Just words? Ed Miliband and the Anne Frank Declaration

This was first posted on 30 March 2015 at NFZ Syria. I am reposting it now five years later as Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer has just brought Ed Miliband back to Labour’s front bench.

Why is the The Galway Advertiser promoting atrocity denial?

“Hell yes”

#HellYes
— Jamie Glackin (@Jamie4Labour) March 28, 2015

@Jamie4Labour Imagine these were your family, your children. Think about how “Hell yes” sounds to the survivors. https://t.co/IzuuaEKIMZ
— No-Fly Zone Syria (@NFZSyria) March 28, 2015

@NFZSyria What are you talking about??
— Jamie Glackin (@Jamie4Labour) March 28, 2015

@Jamie4Labour These are victims of Assad regime’s Sarin attack on Ghouta. Do you know context of “Hell yes”? Didn’t you watch the interview?

— No-Fly Zone Syria (@NFZSyria) March 28, 2015

@Jamie4Labour Ed Miliband was talking about his response to the Assad regime’s Sarin attack on Ghouta when he used the phrase “Hell yes”.
— No-Fly Zone Syria (@NFZSyria) March 28, 2015

@NFZSyria How do you know? I’ve used the phrase myself. As do millions of people daily. Think you’re very wrong here.
— Jamie Glackin (@Jamie4Labour) March 28, 2015

@Jamie4Labour So you didn’t watch Ed Miliband interviewed by Paxman?
— No-Fly Zone Syria (@NFZSyria) March 28, 2015

@NFZSyria No, I actually did. But you clearly took something very different from it than everyone else.
— Jamie Glackin (@Jamie4Labour) March 28, 2015

@Jamie4Labour He was talking about his response to the Assad regime’s Sarin attack on Ghouta in August 2013. You do know that then?
— No-Fly Zone Syria (@NFZSyria) March 28, 2015

@NFZSyria Not arguing with you. It’s got nothing to do with that. At all.
— Jamie Glackin (@Jamie4Labour) March 28, 2015

@Jamie4Labour How can it have nothing to do with it when that’s what he was talking about?
— No-Fly Zone Syria (@NFZSyria) March 28, 2015

Denial. @Jamie4Labour Chair Scottish Labour can’t accept Miliband’s “hell yes” has anything to do w. Sarin massacre. https://t.co/s157ZZpBZk
— No-Fly Zone Syria (@NFZSyria) March 28, 2015

And so @Jamie4Labour has blocked me.
— No-Fly Zone Syria (@NFZSyria) March 28, 2015

See also: Ed Miliband is peddling a lie about his volte-face on Syria, by Dan Hodges.

So proud are Mr Miliband’s supporters, they’ve made a “Hell yes” t-shirt.

I have voted Labour in every general election until now. But not this time.

Related posts: A letter to Ed Miliband, and For readers of the LRB.

“Moi aussi, je suis une dessinatrice.”

Paris. Via Kim Willsher.

Et moi aussi, je suis un dessinateur.

Use force to stop the barrel bombs: On issues of morality, legality, practicality, and responsibility.

Cross-posted from NFZSyria.org.

Update: PDF version here – please share.


This week’s BBC News story on the ongoing bombing of Syria’s civilians by the Assad regime is just the latest of countless reports. The bombing continues daily even if many Western news outlets now report it infrequently. For anyone who wants to know more about how the bombs are impacting men, women, and children, there are more than enough gruesome images of severed arms and legs, of children with their skulls split open, all available just a few clicks away.

A cooler assessment of the bombing’s impact is available in counts of lives taken, in counts of attacks, and in counts of refugee flow increases.

The Violations Documentation Center in Syria today lists 10,365 individuals killed in air attacks since the start of the conflict, 9,892 of them civilians, 1,656 of them under 18, and of those 1,150 children up to the age of 12. This is a minimum count of confirmed killed, not an estimate of the true total. The numbers will likely be higher by the time you click a link.

Of the over 10,000 individual killings by aircraft documented by the VDC, 2,887 took place since the start of this year, a rate of over 700 confirmed killed by air attacks per month.

Just looking at numbers killed doesn’t take account of the horrific scale of injuries. One doctor from Aleppo describes 40 to 50 injuries from one barrel bomb attack as the norm, an overwhelming escalation compared to his earlier experiences with mortar attacks that might injure 7 or 8.

Since February 22nd when the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2139, which amongst other things demanded an end to air attacks on civilians, activists have logged at least 1,006 reported air attacks by Assad’s forces.

In February, UNHCR reported aid workers as saying the aerial bombing of Aleppo was causing one of the largest flows of refugees of the war, as many as 500,000. And the bombing has now continued for a further two months. The total number of refugees registered with UNHCR is now over 2.6 million.

