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Of Mice And Man: Obama, Syria And The Doubting Thomases By Kennedy Emetulu

October 1, 2013

“To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason”.
------ President Barack Obama (from his Nobel Peace Prize Speech, 10 December, 2009)

“To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason”.
------ President Barack Obama (from his Nobel Peace Prize Speech, 10 December, 2009)


 
President Barack Obama is human, flesh and blood. So, no matter how powerful, he cannot run ahead of the history unfolding before our very eyes. Like any good leader, he can only sit down and think his options through before making a decision, even as we hold him accountable for everything happening at breakneck speed. Yes, when there’s a rumble anywhere around the world, whether instigated by the United States or others, even the most reasonable of us expect the President of the United States of America to come flying down in his Superman cape to sort it all out in a jiffy! Otherwise, we yell and cry and call him all sorts of unprintable names in all languages! Rightly or wrongly, it’s our right.
 
Thus, when we hear some people lament how Obama sat on his hands these past two years as some wise people advised him to arm the Syrian rebels, we sympathise with them and glare disapprovingly at the dithering, taking-forever-to-make-a-teeny-weeny-decision president. But it seems we’ve graduated from that already, because these days it’s a certain Vladimir Putin of Russia offering us a new angry lens through which to view Obama at home and abroad. To our chagrin, the newspapers inform us that Putin’s the one running American foreign policy. Those of us in doubt went into the website of the New York Times on Wednesday, 11 September 2013 and were shocked to read Mr Putin directly addressing Americans and their political leaders about Syria, paternalistically warning against military action, preaching human rights, playing leader of the free world, hugging the Pope and calling God. And oh, the God bit is apparently very serious.
 
Indeed, I was sitting in front of the television on the morning of 12 September when Sky News wheeled in a Russian fellow they said was a Putin biographer. After helping to properly pronounce the Russian leader’s middle name, “Vladimirovich”, this man proceeded to lecture viewers about how serious Putin is about this whole Syria mission as enunciated in his New York Times letter to Americans and their leaders. He said Putin’s personal motivation is the protection of the Christians being killed in Syria. He reminded us that when Putin first met George W Bush, the first thing he showed him was the aluminium cross he wears. Putin is so geared up and ready to protect those Christians that he’s considering sending in “paratroopers”, he said. And yes, people must note closely Putin’s mention of the Pope and God in the context of “one in four people” declaring Obama to be anti-Christ! Huh? Yeah, it’s a battle of Good versus Evil, ladies and gentlemen and you can spot the evil one, can’t you? I opened my mouth to let out what I’d thought was going to be a huge, earthshattering guffaw, but nothing came out!
 
In desperation, I took to channel-hopping, but everywhere I turn talking heads were riotously declaring that President Obama’s response to this man is nothing short of some mickey-mousey display of poor chessmanship! For a moment, I was transfixed watching Vladimir Chizhov, the Russian European Union Ambassador, grinning from ear to ear, sounding all triumphant on a segment of Amanpour on CNN as he declared: “Many people in my home country and here in the European Union think that President Putin and Minister Lavrov actually came to the rescue of President Obama, who was facing possible defeat in the U.S. Congress.” And just about the same time, I heard in the news that Bashar al-Assad was giving an interview on Russian TV claiming the Kremlin influenced his decision to hand over Syria’s chemical weapons and not the American threat of force. Donald Trump, Pat Buchanan, Rep. Mike Rogers and a whole tribe of American neo-Russians were falling over themselves to declare Putin the overwhelming winner in this statesmanship face-off with Obama. For a whole lot of people on the right, Putin has won for them the foreign policy debate they couldn’t win at the last election while Putin himself began to think and act as though he’d just won the Cold War, not minding that the Soviet surrendered decades ago.
 
 
A Botoxed Charm Offensive:
 
I find the attempt to paint President Barack Obama as having no real plan for Syria and the idea that he’s being given the runaround by Putin laughable. What we are seeing are two men whose moral visions of governance and the world are different and who preside over two countries that constitutionally and institutionally operate differently in dispensing their capacities nationally and internationally. History has consistently showed that when it matters, the United States with its democratic institutions and culture of defence of the rights of man will stand firm. I’m not saying the United States has been a paragon of virtue in international relations since the end of the Second World War, but quite apart from its Cold War responses to the challenges supposedly posed by the Soviet Union in the post-war era, it remains the only superpower that has risen to the challenge of at least trying to rally others to live the ideals of the United Nations when it matters most, whether on its own steam or after an initial collective failure.
 
Putin might be basking in his new-found status as the snake-charmer of America, but he is the one with limited options here and he’s the one likely to hit the dust first if things fail at this point.  While it makes good copy for the press to report that John Kerry’s ‘solution’ was ‘unscripted’ and that it was a mistake that the apparently smart Putin jumped on to craft a consensus going forward without the use of force, evidence indicates that this is an idea that was already conceived and discussed before Mr Putin made it his own in his typical fashion of pocketing things that belong to other people. For instance, we now know that the idea of Syria handing over its chemical weapons to the international community was not after all the brilliant Putin’s original idea. The Polish authorities have since confirmed to the world that their Oxford University-trained Foreign Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski proposed the idea directly to the United States Secretary of State, John Kerry on the phone on 29 August, 2013, including presenting it to Kerry in person upon his visit to Vilnius, Lithuania in the company of Elmar Brok, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the European Parliament and that was before Kerry met with the British Foreign Secretary, William Hague with whom he was at that joint conference in London where he supposedly misspoke.
 
A day after speaking to Kerry on phone, Sikorski further espoused this idea in an interview with the French newspaper, Le Monde, stating: “If Russia, which doesn’t want this intervention, said it would take responsibility for securing this arsenal, that would have an influence on events.” The Polish Ambassador to the United States, Ryszard Schnepf confirmed this when he said: “I am pleased that the Polish initiative put forward by Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski during his talks with Secretary Kerry presents an opportunity to resolve the issue of controlling the presence of chemical weapon in Syria.”
 
The Poles haven’t said they shared this with the Russians neither have the Americans, though a Reuters report of September 9 quoted a Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov as saying the idea of placing the chemical weapons arsenal under international control was discussed between Putin and Obama on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in St Petersburg. The report did not indicate who brought it up. Nonetheless, what all this confirms is that Kerry knew what he was doing when he gave Syria and the Russians a glimmer of hope with that opening in his speech in London. It was not a slip of tongue or an off-handed remark. It was all scripted. Thus, unlike what the press is reporting and what Putin wants the world to believe, it is no new proposal from the Russians. It looks new, because it’s coming from the Russians officially after the threat of military action. In other words, it wasn’t Putin offering the idea to save Obama and the Americans from having to make a decision about striking Syria; it was Obama through Kerry that offered Putin the opportunity to save face, because the world can see with the American military build-up around Syria that they are ready and that this was not just mere talk. For the proud Putin, he knew the only opportunity he had to save his client-regime in Syria is to make an offer of handing over the chemical weapons with Russia as guarantors.  He knew Obama wasn’t bluffing and he knew that all the talk about limited military action is just an excuse to get in. Once the US gets started, Putin knows they won’t stop until they get Bashar al-Assad out. Targeted limited strikes or not, it was obvious without anyone saying so that if there is a military strike, the US will not leave Syria with Bashar al-Assad still sitting there as president.
 
Putin must have had Libya playing in his mind. At the time, the US was acting reluctant, propping her allies forward to lead and supporting them from behind, declaring it wasn’t interested in regime change, but only wanted to establish a no-fly zone and all that. However once Operation Odyssey Dawn was put in motion in March 2011, by October, Col Muammar Gaddafi was dead.  Obviously, the United States acted with others through Security Council Resolution 1973 and masterfully succeeded in pressurising Russia and China to abstain rather than veto, but Putin knew at the time that even if Russia had vetoed, Obama was well prepared with the allies to still get on with it under the legitimate principle that the international community cannot stand by and let genocide go on anywhere simply because United Nation Security Council politics is in the way. Thus, the abstention by Russia and China made them appear not to be against international effort to stop the bloodshed in Libya by the removal of Gaddafi, a sort of face-saving device in the end.
 
Thus, for Obama at this point, it is the realpolitik that matters, not the appearance. Putin can go claim all diplomatic glory, but Obama actually needs him to play a much more responsible role in Syria, rather than just rejecting every proposal brought forward, except anything he knows he can kill at the UN Security Council. Obama knew he had to force him to do this and that was the whole idea behind the strategy of using the threat of military force backed by real movement once Syria in desperation crossed that ‘red line’ with the chemical attack of 21 August, 2013.
 
Obama knows the American people are war-weary, but he knows too that a well-structured plan would win them over, as in Libya. Yet, he’s fully aware that Syria is not Libya. He was only going to intervene in Syria when he’s sure the democratic forces are prepared to fight the Islamists politically and defeat them, having learnt the lessons of Egypt. He was also not going to commit American resources and military to nation-building of any kind, having learnt the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. But something as serious as a chemical attack by state agents was going to force his hands when he was instinctively not ready. So, these were the circumstances under which Putin walked into that ‘diplomatic trap’ and Obama isn’t known to be the one to gloat or fight over who is winning some diplomatic war. He is satisfied that his military option is directing all actions, even if with Putin prancing around proclaiming himself some diplomatic victor.
 
 
The Fangs and Fancy of Diplomacy:
 
Earlier I did mention that both men have different moral visions of governance and the world and that they also preside over two countries that are operatively different constitutionally and institutionally. These differences are what Putin is banking on to give him better leverage and room to manoeuvre than Obama. While Obama has a war-weary American public to answer to, a Congress to win over and a free world to appeal to and carry along, Putin on the other hand does not see himself as accountable to anyone, because what he’s got in Russia is a Potemkin village of a democracy. He just sleeps and wakes up with anything he conjures up as the Russian policy for Syria and dispatches Sergey Lavrov and other minions to go sell it to the Americans.  He’s a glorified dictator who thinks he’s now got the key to the heart of the world, but Obama is a proper democrat who’d need to properly explain his policy and build a strong and consistent case to appeal to different sections of the people, including the political leaders. To Putin, this is a game; to Obama, this is about using the enormous power of the United States responsibly to save lives and protect United States’ friends and interests. Above all that, this is about the future of the world and what type of conduct that must not be accepted even in a war situation. It is about the defence and protection of fundamental international norms and to act in concert with other willing members of the international community to deter anyone, group or regime that breaches these norms, especially those concerning genocide.
 
Of course, we have people who keep saying America looked the other way as Saddam Hussein gassed his own people and Iranians, that they used Agent Orange in Vietnam and that Obama is being hypocritical for threatening Bashar al-Assad with military force for using chemical weapons against his own people. All that would be fair criticism, but only to an extent. That extent does not take us to the next level, because once we digest those criticisms, the next question naturally is what next? Whether you’re ideologically left, right or centre, you need to provide a view, a way out of the Syrian impasse. Just looking the other way and declaring the sanctity of non-interference in the affairs of another state, something the Russians have mastered by vetoing all proposals for real action at the UN Security Council is actually beneath debate.
 
Criticisms of America’s past are not effective responses to today’s challenges under today’s international rules. National histories everywhere are woven in tapestries dripping with blood, fashioned in war, injustice and subjective heroism. There is no country that does not have its own terrible history to tell, whether in the form of a national establishment perpetrating bad governance against its own people or engaging in offensive conduct against other countries or other people. But humanity is always striving to be better. The beginning of the 21st century confirmed for us that humanity has made great improvements. The Second World War became a distant memory and people began to think more of globalization and how they can unite in dreams through advancement in technology, intellectualization and governmental best practices through internationalism and multilateralism. The United Nations has no standing army, but we have avoided a World War, ended the Cold War and created a world with less suspicion.
 
Then a new threat struck. On September 11, 2001, America felt the burning rage of Islamist extremism that had nothing to do with religion, but all to do with the bitter fusion of a Frankenstein political message of transnational injustice based on Muslim identity with brutal ignorance masquerading ideologically as Islamic theocracy. Unfortunately, at the time, America had a political leadership at the highest executive level suffering from jingoistic delusions. George W Bush, Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives that made policies ignored the real problem of international terrorism and went into an adventure in Iraq, including going into Afghanistan against the Taliban, which ordinarily was a just cause, but doing so on the back of some fundamentally flawed messaging. The cost to America’s prestige and standing in the world was enormous. Americans themselves realised this and turned a political corner when they elected Barack Obama as President in 2008. Here’s a man whose vision of the world is shaped by his own origins and experience. His idea of American leadership is one based on strength through humility. It is one anchored strongly on the trust and goodwill of others who appreciate that though the days of imperialism are over, the world still needs leadership in times of trouble from certain countries foremost amongst them, the United States.
 
