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| From L., Obama, Power, Dilon and Rice (White House photo by Pete Souza) |
Would the two women named to major national security
posts this month by Barack Obama eventually convince the president of America’s
“Responsibility to Protect” the
Syrian people – by military means if necessary?
Praising their “integrity and their heart” on June 5,
Obama elevated Susan Rice
to National Security Advisor and nominated Samantha Power as
American ambassador to the United Nations.
The
two are veterans of his 2008 campaign and have strong personal relationships
with the president.
But a third woman doubts whether the two
prominent advocates of liberal interventionism could prod into action a president who has persistently resisted
intervening in Syria’s ongoing human rights disaster.
The third woman is Marah Buqai,
a Syrian American academic researcher, professor and published poet who
was nominated
by the Middle East Forum’s Campus Watch project as one of the most thoughtful
and balanced scholars among the Middle East Studies faculties in North America.
Writing
this week for Aljazeera news portal, Ms Buqai makes three main
observations:
(1) Ms Rice is the
voice for humanitarian intervention, which going to war not for
imminent national-security needs but to save innocent lives.
As the ambassador to the UN, she pushed
through the March 17, 2011 Security Council vote of 10-0 to take “all necessary
measures” to protect Libyan civilians. Rice was a staffer at the National
Security Council in 1994 when the world failed to stop the genocide in Rwanda.
A participant in deliberations on the crisis, she later said the White House
failed to see the larger moral imperative to act and later told her friend Ms
Power, a Harvard scholar at the time and now her likely successor at the UN,
"I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come
down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was
required."
(2) For
Ms. Power, who has also leaned toward intervention and made
her name as a journalist covering the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia was
a formative experience. In her 2002 Pulitzer Prize book “A Problem from Hell,”
she presented a history of genocide in the 20th Century and a withering
critique of the failure of the United States and other countries to respond to
them.
(3) Australia’s international
policymaker and former politician Gareth J. Evans
is the godfather of the Responsibility
to Protect concept. “The core idea of the Responsibility to Protect (often
abbreviated as 'R2P' or 'RtoP'), as endorsed by the UN General Assembly at the
2005 World Summit, Wikipedia writes
on Evans’ profile page, “is that every state has the Responsibility to Protect its population from genocide and other
mass atrocity crimes; the international community has a responsibility to
assist the state if it is unable to protect its population on its own; and that
if the state fails to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful
measures have failed, the international community has the responsibility to
intervene with appropriate measures, with coercive military intervention,
approved by the UN Security
Council, available as a last resort. The concept was expressly
designed to supersede the idea of 'humanitarian intervention', which had failed
to generate any international consensus about how to respond to the 1990s
catastrophes of Rwanda,
Bosnia and Kosovo.
“Evans has been widely
acknowledged as playing a crucial role in initiating, and advocating the
international acceptance of, the concept, first as Co-Chair of the International
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty which introduced
the expression in its 2001 report of that name, and subsequently as a member of
the UN Secretary-General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change,
Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the Global Centre on the Responsibility to
Protect, and as the author of the Brookings Institution-published The
Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All and
many other published works…”
Ms Buqai writes in her
think piece, “In May 2012, I handed Ms Rice at her State Department office a
legal memorandum outlining the case for the Responsibility to Protect civilians in
Syria.
“Today, as Ms Rice prepares
to assume her new and influential role as National Security Advisor, it is a
national duty to take up where we had left and revisit the case of the Responsibility to Protect civilians in
Syria.”
Buqai says the policy
legacy of Tom Donilon, the man Ms Rice will be replacing, is the Obama
Administration’s shift in priorities from the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq to the fast-growing economies of Asia.
The substantial shift
in focus from the Middle East and South Asia toward Asia proper could live on after
Donilon’s departure.
Can the two newcomers make
a big difference when Obama’s own presidential priorities do not include
getting involved in another Middle East war?
Probably not, Buqai
says.
“The most America will
be doing now is drag the two sides to the conflict – a fading opposition and a keyed
up regime – to the negotiating table, where the Syrian revolution would be
nipped in the bud.”
