Burnt by their experience with the Libyan resolution which the
West exploited to attack Libya, Russia and China may understandably be
exceptionally wary on Syria, given the West’s constant vituperations against
President Assad.
If the legal
case for western intervention is weak, the political and moral case is full of
contradictions. This is not the first instance of chemical weapons use in West
Asia. They were used in the Iraq-Iran war and by Iraq and Syria internally in
the past. In all these cases, no external retribution followed. In fact,
western powers conveniently ignored these transgressions, and, in the case of
Iraq, Saddam Hussein remained an acceptable interlocutor till the change of
political calculations made him an enemy. The U.S.’s use of chemical agents in
the Vietnam war also complicates discussions on the moral dimension of the
western position.
Comparing Egypt and Syria
The contrast
between the West’s approach to the latest developments in Egypt and the turmoil
in Syria is politically telling. The Syrian government cannot be forgiven
because it forcibly suppressed peaceful demonstrations in favour of democracy,
rejected the dynamics of the so-called Arab Spring and created conditions for
civil strife. In western eyes this makes their intervention and that of Qatar,
Saudi Arabia and Turkey against the Syrian government politically and morally
defensible. Key western leaders have declared time and again that President
Assad must and will go, as if they must decide the political fortunes of a
foreign head of state in his own country. To oust him, they have bolstered the
rebels politically and militarily. However, concerns about al-Qaeda linked
extremist religious organisations gaining ground in Syria is conflicting with
the goal of breaking Iran’s nexus with Syria and the Hezbollah in the interest of
Israel’s security, and this is causing some confusion and shakiness in western
strategy.
In Egypt’s case,
when peaceful demonstrations demanding the reinstatement of a democratically
elected leader have been brutally suppressed by the Egyptian military, causing
more casualties than the number of gas attack victims in Damascus, the U.S.
condones it as an action to safeguard democracy. The U.S. countenanced the
overthrow of President Mubarak; it supported the Arab Spring street activists
as harbingers of democracy; it backed the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power
through democratic elections, seeing in this emergence of political Islam a
solution to the conundrum of marrying Islam with western-style democracy; it
has now supported the overthrow of Morsi through a military coup. This
extraordinary political flexibility in dealing with developments in Egypt,
guided less by principles than by compulsions of self-interest, is notably
absent in the case of Syria. What adds to the irony is that though the Arab Spring
is dead, President Assad is still being punished for rejecting that phenomenon
in a country where the Muslim Brotherhood has been traditionally highly radical
and the danger of sectarian strife in its religiously diverse society, large
sections of which are attached to secularism, is most acute.
Evidence
U.S. leaders are
convinced that the Assad government is guilty of the gas attack based on
evidence they claim to possess. They are satisfied with that evidence and do
not think that leaders of other major countries need to be satisfied too, even
when the latter have serious concerns about armed action in an already highly
combustible region, with a potentially grave fallout elsewhere. The U.S.
leaders want others to accept what they say at face value, despite their
credibility in such matters being especially low after the lies purveyed about
Saddam Hussein’s non-existent chemical weapons to justify the war against Iraq.
It is discomforting to hear Secretary Kerry speak with such certitude and
vehemence about Assad’s guilt even before the U.N. inspectors have completed
their groundwork and delivered their report to the U.N. Secretary-General.
It is noteworthy
that after the first chemical attack in Syria purportedly from rebel positions,
the Syrian government asked the U.N. Security Council in March to send an
investigation team, a move apparently blocked by the U.S. for five months as it
sought the extension of the team’s mandate to the whole of Syria. The U.N. team
that has just concluded its work was in Syria in response to Syria’s initial
request. That the second attack on August 21 coincided with the arrival of this
team speaks for itself. No wonder President Putin has called the accusations
against the Syrian government “utter nonsense” and has asked the U.S. share the
evidence at its disposal.
Politically convenient
U.S. leaders
argue that the U.N. team’s mandate is only to verify whether chemical weapons
have been used, not who used them, and that, in any case, Syrian bombardments
of the site where they were used will destroy any remaining evidence. They are
apparently pre-empting the U.N. report and making it irrelevant to their
decision to take military action. Such a posture strengthens suspicions that
having drawn a redline which seems to have been breached — even though it is
unclear by whom — President Obama is under pressure to act to assert America’s
global leadership. Holding the Syrian government responsible is politically
convenient as it supports the strategy of ousting Assad, whereas holding the
al-Qaeda linked rebel group Al Nusra responsible — which, incidentally, was
caught in Turkey in May with two kilos of sarin gas — will upturn the entire
western strategy in Syria.
Why the U.S.
President is prepared to strike at Syria alone even as his principal acolyte
has been tripped by a parliamentary vote in his own country is baffling. Its
experience in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in Libya should have counselled
extreme caution in getting embroiled in another conflict in the Islamic world.
The human cost of western interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have
been enormous but are being overlooked in the political calculus underlying an
attack on Syria. The absurdity of causing humanitarian mayhem in the name of
humanitarian action should not escape politicians who are Nobel peace
laureates.
(Kanwal Sibal is a former Foreign Secretary.)
(c) The
Hindu, September 04, 2013