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I need help from you to do an article review as attached. about military(humanitarian) intervention in Syria. Please use your own words to do the review complete with your own analysis and please stated if you agree for military intervention or not. I need 5 pages for the review. font: 12; spacing:1.5..A simple article but due to time constraint i need someone to help me. TQ

?The Crisis in Syria: The Case for UN Peacekeepers?

 

Krister Knapp, Ph.D.

 

Senior Lecturer

 

International Relations Round Table Coordinator

 

Department of History

 

Washington University in St. Louis

 

One Brookings Way

 

St. Louis, MO 63130

 

kknapp@wustl.edu

 

314-935-6838 Abstract

 

The crisis in Syria has reached a level that requires rethinking its possible resolution. Recent

 

efforts ranging from French operational and Saudi light arms support for the Free Syrian Army

 

to Iranian operational and Russian military support for the Assad regime have not resolved the

 

crisis. In fact, they have only worsened it by fueling the flames of sectarian hatred resulting in a

 

bloody stalemate on the ground. A new kind of intervention is therefore necessary. While the

 

suggestion of a NATO military intervention has been en vogue in some circles, this action would

 

substantially worsen the crisis and lead to further resentment against the West. A more humble

 

but effective action would be a robust UN intervention in the form of peacekeepers placed along

 

the Syrian border in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. The purpose would be to create safe havens

 

for all Syrians, not insure victory of one side or the other. The goal would be to stop the current

 

human rights violations and prevent the current humanitarian crisis from worsening, not fan the

 

flames of violence. The justification would be the ?responsibility to protect? doctrine, not mightmakes-right. The hope would be to create a window for a negotiated settlement and not give in

 

to more fighting with no end in sight. Despite recent tarnishes to the UN?s veneer, it should

 

therefore play an active role in resolving the Syrian crisis. 1

 

It is now necessary for the outside world to intervene in the crisis in Syria. The state of

 

affairs there has now effectively crossed a line in which not acting will be worse than acting.

 

Simply put, there is too much at stake to not to do something more than is already being done.

 

Such is the current cry heard around the world. However, ever since the pro-democratic

 

uprisings in Syria turned into a civil war last year, regional intervention has been occurring.

 

Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been providing light arms for the rebels while Iran and Iraq have

 

been supplying fighters and logistics to the Syrian state. International intervention has also been

 

going on for some time. Russia continues to send military weapons for the Assad regime while

 

Britain and France provide operational support to the Free Syrian Army. Since the current

 

configuration of power in Syria has led to a draw even as the death toll and carnage mounts with

 

no obvious end in sight, the question is not whether to intervene but what kind of intervention

 

will be effective. Clearly, the most recent kind has not been. This fact raises two strategic

 

questions: who or what body should intervene in some new way, and what should the goal of

 

such intervention be? While there has been much talk of late that the United States should do

 

more to help the Free Syrian Army oust President Bashar al-Assad, or even that NATO intervene

 

militarily to do it for them, these options will only worsen the violence and further embroil both

 

in a region where neither are welcome. Indeed, such intervention will only do more harm than

 

good for all in the long run.

 

So what is the best kind of intervention at this time? A moderate but effective solution is

 

for the United Nations to install a sizeable and armed peacekeeping force along the borders of

 

Syria. The purpose of such a force would not be to take sides in the civil war, but to create safe

 

zones that provide a modicum of security for all Syrians. The goal of this kind of intervention

 

would not be to determine a victor but to protect human rights and prevent further humanitarian 2

 

crisis. The justification would be the ?responsibility to protect? doctrine and the hope would be

 

to create a window for a negotiated settlement. Despite severe tarnishes to the UN?s veneer, it

 

should play an active role in resolving the Syrian crisis.

 

Critics and skeptics of the UN will surely hoot and howl about this kind of intervention,

 

claiming the UN is feckless and that such intervention will not prevent further killing. Even

 

inside the UN, members of the permanent five of the Security Council such as Russia have

 

blocked efforts to use the UN to resolve hard problems like Syria. This kind of skepticism has

 

deep roots in the Cold War experience when both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. believed, much to

 

the chagrin of former colonized states in the Global South, that each was responsible for solving

 

them in a bi-polarized world. Once the Cold War ended, though, that balance of power altered,

 

opening up possibilities for the Security Council and the Secretary-General whose role during

 

these years expanded, giving the office more power than it had had in the previous 45 years.

 

Skepticism also grows out of more recent UN peacekeeping failures in the immediate post-Cold

 

War Years. Somalia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia are but three obvious cases.