Obama’s worldwide campaign before and after election was one framed by him as a projection of America’s ability to listen to the concerns of others, to be part of a team, rather than act unilateralist when international norms are not threatened and to reassure communities all over the world where egregious exercise of American power had seen deep distrust develop, even amongst people who ordinarily would support her. His opponents on the right disparagingly referred to this as the begging tour, but he won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples".
 
He brought America in from the cold and repositioned her as a trusted leader of the international community. Expectedly, a lot of those opposed to military action against Syria have used the Nobel stick to beat him over the head, some cynically pointing out that Putin is more like the one who deserves it, because of his diplomatic, anti-military push over the Syrian conflict. Yet, for all those saying this, all they need to do to understand Obama’s position today is to go over Obama’s Nobel speech, which could as well have been declared his national security and foreign policy vision even that far back. Despite the worldwide relief that greeted his election and the promises he portended while campaigning for the presidency, Obama showed in that speech that he is no peacenik or pacifist. He expressed a realist’s grounded view of history that his immediate predecessor never had and a forthrightness to take on the challenges that the new international order presents.
 
Now, whether the future of Syria or a world opposed to the use of chemical weapons and genocide has been compromised by the resort to diplomacy would not be a judgment anyone of us can make now. But, so far with John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov having worked frenetically to come up with an ambitious framework for going ahead with the plan to seize and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile and the Security Council passing a resolution adopting that framework after more than two years of Russian hide-and-seek, the best we can say is that all parties so far seem committed to this programme, not least because of the threat of military force, even though this isn’t explicitly stated in Security Council Resolution 2118. The framework calls for Syria to provide full inventory or list of all chemical weapons in their arsenal and their location within a week (which they have done), for all production equipment to be destroyed by November and for the destruction of all weapons to be concluded before the middle of next year. If Syria refuses to comply at any stage, the matter would be taken to the United Nations and the Security Council would have the option of applying Chapter VII sanctions.
 
In the meantime, the United States has not ruled out using military force against al-Assad if he begins to play games, regardless of the UN process. To make things clearer, President Obama believes that chemical attacks anywhere in the world, including in Syria threatens US national security interests by "violating well established international norms". He insists that if military force is to be used, it would be to deter President Bashar al-Assad from using chemical weapons and degrade his regime’s ability to use these. So, really, while Obama has not actually shifted from his pre-diplomacy days’ position of using military strike against Syria on the basis of the fact that it’s used chemical weapons to commit genocide against its own people, he’s left a window of opportunity for Syria to comply by handing over all its chemical weapons while patiently working with the Russians to present a framework that will begin and end with action by the international community if Syria refuses to comply. He has ensured that upon the return of this matter to the Security Council for sanctions, say over Syria’s non-compliance or substantial non-compliance, Russia and China would have no leg to stand on if they choose to argue against military action against Bashar al-Assad.
 
He has also by this provided a diplomatic base for a broader intervention in the civil war itself. This is reflected already in the Security Council Resolution 2118. Buoyed by the present development, the Secretary General is already looking to get the parties together for a November date. The undercurrent of all that of course is that Russia, China and Iran’s continued arming of the al-Assad regime may lead to a more robust pro-opposition support from the United States and her allies, which could possibly tilt the war in their favour leading to the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime before the middle of next year. In which case, the international action to destroy the chemical weapons could be undertaken or be completed under a new government in Damascus. It seems a long shot now, but with intense international focus on al-Assad, the Russians, Chinese and Iranians now over this chemical weapons affair, keeping up the fighting with the advancing rebels and meeting what are likely to be intense demands from the international community may spread al-Assad too thin and give the rebels with more conventional arms an opening.
 
Also, al-Assad may not have too much support from the present Iranian leadership, especially with the open rapprochement going on between them and the Americans, indicating that things have moved on from the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad era to the extent that the American and Iranian presidents actually spoke to each other warmly on the phone for the first time in almost 35 years. If the Iranians steer clear of or reduce their support for Syria in exchange for better relations with the US, the easing of sanctions and technical and financial support from the West for the establishment of a peaceful nuclear energy programme, it would also mean Hezbollah won’t be at al-Assad’s party if there’s a military strike against Syria. Not that it would make a great difference if the Iranians and Hezbollah actively support al-Assad in the case of a US-led military strike, but these moves by the United States can only put more pressure on the Russians. They now have to do all the running or most of the running, because it is incumbent upon them to get al-Assad cooperating to protect the international credibility of Putin. All the US, the rest of the international community and the international civil society groups have to do is monitor progress and where they see non-compliance, begin to build a case to take to the Security Council as required by the agreement with the Russians.
 
At this juncture, it’s important to point out that despite the hurray over the “constructive” talks between John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov and the  progress at the Security Council with the passing of Resolution 2118 , there’s really nothing to celebrate, because diplomacy will not bring back all those men, women and children that died horribly from sarin gas. Rather than diplomacy celebrating the temporary suspension of the military force option against the murderous Syrian regime (with the aim, at least in the first instance, of striking at its capacities and capabilities to use chemical weapons), it should seek to celebrate the acquisition and destruction of Syria’s chemical stockpiles.
 
It’s true that President Vladimir Putin is still out there flying the kite of ‘rebels behind the attack’, but he and anyone involved with this at the highest level know he’s talking bunkum. In fact, even though it did not explicitly state so, the newly-released UN Report on the 21 August chemical attack more or less confirms the fact the al-Assad regime did it by indicating that the arms and facilities used for the attack could only have been available and done that way by a regular army. Long before the UN Report, on 10 September, Human Rights Watch had already produced a detailed and credible report based on evidence from eyewitnesses, survivors and doctors from which it concluded that the attacks were carried out by Syrian military forces using two different types of rockets with chemical weapons capabilities. The first, a 330mm rocket with a warhead designed to carry chemical agent was found at the site of the Eastern Ghouta attack and the second, a Soviet-produced 140mm rocket with capacity to deliver 2.2 kg of sarin was found at the site of the Western Ghouta attack. These findings were confirmed by the UN Report. The only difference in both reports is that the UN Report did not name the al-Assad regime as the perpetrators, but that is clear for any objective observer to see.
 
First, the 140mm M14 artillery rocket with the distinctive 10 angled nozzle section with the body marking of ‘179’ has been identified as a Soviet-made artillery still being used today by the Russian Armed Forces. Indeed, as late as 21 July, 2011, the Russian Ministry of Defence was reported to have displayed this type of rocket with the distinctive ‘179’ body marking to journalists aboard the Russian cruiser, Moskva, which is the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Russian technical manual says the ‘179’ marking identifies the plant that produces the body and this shows that the M14 rockets used to deliver the sarin gas in Syria were designed and assembled at the Institute of Applied Physics near the Siberian Agricultural Machinery Plant (as described by Dr Igor Sutyagin, a Russian weapons specialist who is a Research Fellow with Royal United Services Institution, London). The plant is the largest artillery munitions production plant in Europe. Since 1936, it has had a coded name – “Combined No 179”. The Soviet Union has been known to be a major supplier of chemical weapons components to Syria since the seventies during the reign of Hafez al-Assad and they have also been known to supply the BM14 rocket launcher which utilizes M14 rockets. Hezbollah is also known to use the RPU14 launcher that utilizes the same M14 rockets. The 330mm B-Calibre high explosive rockets with the warhead region larger in diameter were also found intact, which means they were used to carry something other than explosives, in this case, gas. All these were fired from regime-held areas to rebel-held areas.
 
Secondly, the “Narrative and Results of the Mission” section of the report talks about the inspectors facing “repeated threats of harm” and coming under actual sniper attack on August 26. In Appendix 3 titled “Planning and Preparing for Entries into the Areas to be Investigated”, they reported that they had to depend on “a leader of the local opposition forces” for security to conduct their business and control the crowd and so on in the places they visited. That should tell anyone who exactly does not want the UN inspectors around.
 
Really, at this point I don’t think there’s much doubt that the al-Assad forces did the attack. They first denied having any chemical weapons and then later admitted to having them and even though they have not admitted to using them, their denial has been very tepid. They have done absolutely nothing to convince the world they didn’t do it, except to say they’ve belatedly handed over some evidence of rebel involvement to the Russians. I mean, this is not a case of declaring them guilty until they prove their innocence; it’s about governmental responsibility. If the Syrian government can shell the rebels relentlessly to the point of claiming it is winning the war against them, why is it acting so blasé about such horrible massacre of its own people if it isn’t behind it? They could not even deny the charge that they issued their own army with gas masks before the attack!
 
At any rate, the al-Assad family is well-known for this tactics. Though there were unsubstantiated reports that his father, Hafez al-Assad used hydrogen cyanide in the Hama Massacre of 1982, what is not in doubt is that he was a master of communal massacres as a means of sending a macabre message to those opposed to his regime. The difference between his time and now is that technology and social media instantly broadcast his son’s atrocities all over the world. The United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon himself reported to the United Nations Security Council on a massacre by the Syrian army in the same Hama last year and has accused Bashar al-Assad of committing “many crimes against humanity”.
 
Bashar al-Assad and his people used sarin on the civilian population in these places that are suburbs of Damascus to stop any rebel advance into main Damascus, his own base, the seat of power. The idea was to use chemical weapons against them, first to punish them and strike fear into them for supporting the rebels and secondly, to ensure that the rebels, who are mostly a rag-tag army, do not come near those neighbourhoods or try to use them as bases to launch attacks on the seat of power in Damascus. Bombing these places with conventional munitions wouldn’t stop rebels’ advance; but chemical weapons can do that. The rebels without jets or fighter planes would find it harder to reach their targets when they cannot use the suburbs where they have support, because of fear of contamination. The tactic appealed to al-Assad and the Russians because they thought no one would seriously think al-Assad would be foolish enough to gas the opposition civilian supporters when that is exactly what would seriously irk the international community and drag them into it. He had thought it would be easy to simply blame it on the opposition and play the victim of terrorism. He and his forces did it, because they had the assurances of the Russians that no force would be deployed against them by the United Nations Security Council knowing that they and the Chinese would veto any such move and they banked on Americans and their allies being too weary of such intervention, because of their not-so-great experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
But such calculations have evidently failed. It’s obvious now that unless the Russians get their Syrian friends to hand over all their chemical weapons and produce the perpetrators of the crime for international justice, the world under American leadership will not sweep it under some diplomatic carpet. I am actually convinced that Mr Putin’s New York Times opinion piece would ultimately help to focus the minds of Americans on what is at stake here. It doesn’t look that way now, but as this goes on and people begin to wise up to the antics of the Russians and al-Assad, they will begin to make up their minds about what kind of world we want. We will have to decide whether it is one where the Russians can back anybody to gas anybody and come to the Security Council to protect them or one where we simply should not be tolerating crimes against humanity simply because some terrorist-regimes with the backing of Putin and his kind think we are weary of war. Yes, it is the freedom we have enjoyed since the end of the Second World War that is being stolen by poison gas! That it was not perpetrated on American soil makes no difference! That Putin is comfortable talking human rights and diplomacy while a regime he supports poisons its own people in the 21st century should worry Americans and the world at large. What happens when chemical weapons are deployed against American servicemen and other soldiers anywhere else? What happens when another regime does it as a shortcut to winning against insurrectionists?
 
Mr Putin may consider it dangerous that President Obama talks about American Exceptionalism, but that does not change the fact that since after the Second World War, the Old Soviet Union and today its successor state in the form of the Russian Federation have not been a force for good internationally. In Rwanda and Somalia, Russia did nothing. In Kosovo, it attempted to stop the humanitarian intervention. George Bush went on a costly adventure in Iraq and the whole world condemned him, but Russia is there in Libya and Syria and the whole of the Middle East acting the vulture, pecking off roubles from the cold bodies of innocent children, women and men murdered by their client-regime. Honestly, the prospect of Putin dictating international morality is distasteful. So, while America and the world must work with him on getting Syria to hand over all its chemical weapons, they must insist on the punishment of the perpetrators of the crime. No crime against humanity must go unpunished in this day and age. In fact, once the international community finishes securing the chemical weapons arsenal, pressure must be put on Russia and China to join others at the Security Council to make a Syria International Criminal Court referral. It’s encouraging to see that Resolution 2118 makes clear that those responsible for the chemical attack must be held accountable. The international community must begin to fish them out now, so as to stop them from being in circulation where they have continued with their atrocities. Picking them up even as the war goes on will send a clear message to all combatants that there are rules of war they have to obey, otherwise there would be consequences. It certainly would reduce some of the more gruesome atrocities being committed now.
 