Most recently there have been many reports of chlorine being used in barrel bombs, turning them into crude chemical weapons. While the 21 deaths in 14 attacks cited in a report by The Telegraph is a fraction of the number killed by the more usual non-CW air attacks, the chlorine bombs represent a clear breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention, signed by Syria last September, as well as being a breach of UNSC Resolution 2139 in common with the rest of the air attacks, and a crime under international humanitarian law.

To some, all this is enough to make a case for military intervention. Others doubt whether intervention can be effective, or believe it would be illegal, or think it would be impractical or prohibitively expensive, or think that it is not the responsibility of Western nations.

MORAL GROUNDS

I’ve previously argued (here and here) that the likely risk of civilians being killed in a military intervention is massively outweighed by the number of lives being taken by Assad’s air attacks. That case is even stronger now than then.

In NATO’s seven-month Libya air campaign, investigations by The New York Times, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty, counted between 40 and 115 civilians possibly killed by NATO aircraft. While it is right that NATO should be fully accountable to those it was tasked to protect, this number is a fraction of the number now being killed per month by air attacks in Syria: a minimum of over 700 every month as cited earlier.

Military action to disable Assad’s air force, more limited in aims and targets than NATO’s Libya campaign, would therefore most likely prevent very many more civilian deaths and injuries than it might cause.

When the Libya intervention is discussed, objectors point to the fact that Libya is still unstable to argue that military intervention was a failure. NATO’s mission was to protect civilians during the conflict, not establish stable government; nonetheless one can favourably compare Libya’s postwar instability with the situation in Syria. In all of 2013 there were reportedly 643 violent deaths in Libya. In Syria death tolls are now in excess of 200 daily according to the UN Secretary-General’s March report.

So much safer does Libya seem than Syria that the UNHCR has registered 17,589 Syrian refugees in Libya.

It’s also sometimes argued that war in Mali was a result of the Libya intervention, and thus demonstrates the folly of intervention in Syria. This ignores both the history of conflict in Mali, and the scale of the ongoing destabilisation in Lebanon and Iraq that is directly connected with allowing Syria’s war to rage on.

Military action against Assad’s air force would not in itself be likely to end the war, nor would it ensure a stable future for Syrians or their neighbours, but it would almost certainly prevent a big portion of the further suffering now promised to them. For those with the military means to act, there is a moral imperative to do so.

LEGAL GROUNDS

Indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas is prohibited under international humanitarian law.

The recent use of chlorine bombs violates the Chemical Weapons Convention, to which Syria is a signatory.

UN Security Council Resolution 2139 on Syria “demands that all parties immediately cease all attacks against civilians, as well as the indiscriminate employment of weapons in populated areas, including shelling and aerial bombardment, such as the use of barrel bombs…”

The Assad regime is therefore clearly, deliberately, continuously violating international law. But would a targeted military action to disable Assad’s air force also violate international law? Not according to UK Government legal opinion.

Minister of State Hugh Robertson reaffirmed in January that under certain circumstances the UK Government regards humanitarian intervention as legal even without a UN Security Council resolution. Those circumstances were defined in a Foreign and Commonwealth Office note circulated to NATO allies in October 1998 prior to the Kosovo intervention, as follows:

Security Council authorisation to use force for humanitarian purposes is now widely accepted (Bosnia and Somalia provided firm legal precedents). A UNSCR would give a clear legal base for NATO action, as well as being politically desirable. 

But force can also be justified on the grounds of overwhelming humanitarian necessity without a UNSCR. The following criteria would need to be applied: 

(a) that there is convincing evidence, generally accepted by the international community as a whole, of extreme humanitarian distress on a large scale, requiring immediate and urgent relief; 

(b) that it is objectively clear that there is no practicable alternative to the use of force if lives are to be saved; 

(c) that the proposed use of force is necessary and proportionate to the aim (the relief of humanitarian need) and is strictly limited in time and scope to this aim—ie it is the minimum necessary to achieve that end. It would also be necessary at the appropriate stages to assess the targets against this criterion.

In a parliamentary debate on the Kosovo intervention in 1999, UK Defence Minister George Robertson declared that:

We are in no doubt that NATO is acting within international law. Our legal justification rests upon the accepted principle that force may be used in extreme circumstances to avert a humanitarian catastrophe. Those circumstances clearly exist in Kosovo. 

The use of force in such circumstances can be justified as an exceptional measure in support of purposes laid down by the UN Security Council, but without the Council's express authorisation, when that is the only means to avert an immediate and overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe.

The current situation in Syria is similar in that narrowly targeted military action to stop aerial attacks would clearly be in support of the purposes of Resolution 2139, even though that resolution doesn’t expressly authorise the use of force.