 

Nonetheless, there have been successful cases in both during the Cold War and afterward that

 

indicate the UN has been and can continue to be decisive and effective at helping to resolve

 

major security dilemmas. It should not be left out of the resolution to the Syrian crisis now.

 

For such plan to have a modicum of success, it must overcome several notable obstacles.

 

The first is the hard reality on the ground. President Assad remains in control of the Syrian

 

government, but he is not in control of the entire country, and something like anarchy has already

 

set in on the ground in major pockets of Syria. Clearly, much to blame lies with his regime.

 

Some statistics help drive home the point. Recent credible figures put the dead at 25,000. 1.5

 

million Syrians have been displaced internally, 1.2 million of those from the Syrian army?s 3

 

destruction of one-third of Homs, Syria?s third largest city. In addition to those displaced, many

 

more have fled abroad. The UN?s number of 150,000 counts only those that have officially

 

applied for refugee status, but based on reports of Syrians arriving in Jordan and Turkey, the total

 

number of refugees exceeds 325,000 and is likely to go much higher.1 It might be fair to say,

 

then, that crisis in Syria has now surpassed similar crises from the 1990s in Bosnia, Chechnya,

 

and Sri Lanka, and that Assad regime has now wreaked more devastation across Syria than

 

occurred in Grozny, Jaffna, and Sarajevo.2 Indeed, this past summer, the Assad regime started

 

shelling neighborhoods and whole cities once loyal to it, using airplanes to drop so-called ?TNT

 

barrels,? each containing hundreds of kilograms worth of explosives. It also unleashed the

 

Shabbiha, the relatively autonomous militia that commits gruesome massacres, such as the

 

killing of 400 people in Daraya on August 27th. In fact, somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000

 

people were killed in August, the highest for any month yet.3

 

Naturally the regime is not the only side to have committed atrocities. The co-called Free

 

Syrian Army (FSA), which is much less of unified army with a central command structure with

 

trained troops as it is a hodgepodge of disaffected Syrians who have taken up arms, rag-tag

 

mercenaries, former low-level Syrian conscripts, and a few officers with military training, has

 

also behaved poorly. One of the more recent episodes is the killing of five Alawite officers

 

outside of a Damascus police station.4 There are also credible reports that elements of Al-Qaeda

 

have arrived in Syria, hoping to kidnap the rebel?s pro-democracy mission and convert it to a

 

fight for a Sunni-led Arab caliphate based on fundamentalist Islamic interpretations of Sharia

 

law.5 These are heavily armed and battled hardened jihadist fighters that are being supplied by

 

Saudi Arabia and Qatar, indicating that the ruling Sunnis in those states have an interest in seeing

 

the Alawite Assad regime overthrown.6 It is similarly known that Iran not only provided Syrian 4

 

police with riot gear and paramilitary training during the pro-democracy demonstrations last

 

year,7 but also has sent members of its elite Revolutionary Guard units to fight with the Syrian

 

army against the rebels.8 Iraq is also sending Shi?a fighters to Damascus help protect the

 

regime.9 Finally, Hezbollah, the Shi?a Islamic militant group and political party based in

 

southern Lebanon and supported by both Iran and Syria, has likely sent fighters from its

 

paramilitary wing to the region as well.10 Clearly, the country is not just engulfed in a civil war,

 

but is quickly becoming a sectarian battleground of many forces and countries inside and outside

 

of Syria indicating that it is now a powder keg on the verge of exploding totally and irrevocably.

 

This grim reality can be contrasted with the surreal statement President Assad made on August

 

29 on Addounia TV, the pro-regime media station, that ?Syria will return to the Syria before the

 

crisis.?11 Clearly, this is not going to happen. Things are going to get worse before they get

 

better, especially if the situation is allowed to continue under its own inertia.

 

The situation thus requires a new kind of intervention. The question is of what kind? A

 

military intervention under the auspices of NATO is one possibility being discussed as of late.

 

Certainly such intervention could be justified by Article Five of NATO which states that ?an

 

armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an

 

attack against them all.?12 The repeated mortar firings into Turkey from Syria, which by now

 

can no longer be believed to be ?accidental,? would certainly fall under this provision (Turkey is

 

a NATO member). In fact, this situation has led to a rare invoking of NATO?s Article Four

 

which states ?The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the

 

territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.?13

 

Turkey?s recent military interception of a Syrian passenger plane en route from Russia to

 

Damascus, allegedly containing Russian made munitions and military gear for the Syrian regime, 5

 

which is a violation of international aviation law,14 could be interpreted as Turkey?s response

 

that it feels the conditions of Article Four have been met. If so, Turkey would be within their

 

legal bounds to request NATO strikes against Syria. So there is a case to be made for NATO

 

intervention.