 
The Fiddling People’s Representatives:
 
There’s a groundswell of opinion that thinks David Cameron’s ‘bungling’ of the British vote gave Obama an escape route from the deep hole he supposedly found himself over Syria, just as they also claim same for Vladimir’s Putin’s diplomatic intervention. Convolutedly, this theory claims that Cameron losing the vote in the House of Commons made Obama resort to Congress as well and that the threat of a loss of the vote in Congress delayed the proposed strike against Syria which in turn provided the opportunity for Putin to come to Obama’s rescue with the diplomatic gambit, seizing on the supposed off-hand comment by US Secretary of State, John Kerry.
 
But real Obama watchers would not buy this reasoning. Cameron’s problem was clearly one of precipitation. He moved too quickly without first making the case properly, even to members of his own party. Party whips or not, British MPs and the British people, like Americans, are war-weary and there is that simple problem of most people, even MPs, viewing Syria through the same Iraq and Afghanistan lenses. Cameron also underestimated the desperation of the Labour leader, Ed Miliband. But the London outcome did not make Obama decide to go to Congress. Obama know the nation is weary of war and that at that point most people still did not understand the nuanced differences between Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan. Even a lot of supposedly informed Americans still aren’t sold on it basically because they do not see any good guy on both sides of the Syrian war. They interpret any proposed strike against al-Assad (even if only targeted at his chemical weapons capabilities) as an intervention on the side of rebels who are an assortment of jihadists that are no friends of America. The pro-Syrian government international media people have also successfully sold the notion in the West that al-Assad is the only protector of the Syrian Christian population. Thus, the idea that al-Assad is bad, but that he’s the best option amongst the barbaric lot has since become a singsong amongst the Christian right and their political foot soldiers.
 
So, Obama knows that no amount of moral preachments or appeal to conscience is going to change this overnight. He knows it would take time to sell his core message to the American people - the fact that the al-Assad regime’s use of chemical weapon is a danger that must be addressed and stopped by the international community or by the United States unilaterally, if necessary. But he knew he couldn’t just let it go after his statement that the red line would be the use of chemical weapon. But, at the time he said that, it was actually aimed at making Syria irrelevant in the re-election campaign, because he knew the capacity of the vagaries of war to affect electoral fortunes. Thus, by drawing a red line (which actually is no different from the red line already drawn by the international community as he said in Sweden), he effectively gave everyone a sign to look out for that would trigger an American intervention. It didn’t come before or during the election, so, to that extent, it worked. But once it happened on August 21, he had to find a way to force some kind of response from al-Assad and the Russians towards addressing the matter. He was also aware that considering the precarious condition of the American economy which is still gradually being nursed back to health, any foreign intervention would raise fears in terms of costs, so whatever programme he has in mind to deal with the situation needs to get Russia to bear some cost. But that won’t happen via military action, as Russia will always oppose that. That can only happen via involvement of Russia in seeking a diplomatic solution. This was always going to be difficult with Russia’s narrow diplomatic investment being through the United Nations where it’s guaranteed the power to use the veto to frustrate any attempt at diplomatic or military solution or even sanction while it continues to arm the al-Assad regime to prosecute the war.
 
Paradoxically, Obama knew his biggest trump card was to threaten military action against Syria. He knew he had a legitimate case for this, with or without the United Nations, because, unlike Bush’s precipitate war in Iraq without evidence of weapons of mass destruction, in Syria, there’s actually a case that genocide has been committed by a regime against its people via the use of chemical weapons in breach of the Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare (1925) and other important rules of customary international law. He also knew that he didn’t have to go to Congress to use military force, just as he never went to them over Libya. For Obama, the triggers for military action are two key things that must work complimentarily. First is the strong possibility of success to be achieved within the shortest possible time and without boots on the ground and secondly, the willingness of other allies to ‘lead’ if necessary while the United States does the diplomatic legwork. Despite the latter-day political bow-wowing from the right over Benghazi and so on, the Libya interventionist model is Obama’s preferred template where necessary.
 
But Syria is more complex than Libya. Even though it all started as a popular street opposition against the al-Assad dictatorship in March 2011, the opposition did not show enough pro-democracy credentials or any ideological affinity with the Arab Spring to warrant support from the West. What made the movements in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Libya successful magnets of international support was the uniform renouncement of al-Qaida and extremism and a noted commitment to democratic transitions. The opposition in Syria did not explore that very much. Once they started and realised that the West was not going to rush to their side, they began to band together with all manner of professional jihadists and revanchists who see Syria as the new frontline in pursuit of their Islamist agenda. For more than four decades they’ve seen the Alawite minority governments of the al-Assad family as  puppets of the West and now that the Assads are no longer in the good books of the West, they are ready to cash in, even if with Western guns. Yet in doing this, there is no concerted effort to assure the international community that the Christians, the Kurds, the Alawites and other minorities in Syria are safe if they claim power.
 
The above considerations were the things on Obama’s mind at the time of the chemical attack. He was not going to sanction arming rebels, even though he’s aware that the Syrian military is being heavily armed by Russia, Iran and China (mostly through Iran) until America and her allies in the region are sure of who is who amongst the disjointed opposition. But even then, it is not enough to isolate the so-called moderates for support, because America will still have to fight off the extremists and ensure that the moderates themselves are committed to a democratic transition in Syria going forward. With the experience of Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, even this is not a guarantee. Thus, immediate military action in response to the gas attack was not something he wanted, even though he was seemingly strongly indicating this approach immediately after.
 
After reviewing the situation and considering the dilemma he found himself, Obama settled for a feint. His speech of 31 August at the Rose Garden stating that he had decided on military action against Syria and was going to seek Congressional authorisation for it was exactly that – a tactical feint. It was not intended to do those things it stated on the face of it that it wanted to do, rather it was aimed at (1) alarming Bashar al-Assad and Putin and forcing Putin to quickly come up with an alternative solution for the problem of the Syrian chemical weapons’ use outside US-led military strikes against his ally, (2) putting Syria on top of international agenda at the G20 Summit to be held in Putin’s hometown of St Petersburg, Russia less than a week from the day of the address, (3) alerting Americans and the rest of the world on the issues at stake in Syria as opposed to Iraq and Afghanistan, (4) putting Congress on the spot and (5) using the debate over the Syrian crisis to attempt to heal the deep and embarrassing divide in Washington.
 
To achieve (1), President Obama in the speech stated that he has decided to take military action against Syria. To prove that this is not an empty threat, he indicated that the US military has positioned assets in the region and that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the military are just waiting for his orders. “Moreover, the Chairman has indicated to me that our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive; it will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now.  And I'm prepared to give that order”. Obama knew this alone would alarm Putin. The Russian president wouldn’t want to be hosting the G20 summit in his hometown of St Petersburg, in front of the whole world, while American planes are shelling his ally, Bashar al-Assad, in a country in where they have the last naval base (Tartus) outside the old Soviet Union and with him incapable of doing anything but just rant and rave.
 
Of course, Putin knows the American people are war-weary, but he also knows that even though they were not supportive of the American Libya intervention, Obama still boldly went ahead with it and won them over with the success of the mission after. He knows Obama does not have to go to Congress for authorisation, because he can be that single-minded when necessary. Obama put the ball in Putin’s court, but gave him a little opening with this: “But having made my decision as Commander-in-Chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interests, I'm also mindful that I'm the President of the world's oldest constitutional democracy.  I've long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.  And that’s why I've made a second decision:  I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people's representatives in Congress”. But, Obama made sure that Putin knows that he is not going to stand for Putin’s UN Security Council veto gimmick anymore. “I'm confident in the case our government has made without waiting for U.N. inspectors.  I'm comfortable going forward without the approval of a United Nations Security Council that, so far, has been completely paralyzed and unwilling to hold Assad accountable”.
 
This would have been a source of great relief to Putin, because it guarantees that Obama would not embarrass him with a Syrian strike while the G20 meeting is on and since he was coming to St Petersburg, it offers him (Putin) an opportunity to discuss face to face a way forward at the G20 meeting, which was exactly what happened as Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov was reported to have said that Putin and Obama discussed the idea of placing Syria’s chemical weapons under international control on the sidelines of the G20 meeting. So, the idea wasn’t something that came about later because of Kerry’s supposed rhetorical stumble or off-hand comment. There was no stumble from Kerry. The statement was deliberately made in London two days after to give Putin that opportunity to play statesman, something already agreed with Obama two days before. That way, Putin saves face and Obama gets his diplomatic breakthrough by giving Russia ownership of the problem. Of course, Obama is not worried that a lot of people in the press and in the political class read it in reverse. He is comfortable with people saying Putin saved him from the Syrian mess, because what he is more interested in is the substance, which is that his strategy finally drags out Putin from the shadows, makes him commit to a diplomatic approach that he Putin has invested his credibility to make succeed under a framework already prepared.
 
While (1) and (2) were Obama’s immediate aims with the Rose Garden speech, (3), (4) and (5) are more medium and long-term aims. Obama knows that war-weary Americans and a suspicious world are not going to change their opinion overnight over military strike against Syria; but he is convinced that people need to be informed. In fact, he is aware that even a lot of members of Congress are not informed enough about this which was why he offered in that speech the following: “In the coming days, my administration stands ready to provide every member with the information they need to understand what happened in Syria and why it has such profound implications for America's national security.  And all of us should be accountable as we move forward, and that can only be accomplished with a vote”. Obama knows that people would take time to digest the information and finally make up their minds. He knows that a lot of people with the default position of war-weariness would ultimately begin to look through this at some point and even if they don’t necessarily change their minds about the need for military strikes (which, in truth, he’s doing everything to avoid without compromising American and international security), it would make them more informed of the issues and guide their views over issues that the diplomatic engagement with Russia and Syria are likely to throw up in the coming days and weeks and months as the parties work around the Kerry-Lavrov framework and now Security Council Resolution 2118.
 
Nos (4) and (5) are the most important reasons why Obama was involving Congress, even if the speech didn’t explicitly state so. Reading between the lines, one gets the message. But, first, let us understand the background. From the moment Obama was first elected, the Republican right as a party in Congress transformed itself into an obstructionist party. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate Minority leader declared with glee half-way into President Obama’s first term: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." That was exactly the guiding principle behind all Republican actions in Congress; they became the party of no. They blocked the president’s jobs legislation, played brinkmanship with the debt ceiling negotiations, blocked judicial nominees, refused to staff the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the National Labor Relations Board, refused any compromise on the Bush tax cuts and generally antagonised the president unnecessarily. There were the birthers, the Tea Party activists, racists and all sorts of agenda-driven people lined up to ensure that he does not have a second term by obstructing everything. It took Obama’s political genius, tact and remarkable intellectual astuteness for him to achieve all he did in his first term in the face of Congressional hostility. Meanwhile, Americans were not impressed by the antics of these people in Congress, as their actions set back the economic recovery and created gridlock. The polls showed Congress at historical lows. At any rate, the strategy bombed as Obama handily won a second-term.
 
However, the President had genuinely hoped that after his re-election, the obstructive elements on the right would tamp things down, cooperate with him and focus on governance, so they can achieve more legislatively; but what Americans are seeing are people overindulging themselves in hubris. Obama is deeply troubled by the state of politics in Washington, especially the unhealthy division in Congress that has turned governance into a farce, all because some members on the right are still fighting a blind partisan war and some personal battles with him while others are doing so in rehearsal for 2016. With the RealClearPolitics average of polls for Congressional Job Approval Rating at less than 20 percent, Obama does not feel Americans are getting the best from Washington.
 
The reaction generated in Congress from all sides by Obama’s announcement that he was going to seek authorization from Congress showed how jittery most of them have become, because Obama put them on the spot. They were all comfortable pretending that the Syrian problem is his problem and not theirs. Every member of the House of Representatives and 33 members of the Senate have their minds fixed on next year’s midterm elections. None of them wants to go to their constituency answering questions about Syria. Already, for the Republicans, retaining their majority in the House is paramount in order to be in a position to challenge for the presidency in 2016 and anyone looking for the party ticket has to start by showing their electoral value next year. Obama’s Syria vote notice has already precipitated a civil war within the GOP with Tea Party isolationists led by Senators Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz on one side and the hawks led by Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham on the other. Both sides do not exactly support Obama, but their position on Syria is shaping up to be an ideological bone that may well shape the national security and foreign policy debate within the party for some tickets next year and its presidential ticket in 2016. In the House, while the leadership led by Speaker John Boehner sees the merit in Obama’s case for military strike, the majority of the Republican Congressmen are simply wallowing in Obama-hate and would do anything to politically crush him, even if it means cutting their nose to spite their face.
 
As for the Democrats, they were crapping themselves silly because they just couldn’t understand why the leader of their party would want to risk his legacy with the Syrian vote in Congress when he clearly knows that the Republicans are bruising for a fight and therefore would never give him that authorisation. Considering the midterm elections, they reckon he’s made their position harder. They are supposed to be the anti-war party, the party that understands the mood of the nation, the party that knows Americans are tired of war, which is why Barack Obama, the anti-war candidate was elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. Even if he wants to indulge himself in some foreign policy gamble since he isn’t seeking re-election again, why doesn’t he just do what he did with Libya, use his presidential war powers and leave the Democrats to go defend him after the fact in Congress and the media, rather than put them on the spot now?
 