PRACTICAL OPTIONS

A patrolled No-Fly Zone such as was implemented over Bosnia, and later over northern and southern Iraq, would be an expensive open-ended commitment. It would also require the kind of capability to suppress enemy air defences only held by the US, so would not be an option without active US participation.

Use of Patriot missiles in Turkey has been proposed by some, but they’re better suited to defend against missile attack and can’t be safely used against enemy aircraft  if friendly aircraft are operating in the same space.

Providing anti-aircraft weapons to rebels is seen as a serious security risk in case they might come into the wrong hands and be used against civilian aircraft.

The best option in Syria seems to be limited strikes against selected targets, whether deterrent strikes against a few choice targets to try and persuade Assad to comply with Resolution 2139 or a wider campaign of strikes against Assad’s air capacity.

Not only would this cost less than a full no-fly zone, but as the duration of a limited strike action would be shorter than a patrolled no-fly zone, and as air defences wouldn’t need to be targeted to the same degree, there should also be less risk to both air crews and to civilians on the ground.

OUR RESPONSIBILITY

There are only a few states capable of mounting carefully targeted military strikes against Assad. They include the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Of those, Britain, France, and the United States are the only ones with previous experience of conducting such operations, and are also the only permanent members likely to support such action given Russia and China’s history of support for the Assad regime.

The capacity to act, the privilege of permanent membership of the Security Council, the protection of veto power in the Council; all of these mean a moral, legal, and political responsibility to act falls upon the governments of Britain, France, and the United States.

Continued failure to act undermines the moral standing of the UK, France, and US. It undermines the legal standing of UN Security Council resolutions, of the Chemical Weapons Convention, and of all international humanitarian law. It undermines the political position of UNSC permanent members, and undermines the current international order. It threatens our security.

This responsibility falls on these three governments collectively and individually. If one fails to act, that does not absolve the others. Each has both the power and the responsibility to act.

Exercising the Colonel

Above, one of David Low’s Colonel Blimp cartoons from the lead up to the Second World War. You can see and read more of the Colonel in this blog’s most popular post by far, from a few years back.

I would love to look back at Low’s satires of muddled thinking and be able to say how out of date they seem, but that’s far from being the case. David Low’s Blimp character was primarily a satire on right-wing little Englander pro-appeasement attitudes, but Low also took aim at similar views on the Left via his Pmilb character: Blimp backwards. Today’s Pmilbs and Blimps continue to muddle ideas of radical left and reactionary right, of liberalism and of bigotry.

A couple of prime examples from the past pages of this blog are Simon Jenkins, a modern-day little Englander who has found a comfortable berth at the supposedly liberal Guardian, and Judith Butler, a leading academic in feminist and gender theory who contrived to describe Hamas and Hezbollah, two violent, sectarian, antisemitic and misogyninist organisations, as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.”

Several more examples have been on parade in recent days, with a series of supposedly Left commentators eager not to distance their own beliefs from those of religiously bigoted anti-democratic fanatical murderers, but rather to point to how close in agreement they are, and to claim justification of motive (though not of course of action) for bloody public murder on a London street.

Take Rachel Shabi’s comments on the Woolwich murder, beginning with this tweet:

Just told Sky news #Woolwich a collective problem, we should not single out Muslims; need to look into Brit foreign policy element
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 24, 2013

There is nothing that controversial here in my eyes. Radicalisation is a problem for the whole of society to deal with. To charge one group with responsibility for solving it in isolation would seem likely to be counterproductive. And UK foreign policy? What about it? That aspect could be taken in a number of directions.

But then she clarified that her preferred response to the murder was “eliminating bad foreign policy as a recruitment device”.

.@nicholasblincoe it's not that madness can be cured. more about eliminating bad foreign policy as a recruitment device
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 24, 2013

So here Rachel Shabi sees UK foreign policy as bad and believes that as murderers of today and potential murderers of tomorrow agree with her, that policy should change. However when pressed by Rob Marchant on the question “Should foreign policy change as a result of these attacks,” she tries to split hairs:

@rob_marchant @tomsp @tomharrismp UK foreign policy in Mid East should change cos it is hypocritical, counterproductive NOT cos of attacks
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 25, 2013

Rachel Shabi insists that “understanding is not justifying,” but though she doesn’t justify the act she does justify the motive, making clear that she sees anger over UK foreign policy, the only motive to which she gives any consideration, as “justifiable anger,” and again “justified anger”.

Incredibly, having concluded that this anger over actions like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan leads to radicalisation and acts of terror, she then does her little bit to encourage such anger with a wholly one-sided representation of today’s news story on prisoners held by the British Army in Afghanistan:

This is how UK 'liberates' #Afghanistan: with unlawful detentions in secret prison ind.pn/112ek85
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 29, 2013

It’s an interesting story, though not so simple as Rachel Shabi would have you believe.

