Sadly, David Rieff pretty much gets it right with his provocative article this morning, "Save Us From the Liberal Hawks" (whose URL contains the phrase "Syria Is Not Our Problem."
As he says, in argument against military intervention to stop crimes against humanity in Syria:
If the looming victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the failure of the democratic project in Iraq, and the fact that the most significant political outcomes of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Yemen, and Libya have been instability and the victory of political Islam have not chastened them -- and clearly they haven't -- nothing will.
I agree. Human rights activists have to think of this, and be accountable. With largely uncritical support of the Arab Spring, with support of the NATO intervention in Libya, and now support of some military intervention in Syria, they are helping to usher in systems through massive violations of human rights. This has prompted Brazil rightly to talk now in the UN Security Council about "responsibility WHILE protecting." When we intervene, then we have ownership of these governments that are then more massively violating human rights than the previous autocrats. That should pose more of a challenge to the human rights ethos than it does.
As I wrote in 2009 in objection to Gareth Evans on Open Democracy, Responsibility to Protect (RTP) is an insidious doctrine as it implies that bad actors will act to protect their own people, which they won't, and that good actors will somehow avoid massive human rights violations in waging RTP wars, which they won't -- or that the results are pretty -- which they have never been.
We should at least wait to see if any of these other situations where we intervened and are losing ever improve before trying it again.
The religiosity of RTP has prompted Ken Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, now to call for us to "nurture the rights-respecting elements of political Islam" as if we can count on such rights-respecting.
The obsession with RTP intervention is preventing us from thinking about other means, such as putting pressure on China and Russia in other ways.
This is in sharp contrast to Anne-Marie Slaughter and other enthusiasts of RTP who have been strenuously calling on Twitter to "do something," with urgent argumentation against the realpolitickers like Joshua Foust -- who doesn't then have another plan to put pressure on Russia (or China) because he's generally uncritical of Russia (for him Georgia is always worse, etc.)
The massacres in Syria should be among the many reasons we really review the terms of the "reset" with Russia (and certainly not do things like "abolish" Jackson/Vanik when we can just simply declare that Russia has graduated from it). While it's unglamorous, we should return to the more patient type of human rights of the Cold War era when we had to combine rhetorical condemnation and documentation and incremental progress with arms talks. We should let the Arab League do the heavy lifting on dealing with the murderous regimes in their own region. No, it doesn't provide an immediate salve to the conscience -- the regimes resulting from intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan haven't either for the last 10 years, and we should be mindful of that.
If this seems callous, go back to the half dozen failures mentioned at the top -- they should be chastening. I say "sadly" about Rieff's doctrine because I don't take any smug joy about it as some will, because it's so bleak. Nobody wants to stand by while people are murdered. But we might find ourselves in a proxy war with Russia or at least Rosvoorouzhenie (the Russian state arms supply company) in Syria that will make things worse.
As I said, an unseemly byproduct of the RTP doctrine and political human rights these days is Ken Roth's call on us to "nurture" Islamic states. He does this in much the same way as my friend Sergei Kovalev has always imagined that you could still have a socialist state even like the Soviet Union that might still be imagined to obey international human rights law. There's always been an assumption among such liberals that we can be agnostic about the social system of countries and pretend that one social system versus another isn't better about respecting basic civil rights and liberties. We'd all like this to be true. We can all show it to be false simply by looking at the Freedom House or Transparency International surveys. That doesn't mean we can argue backwards and decide to go soft on human rights criticism of Western liberal capitalist democracies because their systems ensure rights better (the Jean Kirkpatrick debate of the 1970s). But we can go to where the violations are, and admit that they should deserve the lion's share of our resources and attention.
The feminists who have challenged Amnesty International's disturbing doctrines in support of "defensive jihad" and jihadists who support the abrogation of women's rights have challenged Roth now, too, in a petition.
