Of Foreign Intervention

A Note published on my Facebook Public Page:

I hate foreign intervention. It always comes at a high cost. I know that because we’re already paying it. We’ve been paying for centuries now, centuries. For we live in the Middle East, not on some deserted island, “foreign” intervention has always been one of the historical constants shaping our lives and destinies. Today, it is a fact of our daily life. Stopping foreign intervention has never been the real challenge confronting us. Our challenge has always been one of management. We simply have to find ways to influence the intervention process so that our interests can be served and our goals achieved:  freedom, justice, dignity, development.

The only reason Bashar Al-Assad is president today is because of French intervention and American willingness to play along. By reaching out to the French and the Americans, the protesters are merely trying to have a say in those very quarters that count, the quarters where the real decisions are often made. This is not a sign of defeatism and subservience, but of growing awareness of the nature of the global political order of which we are part. The overthrow of the Assads, and other dictatorial regimes in our midst, is but one small and necessary step on a very long path towards equity and equality in the existing international order.

So stop throwing the wrench of ideology in our engines, the people know well what needs to be done in order to take this one small but important step, that first step: they need foreign intervention in the form of buffers zones, safe corridors and support to their Free Army. Indeed, the international community may not be ready to give them that now, but our task, if we really want to represent them, is to lobby on their behalf not find excuses to dither. Meanwhile, we can always count on Assad’s cruelty to drive the point home.