Yet, this is precisely what Obama wants. He’s woken them up with his feint, but what he really wants is Putin taking more responsibility diplomatically towards achieving some kind of success with Syria. He knew he couldn’t do it without the threat of military force. He was not going to give Republicans an opportunity to humiliate him, but it was worth using the feint to rouse Congressmen and Congresswomen and the nation. He knew the only thing that can dramatically focus the minds of everybody in America left or right is the prospect of war. No matter how divided they are, Congress has never voted against their president when it comes to authorization for military action, because it gives every scoundrel the opportunity to play patriot. Not that he was going to risk it with this lot; but it was worth giving them something to think about. He just wanted them to take a break from their selfish political gamesmanship and see the world around them and ask themselves questions about American Exceptionalism. Poor Putin actually took that bait! It wasn’t for him; it was for Americans. However, speaking so bitterly about it in his New York Times sort of reminded Americans that a Russian nationalist of the virulent kind, a KGB agent who still sees the world through the prism of the Cold War is the person talking to them, not some friend of the United Nations or a Pope-cuddling peacemaker who wants to save the world from Obama the warmonger. Of course, it was pathetic listening to Donald Trump say that until he read Putin’s letter complaining about this in his New York Times letter to Americans and their leaders and declaring it dangerous, he had never looked at the term “American Exceptionalism” that way. The shame that people who call themselves true leaders of America would wait till 2013 to be tutored about the evil of American Exceptionalism tells us how terribly unpatriotic, blind partisanship has turned a lot of them.
 
When the White House was approached to comment on Putin’s piece in the New York Times and they dismissed it with one word, “irrelevant”, most in the press thought it was the White House burying its head in the sand, but that’s exactly the appropriate word to describe it! Obama knew that what the press thought was happening and what they were telling the world was happening wasn’t what was happening. He knew that Putin was the one acting desperate, because he actually fell for the gimmick that he was going to strike Syria, whether or not with vote from Congress and whether or not Americans support him, after all he wasn’t seeking any re-election. Obama knows that Putin understands how morally affronted he feels by al-Assad’s conduct and even though others can underrate him, Putin knows that this chap can bite the bullet to salve his conscience. His diplomatic intervention coerced by Obama was not to save Obama, but to save his ally al-Assad and save face internationally.
 
Putin’s New York Times piece was addressed to Americans after Obama had addressed them postponing the Congress vote, because he has gotten what he wants, which is Putin in the diplomatic driving seat, taking responsibility for the conduct of his Syrian friend and guaranteeing to sort the mess. That’s all Obama wants! His speech to the American people on September 10 was an understated victory speech presented as justification for military action, even when he was supposedly asking Congress to postpone the vote. Putin read that as Obama still being trigger-happy and responded quickly the next day in the New York Times in the form of the letter to the American people and their leaders. It was a plea for them to stop Obama from bombing his friend, al-Assad! Obama knew that, which is why the White House response to the ‘celebrated’ New York Times piece by Putin was a classic putdown which Putin himself must have understood to be exactly that. The response was made through Jake Tapper of CNN by, wait for it, “an unnamed senior White House official” who was quoted as saying this about Putin’s piece: “That’s all irrelevant. He put this proposal forward and he’s now invested in it. That’s good. That’s the best possible reaction. He’s fully invested in Syria’s CW disarmament and that’s potentially better than a military strike – which would deter and degrade but wouldn’t get rid of all the chemical weapons. He now owns this. He has fully asserted ownership of it and he needs to deliver.”
 
By Friday, 27 September, 2013 two things happened to indicate that the Obama feint has worked perfectly. First, the final passing of the Syrian resolution by the Security Council on that day after more than two years of ducking and diving by the Russians is a justification for Obama’s approach in all this. A month ago, Putin never thought he would be committing himself to this. Meanwhile, Congressmen and Congresswomen who were licking their chops, waiting to put Obama through the grinder over this are now left hanging on to the short end of the Syrian stick. Just before that resolution was passed by the Security Council, but after the US and Russia had struck the deal, Obama appeared at a White House media briefing breathing fire. Calling Republicans who threaten a government shutdown “extremists”, he made clear that he would be tackling them head-on over the budget and would not be negotiating under the threat of a government shutdown.
 
But good readers of Obama would have noted that the first thing he did when he walked into the White House briefing room was to announce that he had just got off the phone with President Hassan Rouhani of Iran. This is a historic development on a lot of levels. This was the first time this is happening in three decades. With the possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal by the middle of next year and the Security Council resolution due to come a few hours after that media briefing, this was Obama telling the House Republicans that they cannot hold him hostage with a domestic agenda, because he’s got good options of securing his second-term legacy with historic foreign policy achievements. They can either join the Senate and pass the bill or stew in their own juice. He has obviously come out stronger than Congress and Mr Putin at the end of one month of diplomatic shuffle and Republicans shutting down the government have only made a rod for their own back.
 
 
The Noble Warrior:
 
On December 10, 2009, the first thing Obama said in his Nobel speech after the greetings was “…for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter and can bend history in the direction of justice”. He declared: “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war. What I do know is that meeting these challenges will require the same vision, hard work, and persistence of those men and women who acted so boldly decades ago. And it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace”.
 
Now, this notion of a just war is crucial, because the intellectual opposition to Obama’s threat to use military strike against Syria has coalesced around the argument that a war against Syria would not be a just war. In that speech, Obama defined a just war thus (with a general historical background):
 
“War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease - the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences. Over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers, clerics, and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a "just war" emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence”.
 
Obama acknowledged that for most of history, “this concept of just war was rarely observed”, but he went on to defend the historical basis for the founding of the United Nations after World War II which established “mechanisms to govern the waging of war, treaties to protect human rights, prevent genocide, and restrict the most dangerous weapons”. He said in many ways, these efforts succeeded, because even though terrible wars have been fought and atrocities committed, we have not had a Third World War. “The Cold War ended with jubilant crowds dismantling a wall. Commerce has stitched much of the world together. Billions have been lifted from poverty. The ideals of liberty, self-determination, equality and the rule of law have haltingly advanced. We are the heirs of the fortitude and foresight of generations past, and it is a legacy for which my own country is rightfully proud”.
 
He then posited the problem of the present: “A decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats. The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers, but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale”. Further, “wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states – all these have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos. In today's wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sewn, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, and children scarred”.
 
Obama then gave an idea how he’d deal with this type of problem. “We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations - acting individually or in concert - will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified”. Obama said he was mindful of the Martin Luther King and Gandhi’s notion of non-violence and that even though he appreciated the active moral force and wisdom behind the creed, his position calls for something more, because “as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason”.
 
Obama stated that he was raising the above point “because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause. At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower”. But he was also quick to point out that “it was not simply international institutions - not just treaties and declarations - that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest - because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity”.
 
This is Obama’s whole worldview as an American. It isn’t one based on gung-ho militarism, but one fashioned by national pride in the role that his nation has played in establishing the post-WWII world order. So, contrary to the claims being made by Putin impliedly about Obama’s Syrian policy likely to lead to the death of the United Nations, just like the League of Nations, Obama is actually more invested in protecting the institution, because of the sacrifices American citizens have made in championing its establishment and sustenance. True, at times its bureaucracy and veto system have constrained America’s foreign policy, but Obama knows it is necessary to work within it as much as possible without compromising its credibility. True democratic governments have much more reason to protect the United Nations (even as they know it’s long overdue for reform) than glorified dictatorships like Russia’s.
 
Poignantly quoting from President John F Kennedy’s June 10, 1963 speech at the American University where he was talking about his vision and strategy for world peace, Obama said: “Let us focus on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions." To Obama, the evolution and the practical steps coalesce in internationally acceptable standards to be adhered to by all states, strong and weak. While such standards must not stop states from acting unilaterally in self-defence, he is convinced that “adhering to standards strengthens those who do, and isolates - and weakens - those who don't”.
 
Obama at the time foresaw a situation like Syria and said the following: “Furthermore, America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don't, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention - no matter how justified. This becomes particularly important when the purpose of military action extends beyond self-defence or the defence of one nation against an aggressor. More and more, we all confront difficult questions about how to prevent the slaughter of civilians by their own government, or to stop a civil war whose violence and suffering can engulf an entire region.
 
“I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That is why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.
 
 “I understand why war is not popular. But I also know this: the belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Peace requires responsibility. Peace entails sacrifice.
 
“Let me also say this: the promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone. At times, it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach - and condemnation without discussion - can carry forward a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door”.
 
 
These are the principles that have governed everything Obama has done in relation to the Syrian crisis. He has showed reluctance to intervene when it was just a civil war, because of the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of another state. But as the war goes on, he has watched with horror as the Syrian government resorts to tactics that are clearly in breach of the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention. Bashar al-Assad has no scruples committing acts of genocide against the Syrian people by consistently shelling and killing of non-combatant civilian population.
 
As the death tolls increased and the world continued to be assaulted by the brutal images of the conflict every day, he tried to work with others at the United Nations to get the world to stop the carnage. But obviously the commercial and strategic interests of Russia and China and their friendship with the Bashar al-Assad regime meant they always were vetoing every action put forward by the international community. While Obama refuses to arm the Free Syrian Army and the moderate Syrian rebels, the Russians, Chinese and Iranian are steadily arming al-Assad, giving him a huge advantage in the war. During his re-election campaign, Obama received a roasting from the right for not doing anything about Syria while he was campaigning on the promise of bringing home American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
But, Obama’s strategy before now was based on the model built on the back of the Arab Spring. There has to be a credible opposition that would boldly confront the dictatorship with a democratic agenda and attempt to force it to the table to negotiate a democratic change. He would back this, because that would be in line with the principle of supporting democracy and self-determination worldwide.
 
Right now, if there is anything that qualifies as the Obama Doctrine in the foreign policy of the United States, we are seeing it clearer with this Syrian crisis. That policy is simply this: Whenever an act of genocide or any instance of crimes against humanity is established to have been committed by a state or any agent of state anywhere, the United States will, along with its allies and other interested members of the international community, mobilize all diplomatic and where necessary military resources to confront and eliminate that threat with or without recourse to the United Nations Security Council, pursuant to its obligations to humanity and in defence of customary international law.
 
 
Legality and Legitimacy of US-led Military Strike Against Syria:
 
Vladimir Putin’s September 11 letter to Americans and their leaders in the New York Times took on Obama’s idea of a just war. The man who led his country as Prime Minister to invade Georgia and who used unprecedented brutality to fight against Chechen self-determination bold-facedly told the world in that piece that he’s a fan of international law. “From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future. We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law. We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today's complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not. Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations charter and would constitute an act of aggression”, he declared.
 
But, Putin should know that hypostatization of the international law rule on the use of military force is not a substitute for the reality when applied as humanitarian intervention. And I’m using reality here in two senses – as it relates to substantive law on one hand and as it relates to the practices of states on the other. The idea that the United Nations Security Council is the only international authority to regulate the use of force against a sovereign state under the provisions of Article 42 of the United Nations Charter is not a reality evidenced by actions of states in the international system since the formation of the United Nations and adoption of the Charter nor is it fully settled by the Charter itself as treaty or by customary international law. To put it simply, the model is not the reality.
 
So, when President Barack Obama declared he was prepared to strike the Syrian regime without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council, he wasn’t doing so as a renegade of international law, but only as someone who has a different view from Vladimir Putin about what is lawful and acceptable conduct in the circumstances. Obama believes in the United Nations processes, because the United States was a co-founder of the organization and is a signatory to its Charter which it recognizes as basic international law. His Nobel speech clearly indicates that he is an American internationalist who cherishes the role his country has played in underwriting global security for the past sixty years, including taking great pride in the role of the United States in establishing the United Nations. Obama is not a hegemon. He understands the great responsibility of leading the world’s only superpower, but believes countries with capacities should take their fair share of responsibility for regional and global security and world peace. Obama recognizes the limitations of the United Nations as a body in terms of its bureaucracy and the archaic Security Council veto system that clearly needs reforms, but he believes it’s still the best guarantor of global cooperation, peace and security. He recognises the necessity to work within it as much as possible without compromising its credibility, because it also represents the biggest conclave of democratic governments, a lot of who share American and universal values of freedom, liberty and prosperity.
 