If I found that any of my views were shared by such cutthroats I think I might want to consider whether I was somehow in error, but Rachel Shabi is not alone in finding affirmation in such an alignment. There are more happy to declare their, at least partial, agreement with the murderers...

Ian Leslie points to the stupidity of ex-mayor Ken Livingstone blaming the attack on the invasion of Iraq.

Our friend in Canada, Terry Glavin, adds Michael Moore and Glenn Greenwald (in the Guardian) to his list of moral illiterates weighing in on Woolwich. He writes:

Do note that it isn’t some imam in some dingy mosque carrying on like that, although now and then there will be one of those, too. Note as well that the overwhelming majority of Afghans, and the overwhelming majority of Afghan-Canadians, supported NATO’s intervention, and most of these people are, as it happens, Muslims.

Note well that these idiocies about blowback and retaliation do not generally come from the mosques at all. It’s the sort of rubbish that comes from out of the mouths of moral illiterates.

It should stop.

Norman Geras finds Greenwald’s failure of logic replicated in a Guardian article by Terry Eagleton, and lays out the mechanism to display its faults.

Jonathan Freedland doesn’t forget the Stop The War Coalition, who naturally take their own alignment with the declared motives of murderers as absolute vindication.

Nick Cohen, like Terry Glavin above, takes the time to point out some people most likely not in agreement with the murderers, namely victims of Islamist violence, mostly Muslim, not just in Afghanistan but also Pakistan, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia. The list is far from exhaustive.

Bizarrely Rachel Shabi refers to Nick Cohen’s article as “a cluster bomb of muscular liberal lunacy.” Whatever about lunacy, I think her metaphor of an indiscriminate weapon of mass slaughter to describe the article is perhaps an example of what they refer to in the mental health business as projection. (A more complex analysis here by blogger Unrepentant Jacobin.)

Funnier still is that after Livingstone, Moore, Greenwald, Eagleton and the Stop The War Coalition have all had their say, Rachel Shabi writes 950 words on how debate is being stifled, closed, sealed shut even. And all of her words are published by the Guardian.

Kissinger Obama, Nixon Obama, Pax Obama.

In the Ottowa Citizen, under the title Shrugging at Syria and its refugees, Terry Glavin writes:

When the United States and Britain turned away 70,000 starving Jewish refugees from the fascist Romanian regime of Ion Antonescu in February, 1943, it fell to U.S. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to explain why. There are reasons, Welles said. It’s a trick of some kind. Taking those Jews would just play into the Nazi propaganda machine. There are reasons.

Thirty years later, in 1973, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir came to Washington to plead on behalf of the Soviet Union’s persecuted Jews. In a secretly recorded conversation released only in 2010, President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger are heard to congratulate one another after having just shown Meir the door. They had their reasons.

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Kissinger is heard to mumble, “and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” Nixon responds: “I know. We can’t blow up the world because of it.”

Push the clock ahead 40 years to last month, when events in Syria were unfolding in such a way as to call President Barack Obama’s bluff about the “red lines” he’d blustered about having drawn around Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad’s use of poison gas. To extricate Obama from his predicament, an anonymous White House official is summoned to perform a pitch-perfect ventriloquism of Kissinger’s casual aside to Nixon. “If he (Assad) drops sarin on his own people, what’s that got to do with us?”

Read the rest here.  He has a related post on his blog, Syria: Paint it Black.

Terry Glavin is not alone in his analysis. From Der Spiegel, Gregor Peter Schmitz writes on an Unlikely Heir: Obama Returns to Kissinger's Realpolitik.

An early version of the Obama-as-Nixon theme came from Nick Cohen in the Observer back in 2010, Obama is the most reactionary president since Nixon.

Others are making the Obama-Nixon comparison not on foreign policy but on press freedom. In the opinion pages of the New York Times, James C Goodale writes that Only Nixon Harmed a Free Press More. I confess that’s a story I haven’t been following closely, but John Cassidy of The New Yorker provides a catch-up post with links, The Leaks Scandals: Questions for Obama.

_

Turning back to Syria, Jeff Weintraub has this month blogged a lot on the war, linking to writers he’s found informative. Here is a list of his posts:

• Escalating atrocities and counter-atrocities in an increasingly ugly Syrian civil war
• From the Spanish civil war in the 1930s to Syria's civil war today – Michael Petrou explains the fallacies of “non-intervention”
• Military stalemate and social meltdown in Syria
• Henri Barkey suggests that, on Syria, Turkey should put its money where its mouth is

_

Finally, Norman Geras has a good post up today which touches on how a war can be worth fighting even when it means allying with undemocratic states, even when one’s own side commits war crimes, and even when the end results are far from perfect, if the alternative to fighting is allowing a dreadful reign of barbarity to prevail. He’s not writing about Syria, but about the Second World War: Just a second more on that second war.

