It’s been over half a year since I wrote my first letter condemning the international community’s abandonment of the freedom-seeking Syrian opposition. This article comes over a week after I first saw the pictures of nearly 50 executed children, all at the age of 10 or younger. It’s been over 15 months now and over 13,000 people are dead; all the UN can do is send an embarrassing amount of peacekeepers, to pretend as if they are doing something, as if the Arab League had not already done nothing.
For all of us who see the truth in the disgusting and infuriating everyday slaughter of innocent people, we know that intervention must happen if we are to make right on this planet and preserve our international character of being protectors of freedom and human rights on the international stage.
What is at stake in Syria is the very progress of humanity since the end of the Cold War; that’s why Bashar al-Assad finds he has to have the heads of children bashed in by his civilian paramilitary force, execution squads, called the Shabiha. Assad seems to know too that we, as human beings, this time through the Syrian people, are bitterly engaged in the next chapter of humanity’s struggle for the very basic freedoms and prosperity that we all take for granted.
The reason the US must intervene is simple. The UN must be abandoned as long as the Russians and Chinese have Security Council votes to support, and then runaway from, the slaughter of innocents in Syria. President Obama, the internationalist, already broke new ground by invading the sovereign nation of Pakistan in order to kill Osama Bin Laden; what honestly, in the context of mass slaughter and undermined state sovereignty, is keeping us from going into Syria and utterly annihilating Assad’s death machine with our air force. No boots on the ground are needed to take out the Syrian regime’s devastating artillery, which are illegal under UN envoy Kofi Annan’s invisible peace plan anyway.
What we are witnessing in Syria, through the Arab Spring, is the collective awakening of a people to the urgency and necessity of their own self-determination. The Arab people want democracy and desperately want out of the disturbing, fascistic bloc of world powers that rule through force and lies, rather than on good will and compromise. The fundamental right of all human beings to be seen, heard, and most of all, respected for who they are, lies at the heart of the conflict. If we, as human beings, under the guise of a Syrian man, woman or child, lose this battle for dignity, then we, as human beings across the world are now vulnerable to the same oppression as other dictators seek to hold onto their power.
The lessons that should be learned from Syria are profound and deeply disconcerting. Murder and oppression is not only OK for the international community, but also tacitly supported as it fails to bring any real assistance to the freedom fighters of Syria, the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Iran, Russia and China now have revealed themselves as enemies of human progress by supporting the systematic murder of pro-democracy activists and, in the case of the children, neutral civilians.
Understandably, we cannot just wade into a large scale war, but the truth is out and the world knows that crimes against humanity are being committed. Not only that, but if we, or the UN, had taken definitive action to stop the slaughter months ago, then Syria would not be turning into the regional civil war it is. If this goes unchecked for much longer, Syria may very well turn into a new regional conflict the international community hasn’t experienced since the crisis in Bosnia.
Why do I care? Because my generation has been sadly absent from the urgency of the present. I won’t forget when in one lecture, I was one out of over 400 students who had ever even heard of Abu Ghraib. I have great hope in humanity, but the absence of my generation in what may be the next tragic failure of the world to stop a mass slaughter is hard to accept.
I wish to leave you with a quote from Noam Chomsky that I believe holds great meaning: “Freedom is something that is not given to us. It is a legacy that is left to us over time by centuries of struggle, centuries of people who have been mostly forgotten, and will be taken away from us unless we constantly defend them.”