Obama has a realist’s view of international relations. However, unlike George W Bush, he is a cultured interventionist who believes that alone or with others, the United States can intervene through the use of force to stop genocide and protect lives. Indeed, Obama’s view on the matter was shared before he assumed office. The American Society of International Law did a survey of the views of all the presidential candidates on International Law and US Foreign Policy in 2008 before the parties chose the flag-bearers for the general election. Just like in his Nobel speech, Obama’s response to a question that relates to the issue here was telling. Asked what his views are regarding the doctrine of pre-emptive use of force, he said: “I will not hesitate to use force, unilaterally if necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests whenever we are attacked or imminently threatened. There is no greater responsibility than that of acting as the commander in chief of our armed forces. And I can tell you that whenever I might send our men and women into harm's way, I will clearly define the mission, seek out the advice of our military commanders, objectively evaluate intelligence, and ensure that our troops have the resources and the support they need. There are some circumstances beyond self-defense in which I would be prepared to consider using force, for example to participate in stability and reconstruction operations, or to confront mass atrocities. But when we do use force in situations other than self-defense, we should make every effort to garner the clear support and participation of others - as President George H.W. Bush did when we led the effort to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. The consequences of forgetting that lesson in the context of the current conflict in Iraq have been grave”. Obviously, his threat to use air strikes against Syria is not in self-defence in the strict sense of the word; but he has framed it as defending American interests, the interest of America’s allies and in defence of our common humanity. He clearly sees his role here as confronting the mass atrocities committed by the al-Assad regime in the form of the genocide he’s committing against his people through the use of chemical weapons.
 
Some have claimed that Obama wants to enforce the prohibitions of the Chemical Weapons Convention when the treaty gave no such powers. But that’s not true. Obama wasn’t and isn’t claiming to want to enforce the prohibitions of the Chemical Weapons Convention. There is a body in place to do the job of inspecting and monitoring and where necessary recommend measures to states or refer matters to the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council. The United States’ role with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the UN over the destruction of the Syrian stockpile is as a stakeholder and a permanent member of the Security Council, because the Council has zeroed in on this issue at the moment following the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian population by the Syrian regime (or whoever else any other member believes used them).
 
However, the US threat of military strike against Syria originates from its belief in its responsibility as a government and as a member of the international community who cannot stand idly by and watch al-Assad massacre women and children and non-combatants, whether he did so with water cannons, machetes, guns or chemical weapons is immaterial. The fact of the act is what matters. At any rate, the ban on chemical weapons is universal where over 96 percent of states representing 98 percent of the world population have signed to it. That gives it the force of being customary international law, because the world is virtually united against it. So, without prejudice to any argument about who should authorize the use of force in case of a breach (and irrespective of what anybody does by way of the exercise of veto at the Security Council), we just have to first recognize that a serious rule of customary law has been breached and it behoves the international community to act against the perpetrator of the act, even if we are likely to be stuck with the questions of how and who.
 
So, while we argue about whether or not international law supports American airstrikes against Syria and watch all these analysts, international law experts, politicians and sundry commentators wave Article 2(4) of the UN Charter in the face of anyone who supports military action against al-Assad, let’s just make it clear that Article 2(4) (which states: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations”) has never stopped countries from threatening and using force against the territorial integrity and political independence of other states and in a manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations. Putin should know this. From the invasion of Hungary to Czechoslovakia to Afghanistan, the old Soviet Union made an art of it. Nor was the tendency just some old Cold War fever. On 31 October, 1998, in flagrant breach of the UN Charter, the United States President, Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act into law. This law made the use of force and funding and support of opposition to effect regime change in Baghdad an official US policy. An actual bombing campaign, Operation Desert Fox followed in December 1998 through January 1999 and curiously, neither the United Nations General Assembly nor the Security Council deemed it fit to condemn the United States or defend the UN Charter against this in any way. Then there is the George W Bush adventure in Iraq in 2003, the repercussions of which are still being felt in Iraq, the United States and the world at large. In fact, its dark shadow still scarily hangs over this Syrian issue and not a few people have tried to make parallels between President Obama’s case for military strike against Syria and Bush’s case for the invasion of Iraq, even when this is clearly not so.
 
Really, there are just too many examples of countries flagrantly breaching Article 2(4) since the formation of the UN. True, we may not have had what would qualify as another World War since then, yet wars have been fought, countries have been invaded, foreign governments have toppled other governments through the use of armed forces, territories have been seized and threats of force, directly or indirectly continue to govern relations between states. The amount spent by nations on buying arms and building armies in the face of pervasive poverty worldwide is mindboggling. In fact, in view of all that the world has witnessed in the past seven decades by way of crises resulting from the threat and use of force by states against another, it’s difficult to honestly believe that the Charter of the United Nations has helped with our collective security. Indeed, it is more reasonable to believe that we have not had a World War only because of the balance of power between East and West and the nuclear deterrent.
 
What all this proves is that international law does not have the power to compel adherence nor does it have enforcement certainties of domestic law. It is actually an extension of the politics of international relations with every country acting in whatever way it considers to be in its best interest, even where such an action may not be in the interest of another country or the rest of the international community. Even the International Criminal Court depends on the voluntary cooperation of state signatories. Okay, it’s not a state of anarchy, but it’s not exactly a state of law either, because what qualifies as law at any point in time would seem to be the de facto act of a state with the military might, clout and influence to get away with any breach. As bad as it sounds, that is the state of international law today.
 
Having said that, I’m not one of those who think it matters not if Obama’s proposed military strike against Syria is legal or not simply because I think it’s morally right. Morality and lawfulness are not mutually exclusive and indeed shouldn’t be where the issue is the use of military force against a member state of the international community. I believe where the morally appropriate action is adjudged unlawful in some quarters, such unlawfulness should not be by deliberateness, but must be the only opportunity cost to the moral justness of the cause. It must stand only if it is the sole legitimate action possible. The fact that the law has not changed to meet that necessary morality should be a challenge to us all, rather than a source of celebration or mere frustration. We cannot accept a proposition that it is impossible or too difficult to formulate legal principles that distinguish situations where intervention is right and wrong. Such proposition is a vandal’s manifesto that will have human civilization marching backward into the Dark Ages. So, yes, no matter the state of international law on this issue and our view of it, the question of whether or not such action is legal must always be asked by everyone at any time we confront the challenge. In fact, the importance of the question is not just for the purposes of jaw-jawing about the insular intellectuality of law and legality, but more crucially, it is to focus minds, especially the minds of the decision-makers who must bear the historical burden of the decision once taken.
 
Now, at this juncture, I believe it is necessary to have an historical overview of the issue in order to see how the law has evolved and the state it is in today. Naturally, I’m not going to address the whole history in detail, but only elements of those key aspects of developments leading up to today. My objective is to show that the law of humanitarian intervention by military force is still evolving within the general rule of military intervention under international law. This knowledge is crucial to understanding the state of the law today and why any decision we take with regard to Syria, whether or not there’s a military strike eventually, can only help further in keeping the matter on the agenda of international law.
 
The threat and use of military force by a state or a group of states against another state or others has always been an issue in international relations, but since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which more or less established the principle of sovereignty for modern nation-states, there have been concerted efforts to address the matter in the general context of international peace and security through more multilateral treaties, observance of norms of customary international law and application of general principles of law. Apart from the principle of sovereignty and the fundamental right of political self-determination, the Westphalian system did enunciate two other principles, which are the principle of legal equality between states and the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of another state. The three principles are related in the sense that in those nascent beginnings of the development of nation-states, it was important to protect the independence the European states had just gained after decades of endless wars.
 
There is of course the contradiction of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and colonialism. When European powers sat in Berlin in 1885 and divvied up Africa into 50 different colonies, they had no respect for the continent’s sovereignty or their right not to be interfered with. It was simply the next stage in the brutalization of the continent, because even though colonialism was presented as a civilizing mission, it was essentially a thieving enterprise. The colonised regions of the world in Africa, Asia, Polynesia or the Americas were mere providers of raw material for the burgeoning industries of Europe and America. By the beginning of the 20th century, the United States was already in on the game of imperialism. Through the instrumentality of the Roosevelt Corollary (an extension of the Monroe Doctrine), it began to use real military intervention (State Department troops) in Latin America to keep out Europeans. Within the first quarter of the 20th century, America had intervened in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Dominican Republic.
 
Within the period in question, one of those momentous developments that made a mockery of the principle of non-intervention was the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia. During World War I, Russia, United States and Britain had been allies for a few months between April and November 1917 when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian Provisional Government, which itself had just replaced the crumbling Tsarist regime after the abdication of Tsar Nichols II on 2 March 1917. The Bolsheviks abruptly left the alliance and negotiated a separate peace with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk, leaving its erstwhile allies in the fight alone. This led to the Western Allies distrusting the Bolsheviks immediately.
 
Then there was their belligerent ideology of Communism and Proletarian Internationalism, which meant they had ambitions to spread communism internationally in other states through revolutionary or forceful means. To the West, they were the new threats and an attempt was made by many Western nations and allies to return the Tsarist regime to power through a massive multilateral intervention force. This force fought on the side of the Russian White Army against the Red Army between 1918 and 1920. The countries that massed against the Bolsheviks in support of the Tsarist White Army are the British Empire, the United Kingdom and its British Raj, France, Japan, Poland, Greece, Serbia, China, Italy, Romania, Canada, Estonia Czechoslovakia and the United States.
 
The Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War and that seemed to boost their confidence to continue challenging worldwide capitalism. The leaders of the revolution kept up the fiery rhetoric and in 1925, Josef Stalin was already talking of a bipolar world where those countries with socialist and communist governments would come together and those with capitalist inclinations the same. And of course, it wasn’t something to happen naturally, it was to be pursued by revolution, military force and installations of socialist governments all over the world. This was actually when the seeds of the Cold War were sown. Europe and America became engulfed in communist scares. The different economic and social systems, the atheism of communism and its philosophical militarism all made the West begin to see Bolshevism as a bigger threat than the disarmed Germany. Despite that state of affairs, the United States in the interwar years entered a period of isolationism. President Woodrow Wilson who invested so much as a founder of the League of Nations could not get the United States to join. Paradoxically, its deliberate isolationism was said to be as a result of the economic boom it enjoyed in that early part of the 20th century, but the Great Depression that was to follow kept it even further isolated.
 
On August 27, 1928, the Westphalian system was given a boost by the Kellogg-Briand Pact or the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy. Article I of the Treaty states: “The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another”. Article II follows up: “The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means”. Parties to the Treaty failing to abide by this promise "should be denied the benefits furnished by this treaty".
 
In approving the treaty, the United States Senate, even though not adding any reservation, passed a measure interpreting the treaty as not infringing on America’s right to self-defense, including a statement to the effect that the US has no obligation to enforce the treaty against any state violator. However, in the Proclamation ratifying the treaty, the President of the United States, Herbert Hoover hoped that encouraged by their example, “all the other nations of the world will join in this humane endeavor and by adhering to the present Treaty as soon as it comes into force bring their peoples within the scope of its beneficent provisions, thus uniting the civilized nations of the world in a common renunciation of war as an instrument of their national policy”. The treaty was signed originally between the United States, France and Germany and is named after Frank Kellogg, the US Secretary of State at the time and his French counterpart, Aristide Briand, who were the initiators of the treaty. Several other countries, including the Soviet Union signed after and by 1971, it had a total of 54 countries as signatories. The treaty has not been terminated or denounced by any of the signatories so there’s a presumption that it’s still in force today. It was the first multilateral treaty to ban war amongst its signatories.
 
However, most historians and political commentators have come to regard the Pact as of no great value, partly because it never stopped wars and partly because they believe it was naïve in its expectations in view of the political realities of the time. It has no precise responsibilities and was open to different interpretations by the parties. Though, the Pact did not stop wars, even amongst its signatories, it served as an important legal basis in establishing the international norm that the threat or use of force against another state is a contravention of international law and therefore unlawful. Indeed, state signatories that have resorted thereafter to threat or use of force have had to do so without formally declaring the war in order not to be in breach of the treaty technically. Even where they declare this, they claim this to be in self-defence or collective defence, no matter how implausible this sounds. But at the time, it seemed to have influenced President Hoover’s foreign policy as he formulated the Hoover-Stimson Doctrine which stated that the United States would not recognise the right of any state that claims territory by force. He also began to withdraw American troops from Haiti and Nicaragua and started formulating what President Franklin Roosevelt later called the Good Neighbour Policy.
 
Perhaps, the most important value of the Pact has been in its influence in the drafting of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. Today, the principle contained in Article 2(4) is regarded as having elements of jus cogens. In other words, it is accepted as a peremptory norm of international law with only two exceptions allowed. These exceptions are said to be those relating to self-defence under Article 51 of the Charter and any action pursuant to Security Council authorization or recommendation under Chapter VII, including authorization for the use of force.
 