Sixty thousand dead in a strategic context

The latest UN count of Syrians killed in the ongoing war lists 59,648 dead from March 15th 2011 to November 30th 2012 according to a conservative survey, with the actual number expected to be greater. This puts the rate of killing in Syria higher than in the two worst years of the Iraq Body Count figures for the Iraq war, 29,026 for 2006 and 25,280 for 2007.

Update: IBC figures don’t include confirmed military casualties. From icasualties.org, Coalition military deaths in 2006 were 873, and in 2007 were 961, giving minimum totals of 29,899 killed in 2006 and 26,241 killed in 2007.

If one compares the figures as daily averages, these Iraq minimum counts showed a daily average of 82 people killed per day in 2006, and 72 people killed per day in 2007, while the UN report shows an average of 95 people killed a day in Syria over the entirety of the conflict. If one looked only at 2012 in Syria the average would be higher as the killing escalated significantly, particularly from April onwards.

US military figures given for insurgents killed in Iraq were 3,902 in 2006 and 6,747 in 2007, but these likely have some overlap with IBC figures for civilians. Taken at face value they add 11 killed on average per day in 2006 for a total of 93 per day, and 18 per day for 2007 for a total of 90 per day, still lower than the daily average for Syria.

Both the UN count for Syria and the Iraq Body Count numbers are minimum counts, which do not include the missing or the unreported. In another example, when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia prepared its 2010 estimate of the death toll in the 1992-95 Bosnian War, it arrived at a list of 89,186 unique death records, the minimum number, but the undercount was estimated at 15,546 resulting in the total number of casualties of 104,732. See report here (PDF). Even this added margin doesn’t include excess deaths: indirect casualties caused by the disruption and destruction of war. The number of deaths resulting from the war in Syria will already be much higher than 60,000.

Making the comparison between the rate of killing in Syria now with the rate of killing in Iraq in 2006-07 might give some sense of scale. It also raises the question of whether a US led military intervention in 2012 might have reduced the killing, or whether such an intervention in 2013 might effectively reduce the killing. The numbers of course can’t give an answer, but they can call into question any expressions of certainty that US intervention is doomed to make things worse.

With the rate of killing higher than that seen in Iraq, and the minimum count of people killed already two-thirds of the minimum count for the Bosnian War, with the war being fought across NATO’s southern border, why is there still no sign of decisive intervention by the US and allies?

The cold horror of this war from a strategic view is that the further it goes without US involvement, the greater are the losses inflicted on rival powers (Iran, Russia) at the lowest cost to the US, at least until it reaches a point where diminishing returns on the war’s effects on rivals are outweighed by rising dangers to US allies. Prior to that point, if the US intervenes it assumes associated risks, military economic and diplomatic, and lets rivals like Russia off the hook to cut their losses and blame the consequences on ‘imperialists’.

The strategic problem is that the point where rising dangers exceed diminishing returns, where intervention may become preferable for the US, could be hard to identify before it’s already passed. And the more damaged the physical, social, and psychological fabric of the country and its people, the harder it will be to build a stable and safe neighbour for NATO and the other US allies bordering Syria.

In the meantime hundreds of people will continue to be killed every week, and they will weigh lightly in the US and NATO’s strategic balance.

Added: a detailed article from FP magazine dated March 2012 on Patrick Ball, the statistician primarily responsible for the UN’s new Syria report.

Also, Jeff Weintraub considers the implications of comparing Syria and Iraq.

For Sale - a Patent Burglar-Rattle

A short early comic strip by William’s slightly less famous brother, Jack B Yeats.

For Sale - a Patent Burglar-Rattle

(1) The inventor made a new mammoth police-rattle.

(2) The rattle ready, the inventor waited for a burglar.

(3) The burglar came, and the inventor pressed the button.

(4) But that rattle was too powerful. It simply rattled the inventor clean out of the window, while the burglar decamped with his booty.

The strip was published in issue No. 198 of Chums, dated June 24, 1896. You can read more about Yeats’s comics career at The Irish Comics Wiki. He’s now better known for his paintings.

Moral questions for the very young

When you and your friends are guests in someone’s home, and something terrible happens for which you and your friends bear a great deal of responsibility, what should you do?

All run away because you’re scared of how your hosts might react?

Or take responsibility and stay to try and make things better?

Syria consequences

A BBC interview with photojournalist Paul Conroy about his experiences in Homs, Syria.

