NATO near Death

From Tripoli to Damascus, the Libyan regime wants to bring NATO to its knees militarily and the Syrians give their tacit approval. Malte Lehming asks if that is acceptable.

Three months ago, President Barack Obama said the following in a speech delivered at the National Defense University: “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.” Because of the threat of a massacre, he said the United States must always be an advocate for human freedom.

And two months ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at a meeting at the American Academy in Berlin, “The world did not wait for another Srebrenica in a place called Benghazi.”

France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, Britain’s David Cameron, the NATO General Secretary, French philosophers, American human rights advocates and German humanists have also said much the same thing. Meanwhile, NATO has flown 11,500 sorties over Libya, 4,400 of which were bombing missions. These have strengthened the rebels who, according to United Nations reports, are now also committing war crimes. What began as the protection of civilians in Benghazi has probably caused more deaths than there would have been without intervening.

Nearly simultaneously, the regime in Syria is waging a war against its own people that is every bit as barbaric as the war Moammar Gadhafi is waging in Libya. The preliminary balance in Syria shows in excess of 1,000 civilian deaths, 10,000 arrested and detained and 10,000 refugees. The homicide figures are similar. What Benghazi is to Libya, Deraa and Jisr al-Shugour are to Syria. The world community bombs in one location but does nothing in another. They keep their clenched fist in their pocket and let Bashar al-Assad alone, saying he’s too powerful and has allies (like Russia and Iran), and they worry about who might replace him.

Those are excuses. Everyone knew the West wouldn’t go to war with the Soviet Union over Hungary nor attack China because of Tibet. Possession of nuclear weapons immunizes one against all sorts of humanitarian intervention. But Syria — unlike Iraq under Saddam Hussein or Yugoslavia under Slobodan Milosevic — isn’t a true enemy. Its military capabilities are at the 1960 or 1970 stage; it’s doubtful the Alawite Assad really has the backing of his generals inside the military.

Invoking Russia and Iran is also a weak argument. The Yugoslavian war massively threatened Russian interests; that’s why there was no U.N. mandate in Kosovo’s case. Moscow, however, only protested verbally. And Iran? It has Western troops on two borders and would have hell to pay if it allowed the Syrian situation to escalate into a military confrontation.

No, the bitter truth is that NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance, got a wake-up call in Libya. Obama wants to extricate the United States from all its wars, Europe is already running out of ammunition and because of ailing national budgets, it’s more likely that defense spending will decrease rather than increase.

The experience with the stupid Libyan war, all good humanitarian intentions aside, has been taken to heart. Even if Gadhafi were to disappear tomorrow, NATO would be unable to disguise its impotence much longer. Its demonstrative passivity in Syria’s case debunks the “responsibility to protect” as an absolute exception.

When then-Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer had to justify the war in Kosovo, he invoked the lessons of Auschwitz. “No more war” was one; “no more toleration of crimes against humanity” was the other. But he didn’t want to send ground troops in.

So again today there’s a huge gap between words and deeds and between strength and weakness. The West’s problem: The more it encourages people to resist — many Syrians had hoped for an intervention similar to that in Libya — the greater the people’s disappointment. “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.” That was Obama’s promise. Too bad for the Syrians who believed him.