No doubt, the United Nations has invested a lot of energy in making the idea behind Article 2(4) central to its work and existence as a body. In one of those efforts and pursuant to its powers under Article 13(1)(a) of the UN Charter empowering it to “initiate studies and make recommendations for the purpose of…promoting international co-operation in the political field and encouraging the progressive development of international law and its codification”, the General Assembly between 1963 and 1970 worked tirelessly and on 24 October, 1970 adopted the Declaration of Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations (Res. 2625 (XXV)). But despite the Friendly Relations Declaration being regarded as another landmark in the development of international law, because of the issues it addresses and the history of its development and eventual adoption by the General Assembly, it did not help in anyway in enhancing the world’s collective security nor did it help in entrenching the values of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter which it expanded upon amongst its seven principles and declared to “constitute basic principles of international law”. The best we can say about these principles in all honesty is that they are hortatory or aspirational.
 
Now, let me speak briefly about something that any student of international law encounters while researching its history and development. This is the curious tendency in intellectual circles for some scholars to treat the 19th century as though it were an aberration in the development of the doctrine of forceful humanitarian intervention. Even though there were enough examples in state practices, these scholars still insist that these are not enough to establish the case of this being customary international law of the time. But in terms of authorities (that is if we are to follow Article 38(1)(d) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, which states that ‘the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists’ qualify as sources of international law), pound for pound, there are more well-known authorities to support the proposition that this is customary law. But I’m not actually interested in that legal controversy here, because it’s already been accepted as inconclusive and there’s nothing I would say here to change that. Instead, I’m interested in the period, because of two related phenomena that are hardly referred to when scholars evaluate the era’s place in the development of humanitarian intervention in customary international law. These two relate to the British, who were the principal power of the period and both were actually crucial to the development of humanitarian intervention, despite the modern tendency to pretend that the history of human rights started with the United Nations Charter.
 
The phenomena I speak of are the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the role of British public opinion in that regard. By the end of the eighteenth century, the great British Empire with its extensive land holdings in India, Africa and the West Indies was very much dependent on the slave trade. However, with the 1772 Somersett case, the writings and activism of freed slaves like Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, the influence of Adam’s Smith’s criticism of slavery on economic grounds in his Wealth of Nations and the general liberal ideas of the post-Enlightenment era, all of which made the slavery and slave trade issue topical in England, the abolitionist movement began to gain momentum. But the pivotal people behind this were the Quakers. These were members of a religious group who were generally considered too fanatical to relate with and who as Nonconformists were barred from Parliament. In conjunction with Quakers in America, they religiously championed abolition with exceptional organizational and campaigning skills. In 1783, George Harrison, John Barton, Samuel Hoare Jr, William Dillwyn, Joseph Woods Sr, Richard Phillips, Joseph Hooper, James Phillips and John Lloyd, all Quakers, joined up with Granville Sharp, Philip Sansom and Thomas Clarkson to form the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
 
Thomas Clarkson and the Quakers took the campaign all over England, getting Members of Parliament like William Wilberforce, William Pitt the Younger and William Grenville to get Parliament to ban the trade. William Grenville as Prime Minister worked tirelessly to pass the Slave Trade Act. On March 30 1807, shortly after the Act received the Royal Assent, he resigned, declaring: “I could not bring myself to struggle much to get my chains on again."  The abolitionists are credited with inventing the techniques of modern campaigning which saw them rouse public opinion as never before seen in support of the abolition. They pioneered the use of tools like investigative research, consumer boycotts, branding, merchandizing, single-issue campaign, media work, parliamentary lobbying, pamphleteering, etc. They remain the foremost inspiration for all modern day international human rights organizations.
 
One of the most important consequences of the abolition of slave trade was the establishment by the British of the West African Squadron as part of the Royal Navy and in response to public opinion calling on the British to forcefully stop the trade. The West African Squadron’s task was to suppress the Atlantic Slave Trade by patrolling the West African coast. That meant it was effectively using military force for humanitarian intervention in other countries’ sovereign space (their ships). The crucial thing was that the British did this unilaterally for almost ten years - that is until the end of the Napoleonic War when it began to enter into treaties with other states to stop the trade and still used force thereafter through the Palmerston’s Act (1839) when necessary.
 
Due to the fact that this began during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain claimed the right to search other countries’ ships under the law of nations - the customary law to determine whether they were enemy ships or if neutral, whether they were violating principles of neutrality. While pursuing this war effort, Britain began to use this right of search to unilaterally suppress slave trade, seize ships carrying cargoes of slaves, free the slaves and prosecute slavers in British Vice-Admiralty Courts around the Atlantic from where appeals are made to the High Court of Admiralty, London.
 
The first of these cases to be upheld on appeal was The Amedie (1810). This was a ship flying under the flag of the United States of America to Cuba with a cargo of 105 slaves. It was intercepted by a British cruiser and brought to the Vice-Admiralty Court at Tortola where the ship was condemned as a lawful prize. An appeal to the High Court of Admiralty affirmed the decision with the Court stating that the British Parliament had clearly “declared the African slave trade is contrary to principles of justice and humanity”. The Court noted that though in this instance, the United States had also banned the trade as a matter of domestic law, it acknowledged that the slave trade had not been completely banned under the positive law of nations: “[W]e cannot legislate for other countries; nor has this country a right to control any foreign legislature that may think proper to dissent from this doctrine and give permission to its subjects to prosecute this trade. We cannot, certainly, compel the subjects of other nations to observe any other than the first and generally received principles of universal law.”
 
The Court declared that under natural law, it was entitled to presume the slave trade unlawful unless some positive law authorized it. Having found the trade prima facie illegal, the court placed on the claimant “the whole burden of proof, in order to shew that by the particular law of his own country he is entitled to carry on this traffic.” Even where the claimant was able to show this, the Court believed that “persons engaged in such a trade, cannot, upon principles of universal law, have a right to be heard upon a claim of this nature in any court”. It declared that at any rate, “no claimant can be heard in an application to a court of prize for the restoration of the human beings he carried unjustly to another country for the purpose of disposing of them as slaves.” Writing for the Court, Sir William Grant stated that the slave trade, because of its contrariness to natural law “cannot abstractly speaking, be said to have a legitimate existence”. This same natural law reasoning was applied in the cases of The Fortuna (1811) and The Donna Marianna (1812)
 
But from 1817, Britain and several other countries with whom it had entered into bilateral treaties to stop the trade began the process of establishing international courts for the suppression of the trade called Mixed Commissions. So, long before Nuremberg and the United Nations system, these anti-slavery courts made up of judges from several countries were the first international human rights courts applying international law to promote humanitarian objectives. They were around till almost the end of the century and set the new moral tone of the day internationally, even in an age of imperialism.  In fact, the term made popular at Nuremberg – “crimes against humanity” – were first used in these courts to describe slavery.
 
One thing I’d also want to point out about the 19th century is that while the British were unilaterally intervening with force in the high seas to suppress slave trade, they were not receptive to the idea of forceful intervention on land in Europe. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, they countered the machinations of the Holy Alliance (the monarchist states of Russia, Prussia and Austria) to use their alliance to enforce the principle of intervention for the protection of ‘legitimate regimes’. This principle was enunciated at the Congresses of Troppau, Laibach and Verona under the controlling influence of the Austrian statesman, Klemens von Metternich. Part 3 of the Protocol of Troppau 19 November, 1820 stated: “When states where such changes have been made, cause by their proximity other countries to fear immediate danger, and where the Allied Powers can exercise effective and beneficial actions towards them, they will employ, in order to bring them back to the bosom of the Alliance, first friendly representations, secondly measures of coercion, if the use of such coercion is indispensable”. In other words, the continental powers were more concerned with suppressing democratic and self-determination ferments anywhere in Europe as the social upheavals of the time were threatening their empires. Their alliance was formed to entrench what they considered to be the divine rights of kings. The Alliance was rejected by the Papal States, the Ottoman Empire and the United Kingdom (even though King George IV assented to it in his capacity as the newly restored King of Hanover).
 
Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, more in response to British public opinion that was very much against the Congress, sent out a circular dispatch to British envoys on 19 January 1921: “…though no government could be more prepared than the British government was to uphold the right of any States or State to interfere, where their own immediate security and essential interests are seriously endangered by the internal transactions of another State, it regarded the assumption of such a right as only to be justified by the strongest necessity, and to be limited and regulated thereby: and did not admit that it could receive a general and indiscriminate application to all revolutionary movements, without reference to their immediate bearing upon some particular State or States, or that it could be made prospectively. The British Government regarded its exercise as an exception to general principles of the greatest value of importance, and as one that only properly grows out of the special circumstances of the case; but it at the same times considers, that exceptions of this description never can, without the utmost danger, be so far reduced to rules as to be incorporated into the ordinary diplomacy of States, or into the institutes of the Laws of Nations”.
 
So, whatever the scholarly view of the 19th century in international law, it is obvious that many of the things that have come to define us in the 20th century and presented to us as some new vision after World War II and a new international law order under the United Nations were not exactly original. Why have we conveniently forgotten the efforts against slavery when it looks like it has every lesson for us for these times? Obviously, we can make several unflattering conjectures about why, most of which are likely true, but more than sixty years after, we should be bold enough to retrieve the dark baby we threw away with the bath water when Europe and America’s collective guilt of the past blinded them to the need of that time. Centuries old crimes against humanity can be addressed only if we do not suffer selective and collective amnesia. Yes, we lived through slavery and colonialism and history did not start with a handful of demented Nazis at Nuremberg.
 
To be honest, a strictly legalistic discussion of the issue of forceful humanitarian intervention in international law is not possible in today’s circumstances, because it’s obvious that it’s still developing, even though the problem and the dilemma has always been with us. However, there are hopeful signs in the work of civil society groups who most of the time are usually in the frontline of this problem when dealing with people and communities that suffer these atrocities that clearly require intervention. For instance, I have followed the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) campaign from its very beginning as a report published by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001 through the 2005 World Summit Outcome to the floor of the UN General Assembly and the Security Council. Despite the inevitable discordance in articulation by various interest groups (scholars, technocrats, politicians and so on) over the years, I have been immensely impressed by the attention it’s gathered at the United Nations and the investment in the idea by successive Secretary-Generals.
 
I am also quite aware of the criticism in some quarters that the Responsibility to Protect campaign or the discourse around it has been concentrating too much on the responsibility to react aspect, thus reducing the whole thing to a discussion about humanitarian intervention of the military kind. Yet, as much as the criticism has traction (because, yes, we’ve got to look at things holistically and keep in mind that the military option is only a last resort), it doesn’t help much when tested on the ground. The prevention and the rebuild aspects have never been controversial; what has always been in issue and which is the core reason for the campaign is the react/interventionist bit. We all understand that it is the responsibility of the state to exercise sovereignty over its space and to be assisted by others where necessary. In an ideal world, its own ideas must be used for the benefit of its own people in order to steer clear of danger. We accept that the focus of state policy must be good governance, good planning, investment in education, political and democratic freedom, protection of human and civil rights, institutionalization of trusted succession processes and continued engagement with the international community with a view to keeping up with best practices and so on. I personally do not think the UN as an institution has been a slouch in that regard. Where we have always had problems is with that responsibility to react when the state not only fail the individual, but endangers communities it ought to be protecting. We let a Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur and so on get out of hand and return to do a post-mortem of blames against those who ultimately took initiative, even if not exactly how we would have individually preferred it. Where the leadership of a state fails its people and are still in control of the state, where does sovereignty reside? Does it still reside with the failed leadership or the people? What happens where the assumed institutional machinery for international response does not respond? What happens when a permanent member of the Security Council go over to the Dark Side?
 
The answer stares us in the face. The Security Council is an anachronism in this age. Having five permanent members and each with a veto that can stop progress on any given issue is always a recipe for disaster. The 21st century United Nations should be a democratic institution where the voice of every member must be heard and where democratic decision-making processes, rather than military might must influence policy. If the objective is to move away from war and strife as much as possible, if it is to pursue peace as much as possible,  international norms should move towards making national investments in arms unnecessary by not rewarding those nations with intimidating arsenals with permanent membership of the Security Council. It was necessary after World War II; it’s not necessary now. If we are truly committed to an international system where we want to act collectively to protect humanity, military might should not be the determining factor in decision-making for our wellbeing.  
 
So, member states should think of UN reform as the priority. We need a new San Francisco where the whole world can sit again to redesign a body that would serve our needs today. The reforms should centre mainly on a review of the Security Council composition and to an extent, its powers. For instance, I would suggest for India, Brazil, Nigeria, Germany, Australia, Japan, South Africa, Egypt, Israel and Turkey to become permanent members of the Security Council to increase that list to 15. Secondly, the power of the veto should be removed, because clearly that has proved really retrogressive. The procedures and rules regarding the 10 non-permanent members should remain, but with the new look, it simply would mean there would be 25 members of the Security Council at all times (compared to 15 today) with 15 members being permanent members. The decision-making process should remain the same, except where it concerns the use of force under Article 42 of Chapter VII. Where that is proposed, nothing less than two-thirds majority of the Council should be needed to approve it. If no two-thirds majority, but just a simple majority, then the matter should be referred to the General Assembly. A simple majority vote of the General Assembly on exactly the same matter on the same terms presented earlier to the Security Council should then be the decision to be implemented by the Security Council in relation to that same matter. This simple reform would make the decision-making process more inclusive and more democratic and it would cut out situations where one permanent member with a veto can hold the world to ransom, especially where the world needs to respond collectively to atrocities such as those we’re witnessing in Syria at the moment.
 