In short, he describes the Syrian regime’s actions in Homs as a slaughter, and says that Homs is just the beginning of an escalating killing campaign by the regime, most of which will now continue away from cameras.

Up to now, governments wanting to stop the Assad regime’s slaughter have used non-military means: political, economic and legal pressure, and humanitarian aid. All of these have to continue, but despite some impact, events show they are not adequate.

I believe it is now time for governments opposing the regime’s slaughter to use force, specifically air strikes against the regime’s military.

Why intervene?
Some commentators argue against any form of intervention, not just military, and declare that internal repression in one country is no concern of other governments. I believe this is both morally and practically wrong. Morally a Syrian life has the same value as a European life, as an American life, as any other human life.

Practically, for any nation engaged in international trade, national security and economic prosperity depend on a minimum of international consistency in the rule of law. Mass murder anywhere puts that at risk, even more so when it happens in regions of particular importance for trade and security, and when those behind the crimes are seen as untouchable. Thus a cause of internal justice becomes an issue of international security.

One strong caveat is that local knowledge is a benefit in intervening, and so local nations may be better suited to intervene than distant ones; though against that, local nations often have conflicts of interest that make them less suited.

Why force, and why now?
Political, economic, and legal pressure on the Assad regime is limited by Russia and China’s stance. Without the agreement of all permanent members of the UN Security Council, it’s impossible to impose a blockade of Syria as some have called for, and it’s impossible to give the International Criminal Court jurisdiction over atrocities in Syria as others have suggested.

While there have been conciliatory moves by Russia and China in signing up to a UNSC statement on humanitarian access, this hasn’t stopped the Assad regime from obstructing the Red Cross/Red Crescent. If it were possible for humanitarian NGOs and human rights observers to get wide access within Syria, this could help the population survive and resist regime violence. It's for this very reason that the regime will continue to obstruct access.

Both the regime and its sympathisers in the Russian and Chinese governments are likely to seek to put an acceptable face on this obstruction while allowing it to continue, so expect to see some occasional minimal access, but not enough to seriously interfere with the regime’s killing campaign.

With journalists driven out from Homs, or killed, with NGOs blocked and embassies closing, with no international observers on the ground, access is reducing as killing is escalating. The continuing partial political and economic isolation of the regime will weaken it, perhaps terminally, but not in time to stop its killing campaign. Instead, now that the regime is committed to a path of mass slaughter, external political and economic pressures have become further incentives to accelerate the killing campaign in order to achieve ‘victory’ while it still has the means.

Therefore the only means left to cut short the killing are those military means that can most quickly deny the regime some of the resources it relies on to supress and kill. By this I mean extensive air strikes against the Syrian military.

Why air strikes?
Widespread air strikes against the Syrian regime would be difficult, dangerous and expensive, and would cause deaths of innocents. They would initially require the destruction of Syria’s air defences which would in itself be a major undertaking likely to cost lives of people, military and civilian, not engaged in repression. Air strikes would not by themselves stop repression and killing by the regime. The regime’s killing campaign would most likely continue to accelerate in the initial stages of an air campaign, and some would seek to blame this continued acceleration of killing on the air campaign. The air campaign would most likely have to continue for several months. While the air campaign could prevent certain outcomes, it could not by itself determine which of various alternative outcomes came to pass, but would nonetheless be held responsible.

Nevertheless, an air campaign is the only means fast and powerful enough to significantly reduce the regime’s capacity to carry out its current acceleration of killing. Its uncertain risks must be set against the certain disaster already underway.

Other suggested military measures are no alternative.

Supplying arms to the Syrian opposition won’t make them strong enough, fast enough, to withstand slaughter by the much more powerful Syrian Army with its artillery and tanks.

Limited punitive air strikes will not deter a regime that now sees its accelerated killing campaign as a race for its own survival.

Establishing and protecting humanitarian corridoors, or supplying aid by air without the regime’s consent, can only be done under cover of a full scale air campaign.

Establishing safe zones would also require a full scale air campaign to ensure their safety, would encourage population movement and increase insecurity outside the zones, and would very likely accelerate ethnic cleansing.

A major ground invasion would be politically unsustainable, would undermine the Syrian opposition, and could not happen fast enough to stop the accelerating slaughter.

For the sake of Syrians, and for the sake of the wider world, we need an air campaign, now.

_

Below are some links, many to opposing arguments.

Pressure Not War: A Pragmatic and Principled Policy Towards Syria, by Marc Lynch.

The Order of Battle Problem by Andrew Exum at his Abu Muqawama blog.

Some Degree of Airpower by Robert Farley.

The logistics of limited intervention at Slouching Towards Columbia blog.

