The tumultuous civil war and the possibility of American intervention lead to strong feelings on both sides of the issue
Mariah Joyce
Staff Writer
Syria has been a constant fixture in our news cycles in the past several weeks; headlines such as “The Problem with Syria” and “Syria in Crisis” paint the newsstands. It seems as though Syria has only just entered the American consciousness, but the conflict is far older.
Some important background: Syria was a French colony which gained its independence in 1946. Like many former colonies in the Middle East, Syria’s borders were somewhat arbitrarily drawn and lumped together several ethnic groups, creating the ideal circumstances for civil war. Syria is made up of an Alawi minority (about seven percent of the population), and a Shi’ite majority (roughly 75 percent of the population). The mainly Alawite Baath party has been in control since 1963. This imbalance of power has generated resentment between the two groups which spilled over in the Arab Spring of 2011.
Initially, demonstrations were peaceful and measured. Predictably, however, police began to crack down more heavily, and the conflict turned violent. Today’s civil war can be traced back to an incident in March 2011, when protests grew violent after a group of teenagers were arrested in Daraa for writing inflammatory slogans. The police responded with violent force, and dozens were killed. The civil war has now been raging for more than two years, and the United Nations estimates that more than 120,000 people are dead, most of them civilians.
On Aug. 20, 2012, when asked by a reporter if he could envision the United States military becoming involved, President Obama declared that “a red line for [the United States] is [when] we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.” Almost exactly a year after that statement, on Aug. 21, 2013, there was a chemical attack in the suburbs of the Syrian capital of Damascus that killed over 1,400 people.
The prospect of military involvement in Syria has terrified the American public, many of whom see it as resembling the war in Iraq. Abby Helvering ’16, president of the conservative Young Americans for Liberty club on campus, disagreed, saying, “I don’t believe that an intervention in Syria would be remotely comparable with the extended U.S.-Iraq-Afghanistan crisis. The situation is entirely different… Should we put boots on the ground in Syria, they will not stay there for long.” That being said, Helvering views involvement in Syria with “great trepidation,” stating that “However noble our cause or swift our action, if we are not decisive and united in our purpose there is potential for tragedy.”
Joe Weston ’16, secretary of the College Democrats, agreed that the war in Iraq and the situation in Syria are entirely different. Rather, Weston said the most analogous conflict faced by the Obama administration was NATO action against Libya, saying that “As in Syria, limited military action was employed against select targets to stop a government from using unacceptable force on a dissident population. Not to topple the regime or hand out arms.”
In the past week, Russia has brought forward a diplomatic alternative to military action. The United States and Russia have agreed that Syria must remove or destroy all of its chemical weapons by mid 2014; this agreement could be enforced by a United Nations resolution backed by the threat of sanctions or military force. However, students at Wooster are wary of Russia’s proposal. Weston observed, “At every point in the Syrian crisis so far Russia has been the biggest obstacle to global intervention, so its commitments to peace in Syria warrant skepticism.”
Helvering agreed, saying that she “does not believe that Russia’s proposition is realistic…if [Assad] does seemingly comply, there is no way of knowing that all chemical weapons are turned in or that the government will not turn to a different method of slaughtering its citizens. Furthermore, it shows the largest weakness of the U.N. to date: unwillingness to act.”
While Syria denies that it was the perpetrator of the Aug. 21 attack, instead citing “rebel forces,” it has agreed to join the global Chemical Weapons Convention and would come under the purview of the treaty on Oct. 14 of this year.
If Syria does not follow through with their agreement to destroy or relinquish all chemical weapons, military action may be put back on the table. To those who think it is not the U.S.’s responsibility to police foreign leaders, Weston would say “intervening in Syria is the right thing to do…we can choose whether or not people have to die in their homes from inhumane gases fired in a conflict they hold no grudge in. That’s something we can and therefore should address with American military superiority.”