 

But a NATO military intervention in Syria would be a grave mistake. This is not

 

because of the thorny issues surrounding the viability of such an attack, especially to what extent

 

it is possible to render the Syrian air force impotent or that of placing sufficient number of

 

NATO troops on the ground to defeat the Syrian regular army without significant casualties.

 

Instead the argument ignores five crucial factors that would surely make such a mission a failure.

 

First, a NATO attack on Syria would only serve to further widen the conflict into a much broader

 

sectarian war, not contain the violence to Syria, likely drawing in Turkey, Iran, Jordan, and Iraq,

 

and thereby lead to a Middle Eastern war for which there is no stomach or need. Second, it

 

would lead to substantially more deaths of both Syrians and NATO forces, and surely there is no

 

stomach for this in the West. Third, there would be no foreseeable exit, leading to yet another

 

long and protracted war with no obvious benefit, for which the West neither desires nor can

 

afford. Fourth, a Western-led military strike would most assuredly inflame Muslim public

 

opinion and alienate some countries in the region, namely, Iran, which might see such

 

intervention as the first step toward attacking it, and perhaps even Iraq, whose government is run

 

by Shi?a but which remains so unstable that the ethnic conflict there would be further inflamed.

 

This point is particularly poignant since the likelihood of a US-led NATO force would be

 

perceived by many in the international community as a third US war in a Muslim country.

 

Finally, it would lead to further aggression against the US by terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and

 

its affiliates in the region to double-down on the effort to attack US embassies and the like, thus 6

 

running counter to US policy in the Global War On Terrorism that seeks to contain and erode AlQaeda. For all these reasons, then, a NATO led invasion of Syria is not the answer to the crisis

 

there. Indeed, it would substantially widen and worsen it?the exact opposite result of what is

 

needed.

 

If a NATO military intervention is not the answer, what is? A moderate but effective

 

response is to install UN peacekeeping units in Syria. The purpose would be to create safe zones

 

around Syria?s borders to the north, east, and south. These would not be no-fly zones enforced

 

through airpower or safety corridors close to the fighting. This possibility was suggested last

 

year by many credible strategists, but the violence has spread too much to make this solution

 

viable. By contrast, UN peacekeepers could help create stability along the borders of Syria in

 

Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, where is there is ample space for them, where all Syrians who

 

seek refuge from the fighting can safely cohabitate temporarily, and where the UN can establish

 

refugee camps to provide for them until other measures can be found. Over time, they can create

 

a de-militarized zone between the FSA and the Syrian Army along the main road that runs from

 

Aleppo in the North to Damascus in the South, where most of the fighting has occurred. The

 

point would to be to avoid taking sides in the conflict, as mandated by the UN Charter, and to

 

prevent as many deaths as possible. The FSA may or may not be victorious in the long run, and

 

the Assad regime will likely fall at one point, but for now, the solution must be a peacekeeping

 

one.

 

To console critics and skeptics alike that such a plan can work, there is ample historical

 

evidence from the distant and recent past. Two examples stand out from the Cold War when the

 

world order was configured quite differently but which apply nonetheless. The first was the

 

peacekeeping operation in the 1956 Suez affair known as the United Nations Emergency Force 7

 

(UNEF 1) in which peacekeepers were inserted along the Egyptian-Israeli border and around the

 

Gaza Strip, acting as a physical barrier between the two countries? troops. While it is true that

 

such action was not a civil war as is the case in Syria today, but a more traditional conflict

 

between two states, it did help stabilize the situation. The second was the United Nations

 

Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) in 1964, which was a civil war between the GreekCypriot majority and the Turkish-Cypriot minority. There, the UN Security Council secured a

 

cease-fire and then established a demilitarized zone a few kilometers wide dividing the two sides

 

along a 180-kilometer line, staffed with UN peacekeepers that has, for the most part, kept the

 

peace ever since.15

 

There are more recent historical examples as well. The most pertinent one is that of the

 

United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Building on the original 1978 mission that

 

involved 2,000 peacekeepers, the mission was expanded in 2009 to 15,000 peacekeepers. They

 

have created a safe zone along the Lebanon-Israel border in which the only armed personnel

 

currently allowed are UN peacekeepers or members of the Lebanese Army; those from Israel,

 

Hezbollah, and Syria are not permitted. Most accounts of this mission agree that UNIFIL has