How many divisions does moral rectitude have? A long sceptical post at Slouching Towards Columbia blog.

The Ambiguous Morality of Foreign Intervention in Syria by Jay Ulfelder.

Syria: The Agonies of Intervention, by Steven A. Cook.

'Adolescent' revulsion and moral shame (over Syria) by Norman Geras.

‘Troops Out - Stop the War in Iraq’

News coverage of yesterday’s bombings in Baghdad, some links via Iraqi Mojo.

Los Angeles Times: Baghdad bombings leave at least 60 dead, nearly 200 injured

A string of explosions ripped through the Iraqi capital on Thursday, killing at least 60 people and injuring nearly 200 just days after the last U.S. troops left the country, police and health officials said.

The attacks came in the midst of a political standoff between the country’s main Shiite and Sunni Muslim factions, heightening fears of a return to the sectarian bloodletting that devastated the country a few years ago.

Authorities said more than a dozen bombs exploded in different parts of Baghdad in a seemingly coordinated assault during the morning rush hour. Most of the targeted neighborhoods were predominantly Shiite, but some Sunni areas were also hit.

In the deadliest attack, a suicide bomber detonated an ambulance packed with explosives in front of a government anti-corruption office in the Karada neighborhood, shattering windows and setting cars ablaze. A police officer at the scene said at least 16 people were killed and 45 injured.

Wealth creation and renumeration

Watching the documentary Inside Job (see previous post) put me in mind of the Lucky Luke comic album Jesse James, drawn by Morris and written by Goscinny, also writer of the original Asterix stories. In Goscinny’s version, Jesse James is inspired by reading about Robin Hood, but this inspiration creates a problem in dealing with the proceeds of his crimes. In the excerpt below, his brother Fank James has the solution. (Click to enlarge.)

The above scans are from the Brockhampton Press edition, translated by Frederick W Nolan. Cinebook are currently publishing good value paperbacks of most of the Lucky Luke stories. I recommend them for all ages.

Lucky Luke excerpts copyright © 1968 Dargaud S.A. English-language text copyright © 1972 Brockhampton Press Ltd.

Charles Ferguson on corruption in academic economics

Below, two clips from Inside Job, Charles Ferguson’s Academy Award winning documentary on the 2008 Crash, and following them, an interview with him that includes a focus on the issue of corruption in academic economics.

Maspero massacre

Ahram Online: Protest against persecution of Copts in Egypt attacked with bloody force

Ahram Online: Egyptian Military attacks Alhurra TV

BBC News: Cairo clashes leave 24 dead after Coptic church protest

EA WorldView: Egypt Latest - At Least 19 Killed in Clashes Over Christian March

Issandr El Amrani at The Arabist blog: Maspero and sectarianism in Egypt

Zeinobia at the Egyptian Chronicles blog: Black Sunday - 1954 Redux

Some Twitter reports and reactions this evening.

The law is for the protection of the people

On EA WorldView last monday, a post marking the second anniversary of a bloody day of protests in Iran, the 20th of June 2009:

Iran Flashback Video: "Neda: An Iranian Martyr" (PBS/BBC)

Two years ago today, dozens of protesters were killed when Iranian security forces cracked down on public marches challenging the legitimacy of the 2009 Presidential election.

One of those slain was a philosophy student named Neda Agha Soltan.

This is the PBS/BBC documentary, from November 2009, on her death and on the post-election conflict in Iran.

June at Tehran Bureau, Hamid Farokhina writes of a day to remember:

Every generation in Iran seems to have key events etched in its collective memory, an ensemble of milestone dates and shared experiences that define its national identity and sense of selfhood.

An older generation had September 1941 and the 1953 coup. The following generation had February 1979. And now the new generation has June 12 and June 15 - the dates, respectively, of the 2009 presidential election and the peaceful march by more than a million people on Azadi Square that followed. The latter, in particular, seems to resonate deeply with many. For it was on that day when millions of mostly young people came out to the streets for the first time in their lives to make a keenly felt statement to themselves and the world at large. And since the march went unmolested for its first few hours, it gave an extra sense of liberation and catharsis both to its participants and those who heard about the remarkable event. For a few rare hours, millions of Iranians actually felt as if they owned their own country.

Unfortunately, though, as day gave way to dusk and as the armed enforcers of the status quo came out onto the streets, violent attacks against peaceful protesters broke out with a ferocity that left dozens killed and injured, along with hundreds arrested.

I happened to be there from the very start and witnessed much that transpired - including organized attacks against the protesters - firsthand.

Read the rest.

Also, Pedestrian on the anniversary of the stolen election and its brutal aftermath: Searching...

