Written by Max Kronstadt
“How many Syrians? What is the bottom line?” pleaded Marcell Shehwaro, Syrian rebel blogger and activist, as she struggled to contain her frustration while speaking before the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22, 2016.
The Syrian civil war, already one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in recent history, has gotten significantly worse in the last couple weeks. The World Health Organization estimates that 338 people, including 100 children, were killed in Aleppo last week alone, adding to the over 250,000 dead since the conflict started in 2011. This major uptick in violence comes after the latest peace agreement between the Russians and Americans, which lasted four days before imploding in an onslaught of Russian and Syrian airstrikes.
Diplomacy is no longer an option in Syria. Peace talks and agreements have been an utter failure due to Russian and Syrian forces’ complete lack of respect for international law and basic human rights. The U.S. should launch a comprehensive military offensive in Syria with the objective of killing Bashar al-Assad, disposing of his government, and helping the Free Syrian Army run free, peaceful elections.
The Assad regime’s lack of regard for the laws of war and the right to free expression has been the driving force behind the conflict since his forces began firing into crowds of protesters in 2011, thus starting the war. In August 2013 he began using sarin gas as well as other indiscriminate chemical weapons that are illegal under international law, killing hundreds of people in a single attack in Ghouta, Syria, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. Recently, with Russian support, he has authorized airstrikes targeting hospitals, schools, civilian homes, and a convoy of food and medical supplies brought in by the UN. The strike on the aid trucks has not been directly tied to Russian or Syrian forces, but the attack was aerial, and the Russian and Syrian militaries are the only ones that fly in the region.
The U.S. bears some responsibility for the current situation in Syria. The invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 destabilized the region. This instability aided to the rise of ISIS, which has distracted Syrian rebels from the fight against Assad’s regime, which has bombed them with impunity under the guise of fighting terrorism. While military action in Syria would be better with an international coalition, Russia’s veto power as a member of the Security Council renders the UN useless, and the U.S. is much better positioned economically and militarily to act than most of Europe. Because of its complicity in creating the conflict, the U.S. must fight alone in Syria if no one else is willing to join.
After 11 years of war in Iraq and 15 in Afghanistan, the American public seems to have exhausted its appetite for war. Our failure to secure peace in those conflicts leads many to argue that war in Syria would be no different. However, it’s unwise to try and boil such complex, multi-faceted geopolitical conflicts down to “it didn’t work last time, why would it this time?” Military operations in Syria could be a success or a whopping failure, but there are no other viable solutions to the conflict; such heinous violations of human rights and international law cannot go unaddressed.
Unlike the war in Iraq, which was falsely justified based on the fabrication of evidence of weapons of mass destruction, and Afghanistan, which was a necessary response to an attack on U.S. soil, the war in Syria would be a moral one—a war fought because when violations of human rights and international law go unpunished, it corrodes the very fabric of those rights and laws, making us all more vulnerable to abuses.
The actions of Syrian and Russian government forces in this conflict represent a flagrant affront to humanity. To sit idle while they continue is morally indefensible and degrades the essence of what it means to be human.