The Syrian government has declared variously that the missile attack on the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus early on Wednesday did not take place at all, that it took place but that no chemical weapons were involved, and that chemical weapons were indeed involved but that they were inflicted by rebel forces. These statements cannot all be correct. Is any of them true?
There can be no doubt that an attack did take place. Many civilians died; the opposition claims more than a thousand. That people did die is beyond argument. Also not disputed is that the area where they died is characterised by resistance to the government’s attempts to quell the civil unrest – let us not prejudge anything by calling it a civil war – for the last two years.
Moreover, all the recorded evidence so far offered to the world shows people suffering in a way that is not commensurate with an attack by conventional weapons. The victims are not showing blast injuries. Their motor functions are affected, particularly the breathing instinct. The spread of this effect on humans is evidently much wider than any structural damage in the area. There can be no doubt that, whatever killed these people, it was not explosives.
Was it a chemical agent? Only an impartial examination at the site can determine this to general satisfaction. Whether such an examination is possible depends wholly on the Syrian government itself. If Assad denies the inspectors, we shall be entitled to draw a conclusion, as I will consider in a moment.
Meanwhile, I want to try to examine the government’s notion that the footage widely circulated across the world is, in some sense, a “fabrication”. Presumably that would mean that the convulsing children that we have seen are actors, that people are playing at being dead. Is this at all credible? I submit that it is not. Given the chaotic nature of what we see, it would require remarkable creativity to “stage” such chaos without any glitch that revealed deception. Is any of the material released at all questionable? If it were, wouldn’t someone have noticed by now?
So it seems pretty conclusive that these things are established: i) that there was an attack; ii) that many civilians died; iii) that some kind of non-blast weapon was responsible for the casualties.
Now we come to the bottom line for the Assad government: the attack was inflicted by the rebels themselves. Does this argument have any merit? Well, it is certainly possible to suggest a motive for the rebels: that they wish to blackguard the Assad regime and “shame” foreign governments into intervening on behalf of the insurrection. William Hague’s increasingly bullish statements since Wednesday morning suggest that, if that was the aim, it is having some traction, at least with the British government. Obama remains carefully non-committal.
But is it possible to stand up the argument that the rebels would inflict such a grotesque death on the families of its own people, even if the exercise could be held to have a chance of tipping the argument about intervention?
I am reminded of a Jewish friend with family in Israel who told me in all seriousness that, when Israeli planes attack the Gaza strip, Palestinians lay their small children on the roofs of their homes so that they are more likely to be killed and hence the Israelis can be accused of war crimes. Although she has a Cambridge degree and has worked in current affairs broadcasting all her adult life, she could not recognise black propaganda when it was offered. I gently pointed out the notorious precedent that the Nazis spread lies about the morality of the Jews in order to make them appear less than human and so more dispensable, but she wouldn’t make the connection. People are willing to believe anything, however far-fetched, if it reflects badly on their enemy.
If the Syrian rebels did this themselves, a lot of people would necessarily be in on the exercise. How could the rebels be sure that no one would expose the deception? Yet we still await the first report of any defector from the opposition’s cause, decrying the tactics of the rebels, whereas several highly-placed officials in the Assad regime have left the country in disgust. Moreover, it is known that the Syrian government has developed chemical weapons: that is not at issue. When would they deploy such weapons, then, if not in a situation that they themselves account a profound threat to the state? It is always possible that Syrian rebels have gained access to chemical weapons, but there is as yet no independent evidence of it.
The UN inspectors ought to have the expertise to determine whether chemical weapons are in opposition hands. They are presently in Syria but the government will not permit them to visit Ghouta. Why so? That there are inspectors in the country at all is only as a result of protracted negotiations. The government says it cannot guarantee the inspectors’ safety. The rebels have said they will ensure that the inspectors are safe in Ghouta. If the inspectors are prepared to go, what argument remains to Assad? We must conclude that he fears what they will discover. If he wants to stay credible, he needs to pre-empt that conclusion.
If there were an international consensus that the Assad government used chemical weapons against its own people, that would change the game, if only in that (once hostilities cease, if they ever do) Assad could be brought before the international court to face charges of war crimes. But there is no such consensus. Alexander Lukashevich, the Russian foreign office spokesman, declared that a homemade rocket carrying unidentified chemical substances had been launched from an area controlled by the opposition.
“All this cannot but suggest that once again we are dealing with a pre-planned provocation,” his statement continued. “This is supported by the fact that the criminal act was committed near Damascus at the very moment when a mission of UN experts had successfully started their work of investigating allegations of the possible use of chemical weapons there ... Moscow considers important an objective and professional investigation into what happened. And we call on all those who have the possibility to influence armed extremists to make every effort to end provocations with chemical agents”.
Of course, if the Russians want to argue that the occurrence of this “criminal act” at the time of the US inspectors’ visit argues for it being an attack by rebels, one might counter that it could just as well be a double bluff, that the Assad regime launched the attack fully intending to tell the inspectors that it must be the rebels’ action. If the rebels are capable of staging an atrocity to look like the work of the government, the reverse is just as feasible and even more likely to be doable.