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The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran gives a thorough account of current abuses by the regime. From their site:

New Report on Iran’s Prison Deaths Raises Concern for the Lives of 18 Prisoners of Conscience on Hunger Strike
Iran’s pattern of prison abuse and neglect demonstrates that the lives of prisoners of conscience are at risk, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said today, with the publication of a new report, Death in Prison: No One Held Accountable.

[...]

The Persian-language report documents the deaths of 17 political prisoners and prisoners of conscience who have died while in custody in Iranian prisons since 2003, allegedly due to torture, medical neglect, and misconduct of prison authorities. (English Summary)

Six of the prisoners were detained and died after the 2009 election and the ensuing crackdown on government critics and political opponents.

[...]

The Campaign’s report comes out five days after twelve prominent prisoners of conscience commenced a hunger strike protesting the recent deaths of two prisoners, women’s rights activist Haleh Sahabi, and dissident journalist, Hoda Saber. On 23 of June, six more prominent prisoners of conscience have joined the protest bring the number of hunger striking prisoners to eighteen. These men are journalist Kayvan Samimi, journalist Issa Saharkhiz, journalist Massoud Bastani, political activist Heshmatollah Tabarzadi, human rights defender Jafar Eghdami, and student activist Ali Ajami.

Sahabi died from a heart attack while on furlough, when security forces raided the funeral of her father. Saber died of a heart attack while on a hunger strike. Family members and other prisoners have alleged his death was linked to physical abuse and the failure of prison officials to transfer him to a hospital in a timely manner.

Read the rest.

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ADDED: From The Guardian, Iran giving out condoms for criminals to rape us, say jailed activists.

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Now 2009’s events in Iran are replayed in Syria. Accusations that Iranian forces have been joining the Syrian regime in its murderous attacks on protesters have increased over the past two weeks, and are continuing.

Today is the 100th day since the current protests in Syria began, and the daily updates at EA WorldView have more on Syria than I can digest. The video below is from friday of last week, showing Syrian forces firing on protesters in the Khalidiya neighbourhood of Homs.

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The law is for the protection of the people.

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The arrest of Ratko Mladic

A lot has been written on the recent arrest and extradition of Ratko Mladic. Below are just a few links. I will add to the list later.

Sarah Franco  of Café Turco writes from Kozarac in Bosnia on the muted reaction of survivors, and of a commemoration at the concentration camp of Trnopolje.

She writes, “there isn’t even a memorial plaque in Trnopolje acknowledging that non-Serbs were imprisoned there, mistreated there, raped there, and then all of those who were not killed there were sent other camps, or to exile. In this place, where a school was turned into a concentration camp and then once again into a school, there is, however, a monument to the fallen soldiers of Trnopolje. Yes, a memorial to Mladic’s soldiers stands there, through which the children pass everyday on their way to school.”

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Marko Attila Hoare writes a substantial post on the wider picture of the Serbian military and political control of their campaign of genocide in Croatia and Bosnia, “The trial of Ratko Mladic will not mean that justice has been served.”

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Harry’s Place points to four articles by Francis Wheen from 1998-2000 on some of the positions held by those on the left and right in the UK during the conflict. The articles were on clivejames.com. Three of the articles can also be found here, here, and here.

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Journeyman writes “If the trial of Mladic is to achieve anything it could be to show that ethnic hatred is not something far away - either in history books or ‘developing’ countries,” and would like to see schoolchildren learn about the Balkan wars alongside the Holocaust, with Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde as recommended reading. An earlier mention of the book on this blog here.

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James Bloodworth of Obliged to Offend writes “Isn’t it time for an apology, Mr Chomsky?” on Noam Chomsky’s support and praise for two deniers of the genocidal Srebrenica massacre, Diana Johnstone and Edward Herman.

Confirmed: Qaddafi’s son worse than Hitler

Via @blakehounshell, the terrible, terrible paintings of Seif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, at Foreign Policy magazine.

Still life with murder

Hitchcockian Still Life by Irish painter Stephen Loughman.

Copyright © Stephen Loughman 1998.

Fleeing by land and by sea

Fleeing Guilin by the North Station, print by Cai Dizhi, 1945.

From the book art blog, A Journey Round My Skull.

Navio de emigrantes (Ship of Emigrants), painting by Lasar Segall, 1939.

From the art blog Weimar.

La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars), a film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1982.

We watched this film last night, and the mirroring of what’s happening now in Libya was almost too painful to bear.

The dictator’s loss of power is now a certainty, so every killing by his forces in these days is a murder to no end, but still it goes on.

Make note of who still supports him, and by this know them well.

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PRI’s The World produced a series of reports on migration last year centering on the story of one Somalian man fleeing war. Read and listen here, and learn how Gaddafi's thugs went about preventing migrants from reaching the EU.