(1) There was a thoughtful column by Philip Collins in Friday's Times, proposing in effect the need for some form of Western intervention in Syria even though the consequences of this could not be counted on to make a difference for the better. These are Collins's opening paragraphs (£):
The most misunderstood book of recent times was lost in a play on words. When Francis Fukuyama called his book The End of History he was not making the foolish claim that history, as 1066 And All That nearly said, had come to a full stop. He was saying that no society better than liberal democracy would ever emerge.
With history unfolding all around us, it is a good moment to point out that Fukuyama was right. The people of Syria, like the people of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, do not wish to buy security at the cost of freedom. The Middle East will, in time, join the league of democratic nations, as Latin America has done since 1970. The fragile Government of Algeria cannot last. The limited reforms sponsored by the kings of Morocco and Jordan will buy a little time. But eventually the people there and the people in Iran will want some of what we have, they being people just like us.
For a long time this argument was buried in Iraq. The idea of liberal intervention, which flowed in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Libya and ebbed in Afghanistan, fell apart in Iraq. There is always a case, as there was in Iraq, for parting a tyrant from his power. There was a case for leaving well alone too. But Syria is showing us what, sooner or later, would have happened. The Syrian slaughter of the innocents is the counter-factual for Iraq.
Collins then says that 'the case for standing by and doing nothing' about Syria is very powerful and he spells out the reasons why. He continues all the same:
Intervention... will mean chaos. But there is chaos already. We have to trade these risks against the following certainty. Six thousand are dead and the upshot of standing by is the gang rape of a young boy. The upshot of inaction is murder. The rhetorical naivety in this appeal is deliberate. When you see children slaughtered by state-backed monsters, there is nothing wrong with being reduced to cliché. This cannot be allowed to happen...
The revulsion is too profound to be written off as adolescent or unrealistic. For those of us who are not religious, the suffering of other human beings is the deepest mark of common human heritage. So it is important to add weight to our moral impulse rather than to dismiss it as naive and foolish. Where does revulsion meet practical reality? That is the central question.
And Collins mentions various possible measures – among them the creation of a safe zone, and the supply of arms, cash and communications to the opposition - before reiterating that the arguments against military intervention are overwhelming, but that the choice is between chaos and chaos: 'It's the nature of the beast and sometimes we forget that it's the fascist that's the beast, not us. We're better than that and in our actions we will show it.'
(2) In a post a few days ago I noted how Peter Beaumont seemed to be proposing a higher threshold for military intervention than that embodied in the doctrine of a 'Responsibility to Protect'. The latter specifies 'a reasonable chance of success' and not making things worse than they already are as conditions for external intervention. Peter was suggesting more demanding conditions than that: an ability to guarantee the introduction of genuine freedoms and real democracy. Set against the backdrop of that discussion, Collins's argument may be seen as moving in the opposite direction: the direction of lowering the threshold. Since it is urgent that we respond somehow, out of solidarity, of our 'common human heritage' with the victims, action must be taken even if it means meeting chaos with chaos and (by implication) that the chaos we cause turns out to be worse than the chaos we're trying to bring to an end.
(3) In Saturday's Times Matthew Parris responds in his turn (£) to the idea that intervention in Syria might now be called for, and he responds to Collins's column in particular. Parris's response is blunt and indeed bordering on the contemptuous. Those who want intervention in Syria he calls neocons (as if no one else than a neocon could be moved to want to put a stop to the murderous actions of a tyranny). For Parris, if there's no 'workable plan', if the odds are stacked against success, one must stay out. To Collins's plea of profound revulsion, he rejoins: 'Forgive me, but no revulsion is too profound to be written off as adolescent or unrealistic. We doubters feel the same horror at atrocity as the neocons do. They do not strengthen their case by repeating their horror. Revulsion comes easy.'
(4) I will not comment here on the argument each way about likely consequences. I don't know whether or not there's a form of military intervention that could make a difference for the better in Syria. However, beyond the assessment of likely consequences, there is something else worth registering here, something which aligns me with Collins's solidaristic plea invoking a common human heritage, and against Parris's contemptuous riposte: that revulsion can always be written off as 'adolescent' if it isn't backed by a workable plan; that revulsion 'comes easy'. For revulsion isn't the only thing that comes easy. So does moral indifference. There was another voice from another time that reflected on the feeling appropriate to being powerless in the face of atrocity, and 'adolescent' wasn't the way he characterized it. Here is what he - Primo Levi - wrote:
It was the same shame which we knew so well, which submerged us after the selections, and every time we had to witness or undergo an outrage: the shame that the Germans never knew, the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse because of its existence, because of its having been irrevocably introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defence.
.....
[T]he just among us, neither more nor less numerous than in any other human group, felt remorse, shame and pain for the misdeeds that others and not they had committed, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. It would never again be able to be cleansed...
Of course, the whole world is not a death camp, and what is happening in Syria falls far short of the Nazi genocide. Yet the brutal murder of innocent people by a state bears some kinship with all crimes against humanity, of which it is itself one. A sense of revulsion, and of shame that the civilized world stands by to these events, so far from being 'adolescent', is an elementary human impulse which competes with tendencies to both indifference and cynical realism. It was expressed just the other day by Marie Colvin, now dead, when she wrote, 'Sickening, cannot understand how the world can stand by and I should be hardened by now. Watched a baby die today.'
Apart from anything else, the very question of whether anything effective can be done by outsiders to bring a criminal assault by some regime to an end partly depends on how many people - and how many governments - are touched by this sense of shame and outrage, and prompted to think that something, if possible, ought to be done. The cynical realist chorus is not as neutral and uninvolved as those who populate it may think.