I’m aware that there are people who’d say the General Assembly already has the power to decide on military force under the 1950 Uniting for Peace Resolution (General Assembly Resolution 377 (V)) which expressly authorises the General Assembly to make recommendations, including the use of military force when the Security Council is unable to act. But considering it’s being used only once in the 1951 Korean Case, it’s only in existence technically. At any rate, besides questions about its scope, I’m talking of powers expressly granted by the Charter, not appropriated by a particular organ of the UN to serve a political purpose at a particular time.  
 
We have to fashion a world body that continues to meet the ideals of the age. Whatever the idea that drove the British, Americans, Russians and their allies to intervene in World War II, humanitarian intervention was clearly high amongst those reasons, because that’s what the formation of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights indicate. In the end, while it is clear from the Preamble of the UN Charter that the overriding purpose of the United Nations was to stop war on such massive worldwide scale as witnessed in World War II, there was nothing by way of the discussions in San Francisco in 1945 to indicate that they were tampering with the established customary law principle of humanitarian intervention if they thought one existed neither did we get any indication that they established a new norm of that nature. What seemed to have happened was an assumption on the part of all that the new world order being created at the time, with everyone thoroughly weary of war, would not have any situation that would be beyond the capacity of the Security Council. Article 2(4) was only meant to stop wars of annexation and territorial claims as pursued by Adolf Hitler, not intervention to promote and protect human rights, which is one of the principal purposes of the United Nations as evidenced in the Charter and several other treaties. That the politics of the Security Council veto makes it quite difficult to enforce it under the auspices of the UN does not take away the legitimate expectation from citizens of the world when we are faced with that danger. That legitimate and natural expectation would be that any state or group of states in a position to stop such atrocities from happening or continuing should act under the subsisting principles of a just war for a just cause and ask questions later. The UN Charter did not extinguish our right to feel for fellow humans! It has not banned nations and people from showing human solidarity in the face of injustice and evil!
 
Yes, we need to appreciate the ability of the majority of the citizens of the world to know what is good for them where international law or what is considered to be international law conflicts with what should be international action at any point in time. The history of the human race actually bears this out. Laws are made for man and not man for laws and it is man that legitimizes law and/or action. Constructive flexibility introduced by legitimacy into international law has allowed the international legal order to survive, because left on its own, we have seen from the history of international relations since the founding of the United Nations that legality has consistently proved insufficient. Time after time, we have confronted the uncomfortable question of what the world should do in the face of unspeakable atrocities against life and property in one region of the world when the United Nations Security Council cannot muster or is unwilling to muster the required unanimity to act in the face of such grave danger due to the national or selfish interest of some permanent members of the Security Council with the veto power. Luckily, whenever we have faced that dilemma, no matter how long it lingers, legitimacy has always been the factor that makes the difference. This is because when it has been necessary to appeal to our common humanity to act in defence of human values, the international community, despite the machinations within the United Nations and the Security Council, have always found it within itself to rally round certain international leaderships and do the right thing. Where a course of action is evidently legitimate, those who have the moral conviction to follow it have always found support.
 
In 1971, a humanitarian crisis involving the loss of over a million lives resulted from some political, ethnic, linguistic and cultural problems in the area today known as Bangladesh, which at the time was known as East Pakistan. Though, they are mainly Bengalese-speaking Muslim people, they feel culturally closer to the Hindu than the Urdu-speaking Western Pakistani. Since the partition of Pakistan from India, the East Pakistanis had generally felt they were politically and economically marginalised by the West Pakistanis and this feeling had always found ferment in nationalist feelings. Then in December 1970, the Pakistani general elections saw the victory of the Awami League, an East Pakistani political party, which claimed 167 seats of a possible 169 allotted the East Pakistanis in the National Assembly. This meant it had obtained a majority in Parliament and could therefore form the government. But President Yahya Khan, rather than call the Awami League leader Sheikh Mujib Rahman to form government, he announced a postponement of the new Parliament indefinitely. This was seen as an obvious attempt to prevent Rahman from forming a government. On March 7, 1971, Rahman called for East Pakistani independence and a campaign of civil disobedience. Yahya Khan sent in the army, arrested Rahman and unleashed a wave of terror on the East Pakistanis. The International Commission of Jurists reported the crisis thus: “The principal features of this ruthless oppression were the indiscriminate killing of civilians, including women and children and the poorest and weakest members of the community; the attempt to exterminate or drive out of the country a large part of the Hindu population; the arrest, torture and killing of Awani league activists, students, professional and businessmen and other potential leaders…the raping of women; the destruction of villages and towns; and the looting of property. All this was done on a scale which is difficult to comprehend”. Over a million lives were lost and over ten million crossed over the border to India where they created a refugee problem. India’s economy was strained and the Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi cried out for international help, calling on the United Nations to do something, because "the general and systematic nature of inhuman treatment inflicted on the Bangladesh population was evidence of a crime against humanity". But neither the General Assembly nor the Security Council responded. Relations between India and Pakistan deteriorated and as things got worse for the Bangladeshis, India intervened on 3rd December, 1971 and after 12 days of war, the Pakistani Army surrendered and East Pakistan became the independent state of Bangladesh.
 
India’s representative at the Security Council, Ambassador Nirupam Sen had this to say after the end of hostilities: “The refugees were a reality. Genocide and oppression were a reality. The extinction of all civil rights was a reality. Provocation and aggression of various kinds by Pakistan from 25 March onwards were a reality. Bangladesh itself was a reality, as was its recognition by India. The Security Council was nowhere near reality”. He said “we have on this particular occasion absolutely nothing but the purest of intentions: to rescue the people of East Bengal from what they are suffering". The International Commission of Jurists suggested that the Security Council could have investigated the allegations of atrocities being committed before India’s intervention under the authority of Article 34 of the UN Charter. Further, it found that had the Security Council investigated, it would have discovered a "threat to the peace" in accordance with Article 39. It also pointed out that the Council had an array of measures it could have taken to stop the carnage, from recommending dispute resolution methods under Article 36 to using force under Article 42. The fact that the United Nations did not condemn the intervention implies that the doctrine of humanitarian intervention with force outside the UN Charter is recognised. The intervention was welcome generally worldwide, because here India intervened to stop further genocide and to protect human rights
 
During the seventies, President Idi Amin of Uganda was the worst dictator in the world. He held Uganda in a vice grip of cannibalistic orgy, inventing new ways of dispatching political opponents, massacring communities, turning Uganda to this dark enclave in Africa from where tales of the absurd filled international consciousness. At the height of the Cold War, East and West found him useful at one point or the other and his buffoonery seemed to make up for his wickedness which meant 500,000 lives murdered in cold blood didn’t matter. For the 8 years he held sway, he was feted internationally by his fellow world leaders, with stories about him being such a jolly, good-natured fellow who made everyone around him laugh. In 1975, his fellow African leaders made him the Chairman of the continental body, the Organization of African Unity. As far back as 1972, the United Nations was aware of the bloodthirstiness of Amin when he wrote, the United Nations Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim purportedly with an analysis of the Middle East situation, including his reasons for hating Jews. He told Waldheim: "Germany is the right place where, when Hitler was the supreme commander, he burnt over six million Jews. This is because Hitler and all German people knew that the Israelis are not people who are working in the interest of the people of the world, and that is why they burnt the Israelis alive with gas." It was all laughed off. Five years later, Uganda was a proud member of United Nations Commission on Human Rights. But by 1979, that epitome of decency, the quiet man from Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere had had enough. On 11 April, 1979, after some border skirmishes with some of Idi Amin’s soldiers, he rolled his tanks into Uganda and drove out Field Marshall Idi Amin Dada. The General Assembly and Security Council said and did nothing, but world reaction to Amin’s fall legitimized the supposed illegality of Nyerere.
 
Now, we can go on and on with several more examples – the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia to rout the Khmer Rouge, who by April 1975 had annihilated over 2 million of the 7 million Cambodian population; the ECOMOG intervention in the atrocious wars of Liberia and Sierra Leone in the nineties; the NATO intervention in Kosovo; the British and American intervention to save the Kurds in Northern Iraq, etc. The world did not look at these the same way they looked at the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, because they could see the difference.  So, let the legality debate continue, but citizens of the world should not act helpless when confronted with acts that diminish us such as Syria’s use of chemical weapons against its own citizens. Yes, let’s talk legality, but for our survival today, let’s talk legitimacy more.
 
 
State of Play:
 
As things are right now after the September 27 unanimous adoption of Resolution 2118 on Syria by the Security Council, the diplomatic ball is in Putin’s court and we can see already that he isn’t going to play it well.  The man who came out in the New York Times as the great defender of the UN process against Barack Obama who he painted as intent on making the organization fail like the League of Nations is clearly being dragged along now kicking and screaming. Since the Kerry-Lavrov Agreement, he’s tried to position himself as the real cog in the wheel, but Obama has not fallen for his antics by trying to engage him, focusing rather on keeping him on the table to get the Security Council resolution that would aid the United Nations Secretariat, OPCW and the inspectors. For instance, speaking in Damascus on Tuesday, 17 September, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov (leading a large military and diplomatic delegation from Moscow) attacked the Secretary General, the UN inspectors and their report on the chemical attack of 21 August. "We are disappointed, to put it mildly, about the approach taken by the U.N. secretariat and the U.N. inspectors, who prepared the report selectively and incompletely….Without receiving a full picture of what is happening here, it is impossible to call the nature of the conclusions reached by the U.N. experts ... anything but politicised, preconceived and one-sided". He then curiously revealed that the Syrian authorities had handed to him some alleged evidence of rebels using chemical weapons and because these and other supposed evidence from other unnamed sources were not considered by the UN investigators, the investigation was incomplete. He further contended that suspicions of chemical use after August 21 should have also been investigated.
 
Honestly, it was a train-wreck of an argument, but it was designed to throw spanner in the works of the United Nations and undermine the determination of the international community to conclusively address al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons. There was absolutely no reason to pick issues with the focus of the investigation, because the terms of reference were clear from the very beginning. The UN Mission was mandated to only consider the chemical attack of August 21 in this first instance. “Terms of Reference” No 3 in its report states: “The UN Mission has conditioned its investigation and all related activities in accordance with the terms of reference issued by the Secretary-General to the UN Mission including the above provisions as well as others on cooperation, methods of work and scope and reporting. As such, the term of reference applied in respect of its investigation of the Gouta allegations on which this report is submitted without prejudice to the continuing investigation of, and final report on, all allegations involving the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic”. So, why complain now that the UN Mission only investigated the incident which its terms of reference mandate it to investigate at that point? Why do so when he is fully aware that the inspectors are due back in Syria later to continue the investigation? Why is the Syrian regime handing over to the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister evidence it wants the UN investigators to consider? Even if the evidence is genuine (which is not likely), why disparage the UN report for not considering such evidence that was never handed over to the investigators in the first place? Why talk of evidence not related to the areas covered under the terms of reference?
 
But no one from the US or the UN side fell for the Russian bait by engaging them. The problem at the time was that Putin was seeing his claim that the rebels were behind the attack unravel before the eyes of the world, not because the UN Mission indicated who actually carried out the attack, but because the painstaking work they’ve done reveals clearly, without them saying so, that the al-Assad regime did it with Russian military equipment they acquired directly from Moscow. Of course, this type of reaction from the Russians after the report more or less confirms what most people know, which is that that the chemical attack was carried out by Bashar al-Assad forces and that the Russians are invested in protecting him. In fact, if Putin really believes the rebels were behind it, why did he not include them in his proposal for the chemical weapons disarmament? He didn’t, because he knows exactly who was behind the attack.
 
