Unlike Libya, why there are no military intervention from NATO or US in Syria.

Back last year, the world was faced with a similar dilemma in Libya. Muammar Gaddafi had pledged to hunt down and extinguish the protesters in the East of Libya like rats. Ill-equipped rebels prepared to defend Benghazi as government troops and mercenaries approached. But hours before hundreds of tanks and thousands of pro-Gaddafi loyalists were to lay siege to the city of 600,000, NATO intervened and Benghazi was saved. Six months later, Libya is free..

president Bashar al-Assad

Now the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad yet  continues to kill civilians in an attempt to tighten his grip on power. Thus the question must be asked whether it is time for NATO and the US  once again intervene and employ a similar no-fly zone strategy that ended Gaddafi’s 40-year reign of terror. The answer is NO.

Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen said NATO doesn’t intend to intervene in Syria even if authorisation is issued for “protecting civilians.” Ultimately humanitarians and pro-democracy activists must come to terms with the fact that Syria isn’t Libya and such an intervention would be much more costly  both in terms of money and loss of lives  and not nearly as smooth. With the death toll soaring upwards of 3,500, many Syrians and democracy activists are once again looking to NATO for help. Yet, while as a humanitarian it is excruciatingly difficult not to support another similar mission, now is not the time to intervene in Syria.

The first child
 to be killed
 by Bashar Al Assad
military

Unlike Libya, Syria’s tribal, religious, and ethnic differences present complicated challenges.  An intervention in Syria could not only accelerate the civil war, it could also lead to an ethnic cleansing. Further complicating any intervention is the fact that aside from the mainly Kurdish populations in the North, Syrian cities are an amalgamation of ethnic and religious communities. The advantage NATO had in being able to divide Libya between the East and West, mainly by patrolling a few coastal roads, does not exist in Syria. Densely populated towns in close proximity to one another make a NATO mission all the more hazardous, as higher civilian casualties would be inevitable if should NATO deploy missiles. Then, of course, there is the issue of Hezbollah and tribal and political affiliations that extend beyond the Syrian border spilling into the greater levant. There is a very real possibility of Hezbollah responding by carrying out attacks in Israel or threatening to destabilise Lebanon. With Jordan to the south, Lebanon to the east, Israel to the north and of course the omnipresent influence of Iran, a confluence of events could ignite regional instability in the levant far worse than the current unrest in Syria.

Unfortunately, the U.S. doesn’t have many options on Syria the country’s descent into civil war. The Syrian opposition has grown more militarise they have chosen the route of military action against the Syrian government. They are not going to return to peaceful protest when their friends and family are being slaughtered.  At this point, the key issues revolve around humanitarian questions of preventing further loss of innocent civilian lives and the broader regional question of insulating Syria’s neighbours from spillover. Of those two, protection of civilians is the most challenging, options that don’t involve some degree of military action. The most important thing that the U.S. can do is to spearhead a contact group on Syria and use this as a vehicle to further increase pressure on the regime, both economically and diplomatically.The US-backed armed opposition is acting increasingly openly to use methods of assassination and terrorism to destabilise the Assad regime. Syrian state media reported that Brigadier General Issa al-Kholi, a senior military physician, was shot dead by three gunmen outside his home in the Syrian capital Damascus.This follows a terrorist bombing against Syrian security forces in Aleppo, a city that has seen few protests against Assad. 

The Arab League has passed its own resolution calling for UN and Arab League peacekeeping troops to be stationed in Syria. Once again the plan faces Russian and Chinese opposition, while Westerners are wary of sending troops to the Middle East. The resolution said that the league supported “opening channels of communication with the Syrian opposition and providing all forms of political and financial support to it,” although it did not specify what that support would be, nor did it recognise the Syrian National Council, an umbrella opposition group, as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.