Russia’s alliance with Syria ensures that the UN’s hands are tied in any attempt to approve some anti-Assad action through the security council. As with so many other international crises, the fact that certain powerful nations may wield a veto leaves the UN powerless and raises the stakes for those nations that would be prepared to make some intervention. I have argued before that the UN’s charter needs to be rewritten and, at the risk of exasperating my regular readers, I am now going to argue it again.
No substantial rewrite of the charter has occurred since it was first drawn up in 1945. The time has long past when the UN needs to be given power independent of individual member states, power greater than any individual member, indeed greater than the sum of individual members.
The veto has to be scrapped. No nation, neither China nor Russia nor the US, can be permitted to continue to block the business of the UN and to override the will of a majority of members. All nations should have the same stake in the global community.
The UN needs to have the power – by which I mean the military power – to intervene in any breakdown of peaceful coexistence and to impose a cessation of hostilities. This might be between any two or more nations squaring up to each other – say, Israel and Lebanon or Azerbaijan and Armenia – or within a sovereign nation where the ruling party is fighting any kind of insurrection – Somalia or Colombia or Libya or Egypt. Where the UN deems it necessary, its troops would depose the government and take over the day-to-day management of the nation’s affairs. After all, whatever else you may believe about Assad, he has patently lost control of his nation. He is, to borrow Norman Lamont’s resonant words, “in office but not in power”.
How could the UN muster such power? I propose that each member nation be obliged to contribute to the UN’s peace-keeping forces the same level of funding, personnel and matériel that it commits to its own national defence. So if, for the sake of argument, the US’s total military budget were $800bn, it would be required to commit the same amount to the UN force. The Swiss government’s share of the UN force bill might be $4bn. In this way, the UN would be furnished with military might sufficient to overwhelm any conceivable national militia and its troops would be as international as possible. With a scheme like this in place, most nations would see both the necessity and the opportunity to scale down their domestic expenditure on what they term defence. That in itself would render the world a more stable place.
Such an imposition on all member states would profoundly alter the psychology of defence. The UN needs to establish as a baseline that any engagement in military combat is intolerable to the community of nations. As it is, the “just wars” are always those fought by a nation’s own troops. From the outside looking in, other nation’s wars are, at the very least, regrettable. More often they are indefensible. And, however righteous the combatants, all wars occasion atrocities on all sides. It is idle to pretend that other people’s wars are crueller and bloodier than those in which we take part.
But, I hear you object, you cannot ride roughshod over the sovereignty of individual nations. To that I say: the game has changed. Nations are no longer discrete entities whose disputes remain within their borders. Look at the flood of refugees from Syria into neighbouring countries. How can those countries, none of them wealthy, cope with the demands that Syria’s folly makes upon them? And why should they be required to do so? Furthermore, what is the cost to the planet of all this destruction visited upon it? Why should other nations be expected to clean up the mess of this – it needs to be stated – indulgence by the government and the citizenry of Syria?
The UN needs to be an organisation that holds as its core belief not only that waging war is destructive and regrettable but that waging war will not be tolerated by the community of nations, however wealthy and righteous and self-important the combatants might be. So my revamped UN would have the power – both judicially, by statute, and literally, by force of arms – to police the planet and snuff out any outbreak of hostilities within hours. All the members of the UN would have to agree to accept this awesome global authority and to isolate any nation in every practical manner until the UN deemed that its full membership of the community of nations had been earned again.
If this dispensation had been in place, the hostilities in Syria would have been halted in the first week. Assad would have been obliged to resolve the contradictions in his nation or step down in favour of a temporary administration controlled by the UN that would have addressed the differences among the populace and set up fair and free elections. By the way, under my new model UN, every nation would be obliged to allow a comprehensive delegation from the UN to oversee and examine national elections and to declare whether they have been acceptable, the UN’s final judgment being paramount and not subject to appeal. Any head of state or indeed any individual candidate found to have transgressed would be barred from future office.
Imagine the different course of events in Egypt over the last two and a half years. Mubarak would have lost control of the country to a UN peace-keeping force. He might still have been tried and imprisoned by the courts. Free elections might still have brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power. Had there been demonstrations against Morsi, they would have been permitted. But what was, by any objective measure, a military coup this summer would not have been allowed to take place. And so there would have been no massacre of protesters.
Well, you will say, none of the security council nations is going to surrender its veto, so this is a pipe-dream. I could simply snap back: ok, so what’s your solution that won’t simply make matters worse? At least I am making a concrete, constructive proposal that has yet to be tried and found wanting.
I am realistic, though. There is only one means by which what I propose could be achieved. Someone would have to run for the US presidency on a programme that included this proposal for the revamping of the UN. The chorus of abuse that would argue that this would be an abject surrender of American power and self-importance would need to be argued down. The candidate would have to win the argument and win the election and then embark on a long and hugely testing round of diplomacy to persuade sufficient of the other security council nations to agree. Yes, it’s a big ask. But what is the point of going into politics if it is not with the intention of changing the world?