Indeed, these new tricks by Putin were predictable. This is the same Putin who has blocked the United Nations from doing anything about Syria through farcical use of Russia’s veto power for almost two years now while the bodies pile up. For instance, at the onset of the Syrian crisis and in the face of the brutality of the Assad regime against peaceful demonstrators, a resolution proposed on October 4, 2011 simply calling for the condemnation of what the whole world could see then as Syrian government’s human rights violations and a demand that the peaceful protests be allowed to resume in the face of the government crackdown was vetoed by Russia and China. On February 4, 2012, another resolution which was a result of painstaking negotiations was vetoed by Mr Putin. Meanwhile, this was months into recorded evidence of the Syrian regime killing peaceful protesters openly in the streets without challenge, including targeting of children. A month before, which was 10 months into Mr al-Assad’s crackdown on peaceful opposition protesters, UNICEF reported that 384 children had been killed and that most were boys. And these were not just plain killings, they were killings aimed at sending a message to their parents as most have their bodies mutilated and dumped by roadsides. About an equal number of children were also reportedly detained with reports of rape and torture and so on. That was just the beginning, but Mr Putin dug his heels and wouldn’t allow the adoption of a resolution that even conceded to Russia the inclusion of a clause ruling out measures under Article 42 of the Charter which allows for military action, because, according to him (and China), the finally presented draft was too expansive. In April 2012, he briefly gave the world hope by agreeing to a resolution to appoint an observer mission to monitor a ceasefire and endorse the Kofi Annan plan, but by July 2012, the mission was withdrawn due to increased violence. Thereafter, following the blatant breach of the terms of the Geneva peace plan by Syria, the United Kingdom and France again introduced a resolution threatening to place economic sanction on Syria. And even though they were careful to add that another resolution would be need to actually impose the sanction, predictably, Russia and China vetoed it. The above apart, there were routine vetoing of press releases that simply condemned the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
 
This is Putin’s record on Syria and yet he comes before the world in that New York Times opinion piece to declare he is not protecting the Syrian government, but only protecting the United Nations. Meanwhile, just before he was making that claim, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic which was established on 22 August 2011 by the Human Rights Council and which has a mandate to investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law since March 2011 in the Syrian Arab Republic had just submitted a report heavily indicting the Syrian regime. Of the nine mass killings the panel investigated for its report, eight were attributed to the al-Assad government and only one to the rebels, which the report notes are battling the heavily armed Syrian army with scanty and sometimes homemade arsenals. International human rights organizations and activists on the ground also confirm these findings. But Putin did not deem it fit to mention this or condemn the Syrian regime for this. He was doing brisk business selling arms to Damascus and pretending to be protecting international law when Bashar al-Assad was strafing his own people on bread queues.
 
Thus, what Mr Ryabkov said in Damascus is true to character. It was part of a double-pronged attack against the United Nations with the aim of muddying the waters after what seemed like a good diplomatic breakthrough with the Kerry-Lavrov Agreement. For instance, on the same day Ryabkov was attacking the UN, Russia was firmly refusing to agree to transform the Agreement between Kerry and Lavrov into a Security Council resolution because of the inclusion of Chapter VII sanctions in case of Syria refusing to comply. On the face of it, it looked like the consistent position of the Russians; but in truth, its immediate aim was to stop the Syrians from meeting their commitment under the Kerry-Lavrov deal to hand over their comprehensive inventory of their chemical weapons arsenal to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons by Saturday, 21 September 2013 through some kind of contrived disagreement. But when everyone avoided engaging them on those grounds and with Obama’s unilateral military threat still there (while still negotiating Chapter VII sanctions with Russia in the proposed Security Council resolution), Syria had no choice but to comply by sending the inventory to the OPCW before the end of the deadline. Syria knew that an instant breach of the Kerry-Lavrov Agreement under the excuse their Russian friends are putting forward would be interpreted as a breach and that can only give Obama the excuse he needs to say the Syrians and the Russians aren’t serious all along. Bashar al-Assad does not want to guess what the consequences of that would be. He knows he’s on a very short leash.
 
For Obama, it did not matter what monkey wrench the Russians throw up, his focus was just getting the Russians to agree to a Security Council resolution that transforms the Kerry-Lavrov framework into a working roadmap for the UN and the OPCW with the singular aim of taking control of Syria’s chemical weapons and destroying them. What Putin did not know was that Obama was not going to make the inclusion of a military threat in the resolution a must, even though he was seemingly investing a lot of energy in this. In fact, all Obama wanted was for Russia to just agree to anything that in principle accepts the Kerry-Lavrov Agreement and the working plan of the OPCW. The rest is semantics, as far as he retains the discretion to unilaterally use military force, something Putin can do nothing about when and if he has to use it. Eventually, what came out from Resolution 2118 is a decision by the Security Council that “in the event of non-compliance with this resolution, including unauthorized transfer of chemical weapons, or any use of chemical weapons by anyone in the Syrian Arab Republic”, it would decide to “impose measures under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter”. No matter how it is interpreted, the point is Russia will not be in a position to stop the use of military force where necessary. If it tries to use a veto against such an action when necessary, the world would not expect the United States and all other members who’ve voted on this (except possibly China) to fold their hands.
 
The position now is that Obama has succeeded in getting the Russians more involved in the diplomatic resolution of the Syrian issue, rather than employing military force, even though he had to deftly use the threat of that military force to get Putin to rush in. To achieve this, he made Putin believe he was going to use military force against al-Bashar on one hand, while on the other hand he pretended to be swayed by Putin’s diplomatic counter actions. The key thing for Obama is to ensure that there are real outcomes. Right now, having gotten the Russians to sign an Agreement committing Syria to hand over its chemical arsenal to the international community and getting this validated in the form of Security Council Resolution 2118, Obama is satisfied moving the process forward based on the framework. His principle is that anything likely to give the Russians an excuse to slow the process down would be avoided. So far, with the OPCW now in Syria to begin the process and the whole world watching, Obama is sitting pretty.
 
However, Putin is now like a rabbit caught in headlamps. He’s got to come up with some other antics now, because he certainly wasn’t expecting that everyone would be looking to him to make this work, which was why at the recent Valdai International Discussion Club meet on Thursday, 19 September, 2013, he protested that people should not only be looking to him to make Syria cooperate. But, obviously that’s too late now. He’s already neck-deep. He wants to increase Russia’s stature in the world, right? He’s got his chance! Of course, if Putin shows honesty and succeeds with the deal of getting Syria to hand over the chemical weapons within an internationally agreed framework of time and actions, Obama will not begrudge him his diplomatic bragging rights, because that’s all he wants – Syria to be rid of those chemical weapons. But from where we are to there is a long, long way.
 
 
 
The Endgame:
 
For obvious reasons, none of us can accurately predict how this would end, no matter what we think of the major actors, nations and the institutions involved in this Syrian affair, not even those who are deeply involved with it at the highest level. Would Putin succeed in saving Bashar al-Assad, his ally from an American-led military strike? Is he genuinely committed to getting al-Assad to hand over the entirety of his chemical weapons arsenal to the international community? Would President Obama finally get the vote for military strike if Syria refuses to cooperate with Russia’s direct or indirect support? Or, would he strike in the future if Syria refuses to cooperate using his presidential war powers, rather than going to Congress? Would there come a time that even the American public and indeed world opinion would support the use of force against Syria, especially if the carnage continues and if al-Assad continues to commit war crimes? We just don’t know. However, I want to make a conjecture about how I think this would end. I emphasise, it’s a conjecture.
 
Once the OPCW gets into Syria, Russia would begin a diplomatic offensive against their work and the process of destroying the chemical weapons. The offensive would come in various forms – offer to help with guarding the chemical arsenal, criticisms of how the OPCW are doing the work, further criticisms of Professor Ake Sellstrom’s team’s work and subsequent reports on chemical attacks and so on. All this would be aimed at generally making the UN uncomfortable. Though, a sort of agreement would be cobbled together between parties to allow the inspectors to do their work in the midst of the war, the Syrian regime would most likely be the ones to breach it. They would pretend to be cooperating, but in truth would employ every subterranean means to disrupt the work of the inspectors and frustrate them. Russia and Syria would invest in using the war as an excuse for the work to stall. They would want to do things that will force the UN to cancel the mission or accept limited success. Assad and Russia would blame the rebels, the US and her allies would blame Assad.
 
In the midst of the uncertainty over the inspection, the UN will start the Geneva II process aimed at getting all parties to the table to resolve the broader issues relating to the civil war. The likelihood of that being a success would hinge on what’s happening with the inspection in Syria. The frustration would come to a head and talks would return to the use of military force, with Russia as usual using all avenues within the United Nations to defend and protect Assad. Meanwhile, while the world is seeing them moving from table to table in the name of diplomacy, the Russians will continue arming the al-Assad regime with more conventional weapons to continue his massacre of Syrians in the name of fighting rebels. The idea is to put the Assad regime in a very strong position when they come to negotiating the end of the war itself and the future of Syria thereafter. But Putin’s recent attack against the West for not putting any post-Assad plan in place is an indication that he’s also trying to hedge his bet.
 
Obama knows the game. While Senators McCain and Graham continue to wail and cry over the non-support for the rebels, the world would surprisingly see that the more moderate rebels are getting arms and are actually gaining ground in the war with more high profile defections from al-Assad as the UN processes deepen. The situation the Russians and the Chinese have envisaged just would not come. The harder they try, the stronger the rebels would get. The unstated Obama policy at this point would be that whatever happens, they will not let al-Assad have the upper hand in the war. The relationship with the rebels would mostly be built around the US allies in the Middle-East, but the US will determine what happens post-war, including ironclad guarantees for the protection of Christians, Alawites, Kurds and other minorities in Syria in a post-war period under a democratic government put in place by a new constitution.  The effect of the Arab Springs in Syria would begin to show fully at this point when secular democracy activists come to the fore to negotiate their future with the Islamists who themselves are realigning for that possibility. Egypt will be a good learning experience for everyone. Once the Alawites and Christians are assured of their security within the new Syria, the rest will fall in place. Syria has everything to look like another Turkey. It will take time, there will be teething problems, but it will go more smoothly than Iraq or Libya, because the secularist spirit is stronger in Syria than in those other places.
 
However, a scenario could arise where the US may lead a military strike against the Syrian regime without recourse to the United Nations. If, for instance, al-Assad tries to play games with the chemical weapons, this could happen. He may, for instance hide away tonnes of chemical weapons while pretending to have given everything to the inspectors and the international community. His army may then use the hidden chemical weapons against civilians or they hand them to Hezbollah to use on their behalf against civilians and then blame it in the rebels, hoping to convince the world, with Russia’s usual backing, that the regime did not do this as all their chemical weapons arsenal are already under the control of the international community. This scenario may look fanciful now, but al-Assad is desperate. He would have noted that Saddam Hussein died while they were supposedly looking for his pile of weapons of mass destruction and Gaddafi died after voluntarily handing over his chemical weapons. He would think doing something like that would turn the tide of opinion against the rebels, convince the US and the world that the rebels were actually behind the August 21 chemical attack that the world had hitherto blamed him for. He would think that this would put him in a stronger position to negotiate the future of Syria with more moderate opposition elements that wouldn’t be averse to sharing power with him.
 
Well, if that happens, Obama will once again address the world and recount the history from the time of the August 21 gas attack up to that point. He will tell the world that the United States will not stand by and leave the al-Assad regime with the capacity to further use chemical weapons. He will remind the world that he has invested in diplomacy, but that al-Assad failed to cooperate at every turn. He will restate what the goals of the military action are. He will tell the world that al-Assad’s continued use of chemical weapons is a scar on the conscience of the world and that the United States, after giving diplomacy a chance, after giving Russia a chance to keep its word to the international community, cannot look the other way while Bashar al-Assad continues to use chemical weapons. President Obama will call on the American people and Congress to back his plan to rid Syria of chemical weapons. The nation’s people and political leadership would back him. Yeah, some on the extreme left and right and the pacifists would still shriek their nays, but Obama would carry the day. The Reluctant Warrior would take the US and its allies into Syria, do what he said he’d do and more. By the time it’s over, Bashar al-Assad would either be dead, in Iran, Russia or at the Hague, but the Syrian people would finally begin to piece their lives together with the help of the international community and in relative peace.
 
 
 
Conclusion:
 
One night long ago, while I was still a little boy, I once saw two mice gnawing away at the toes of my uncle deep in slumber. I’d heard of mice eating up people’s toes while they sleep, but I’d never seen them. It was a compelling sight. The industry of the two mice, their speed, concentration and expertise had me momentarily transfixed. They were acting as though they were going to devour the huge frame of my blissfully snoring uncle in a jiffy! I snapped out of it and gave chase! Of course, they weren’t going to do more than gnaw at a few toes, but their act was intimidating enough to get me recounting it excitedly to whoever would listen in the morning. My uncle was thoroughly amused but more by the fact that each time I retell the story to a new audience, he’d have to pull his shoes and socks off for them to run their fingers across the surface of his toes to feel the zigzag pattern of the mice’s teeth, so that I can be satisfied that I have convinced them of my tale. With the things on Obama’s plate right now, the mice at his feet calling him dumb and congratulating Putin for winning the thinking war have no idea. Yeah, the mice can make a feast of it, if they like; but this President will always stand tall.
 
 
Kennedy Emetulu,
 
London
 

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