Normally I sign their petitions, for example, in defense of Amnesty's gender advisor who was forced to leave over these issues, but this particular open letter to Roth just had a problem for me in the invocation of the idea of the "right" to separation of church and state. I agree this is a good thing to have, but it's nowhere enshrined as a "right" in international law, although it is in the US in the First Amendment. I'm all for it, I just think in the international context you have to find a different way of saying this. And I do think then you have to talk about the assumptions that certain social systems (i.e. religious or socialist) are "better" or "not good" for promoting human rights.
Roth's essay is offensve because it attempts to guilt-trip liberals reticent about endorsing the Arab Spring results as "Islamophobic":
Rather, wherever Islam-inspired governments emerge, the international community should focus on encouraging, and if need be pressuring, them to respect basic rights—just as the Christian-labeled parties and governments of Europe are expected to do. Embracing political Islam need not mean rejecting human rights, as illustrated by the wide gulf between the restrictive views of some Salafists and the more progressive interpretation of Islam that leaders such as Rashid Ghannouchi, head of Tunisia’s Nahdha Party, espouse. It is important to nurture the rights-respecting elements of political Islam while standing firm against repression in its name. So long as freely elected governments respect basic rights, they merit presumptive international support, regardless of their political or religious complexion
God speed to Rashid Ghannouchi, but Ken really ought to be more intellectually honest here and talk about the disaster that is Egypt. What are we getting in Egypt? Or for that matter, Libya? No government merits "presumptive international support". Hamas was freely elected and then didn't respect basic rights at home or abroad. Israel's government is freely elected and has a basic system of respecting human rights which Ken Roth doesn't really acknowledge given Human Rights Watch's obsession with Israel/Palestine. This is politics. Let's not pretend it's human rights. Or let us say that in fact human rights are always in fact political and drop the mask.
Roth then goes on to construct a notion of Turkey that tends to undermine his own theory:
Perhaps the most interesting new presence in the region is Turkey. Despite its distinct history, it remains a powerful example of a country with a religiously conservative elected government that has not used Islam as a pretext to undermine basic rights. Turkey has capitalized on its growing stature by entering the political fray of the Arab world. More vigorously than its Arab neighbors, Turkey denounced the political killing in Syria, championed democratic change in Egypt, and opposed Israel’s punitive blockade of Gaza.
Turkey has done those things, of course, for its own geopolitical interests and to satisfy growing conservative domestic constituents -- not because it has gotten human rights religion. And where's the bar for "rights-respecting" in the test for whether we should embrace Islamic governments, if "Islamic-inspired" Turkey still has so many problems?
Yet Turkey faces several challenges if it is to live up to its enormous potential in the human rights realm. Will it use its growing influence in multilateral arenas to oppose the outdated view of India, Brazil, and South Africa that it is somehow imperialistic to stand with people who are risking their lives to protest repression by their governments? Will Turkey press for democratic change not only among the uprisings of the Arab world but also in Iran, which crushed its Green Revolution in 2009, and the stultified and repressive countries of post-Soviet Central Asia? And will Turkey clean up its worsening human rights record at home–including persistent restrictions on freedom of speech and association, a flawed criminal justice system, and long-term mistreatment of its Kurdish minority—so it can be a less compromised proponent of human rights abroad? Turkey can make a positive difference on human rights in the region—if its leaders take the bold decisions at home and abroad needed to advance this cause.
The idea that Turkey should be the engine for democratic change in Central Asia is about as useless as having Russia, China, or for that matter the US as the engine. In most Central Asian countries, the Turkish influence has now been greatly challenged with the expulsion of not only Turkish businesses but the Turkish schools related to the Nurchilar movement. Both are seen as covers for extremism. (I'm for endorsing the rights of religious schools or "inspired" businesses such as those associated with the Gulen or Nurcilar movement, which has been expelled from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, while also calling on this more liberal form of Islamic organization not to impose the violation of women's rights and other civil rights.)
What all of these problems come back to today is Iran, and the inability of liberals to have a reasonable containment program for Iran, rather than silly things like hoping that Turkey is going to reform Iran, or hysteria about Israel bombing Iran. You know there's a thing that you do when you can't have a hot war, and invade countries and kill thousands of people or install shakey governments that then kill thousands more people. You have a cold war.
