‘Responsibility to Protect’ is No Basis for Bombing Syria

In the Saturday edition of the National Post, eminent human rights advocate Irwin Cotler wrote that “if mass atrocities in Syria are not a case for R2P [the Responsibility to Protect doctrine], then there is no R2P.” He’s right. But the same was equally true of other killing fields, in Darfur and Congo. R2P has been dead for a while. Mass atrocities that attract the intervention of Western powers are the exception, not the rule.

The idea that we have a binding obligation to protect massacred populations in every corner of the world is a product of the universalist foreign-policy rhapsodies that flowered at the end of the Cold War. It was imagined that the conduct of war could be reduced to a set of UN declarations and grandly expressed doctrines, of which R2P is the most ambitious.

But as it turns out, ordinary voters do not want to see their sons’ blood spilled, or even their tax dollars spent, to protect the dignity of an acronym.

No treaty or international body can change the fact that war-making is a  moral  enterprise, not a legal one. This basic truth has been obscured by new technologies that permit modern militaries to deliver massive payloads bloodlessly (for us) from long range, using standoff weapon systems, as in Libya and Kosovo. But it is a truth nonetheless.

It would indeed be a more noble and humane world if we all reacted to the slaughter of Syrians as if the killing were taking place among our own kin. But human nature militates otherwise. Most ordinary people in this country care greatly for their families, much for their friends, a little for their countrymen, and barely a whit for Darfuris, Congolese and Syrians on the other side of the world.

The great exception comes into play when faraway victims, by reason of religion, ethnicity or creed, are felt to be part of one’s own extended family. Sunnis and Shiites, who define their identity on that basis, have flocked to Syria to defend their respective sects — just as many Canadian Somalis abandon comfortable lives in this country so they can fight and die for some narrow conception of Islam in the Horn of Africa. Many Canadian Jews describe the suffering of Israelis as if it were afflicting their own families; the same was observed among Canadian Tamils when Sri Lankan civilians were under siege during that country’s civil war.

But in the Syrian conflict, no such factor is at play among the broad Western populace — either in Canada or any other country — which is why support for military intervention is feeble.

Even in theory, the humanitarian “R2P” argument for bombing Syria is weak: If Bashar Assad were killed tomorrow with a bomb dropped on his palace, the country’s complex civil war likely would continue unabated. This is R2P without the P.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said that “President [Barack] Obama believes there must be accountability for those who used [chemical] weapons,” a reference to an August 21 sarin attack that killed, by U.S. estimates, 1,429 people in a Damascus suburb. Mr. Obama once famously declared that the use of WMDs would be a “red line” for the United States. And supporters of military strikes claim that if the President does not make good on his threat, (a) America will lose credibility on the world stage, and (b) the internationally recognized taboo against the usage of WMD will be weakened, thus encouraging more massacres.

It is doubtful that these two factors outweigh the massive costs associated with a U.S.-led bombing campaign against Syria. But at least such utilitarian arguments are rooted in the firm earth of consequentialism — rather than appeals to well-intentioned, but airy, notions of R2P.

The decision to kill people with bullets or bombs should reflect either a nation’s strategic interests, or an acutely felt moral outrage at the treatment of a besieged population, as expressed in a free vote conducted in a national legislature, such as Britain’s House of Commons (where PM David Cameron lost a vote on military strikes in Syria last week), the U.S. Congress (where a vote could come next week) or our own Parliament. It should not emerge from earnest propositions of international relations that are applauded and understood by human-rights activists, but few others besides.

— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.