 

successfully deterred additional violence along the border, and have allowed it to pursue the

 

other parts of its mission: the delivery of humanitarian assistance to wounded and ailing

 

civilians, and the safe return of refugees and displaced Lebanese.16 This case is not meant to

 

suggest that success is imminent. The historical record during and after the Cold War is littered

 

with failed UN peacekeeping missions, stretching from the Congo in 1960 to the Darfur region

 

of Sudan today. They are also not offered as ?models.? As Paul Kennedy has aptly shown in

 

magisterial account of the UN, The Parliament of Man (2006), the historical record clearly

 

shows there is no ?one size fits all? model, and trying to construct and apply one has shown to be 8

 

nothing but folly.17 The more pragmatic one is to learn from all the UN peacekeeping missions

 

to find what works in certain situations to see if they can be adapted, and to invent new ones as

 

new cases arise. Regardless, clearly there are positive indications that the UN can act in robust

 

and effective ways to curtail violence and reassert peace in conflict zones involving civil war.

 

As important as historical precedence is for justifying a UN peacekeeping mission in

 

Syria, it alone is not enough. The normative case for a UN intervention in Syria must also be

 

made. Such a case must be based in liberal internationalist principles, but to give them weight,

 

they must be applied pragmatically with an eye on what is possible and what is not. The most

 

pragmatically informed liberal internationalist principle at hand to justify UN intervention in

 

Syria is that of ?Responsibility to Protect.? Known as R2P, it was a product of the 2001 report

 

by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), confirmed by

 

Nobel Laureate Secretary-General Kofi Annan in his 2001 book ?We the Peoples,? and codified

 

by the UN at the 2002 Millennium Summit. R2P holds that human rights can transcend state

 

sovereignty under certain conditions, and moves us away from the view that state sovereignty is

 

an unfettered license for carte blanche state action, and toward the view that states must bear

 

some weight to govern responsibly. R2P manifests three basic tenets: first, that sovereignty is

 

contingent not absolute; second, it shifts the emphasis from the rights of outsiders to the rights of

 

victims; and third, it changes what might be called the ?international default setting? for justified

 

UN intervention on humanitarian grounds. Though there have been vocal opponents of R2P,

 

ranging from P5 nations who claimed this limits their power to intervene in their own national

 

interests to developing nations in the Global South who see it as just another cover for First

 

World intervention albeit with a human face rather than a colonial one, the embrace of the 9

 

doctrine by the world human rights community has demonstrated its relative acceptance.18 The

 

normative justification of UN intervention in Syria is thus available to those who look for it.

 

If there ever was a justification of R2P it is surely the current crisis in Syria.

 

Despite the weight of history and theory, several significant bureaucratic and diplomatic

 

hurdles must be overcome. First, since the UN is not allowed to take sides in civil wars and

 

ethnic conflicts, which the Syrian crisis most assuredly is, there is nothing in the 1945 Charter

 

granting the UN the right or responsibility to intervene in such cases. Indeed, the term

 

?peacekeeping? is not even mentioned in the Charter.19 Here, again, however, the cases of Suez,

 

Cyprus, and Lebanon, provide ample evidence that the UN can take such actions thus creating

 

ample precedence for a peacekeeping mission. The point, then, is not to install UN peacekeepers

 

in favor of the FSA and against the Assad government, but rather in support of all Syrians who

 

seek refuge from the violence. The Syrian borders with Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey while not

 

totally ideal, nonetheless presents the best practical place to do so at this time.

 

Second, since enacting UN peacekeeping forces falls under the rubric of the Security

 

Council, approval of the permanent five?the US, Great Britain, France, Russia and China?will

 

be required. Acquiring this is no small task. In fact, it has been the major stumbling block to a

 

more robust UN action in Syria. It thus requires some discussion. Since Russia and China have

 

already made it clear that they are not interested in passing any kind of resolution justifying UN

 

condemnation, even of the Assad government for it gross violations of human rights and

 

egregious behavior, it seems next to impossible that a resolution for peacekeepers could be

 

reached. As any UN watcher knows, the veto power given to the P5 has proven controversial

 

over the decades and at times has been an obstacle to UN efficacy. But it is not an

 

insurmountable one, and given the dire situation in Syria, it is imperative to try. 10

 

There are three ways this can be achieved. The first would be to make an end-run on the

 

Security Council by going directly to the General Assembly for an open vote. This radical

 

possibility may appear to be a violation of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which grants complete

 

authority over crisis situations involving international security to the Security Council, but in fact

 

it has been done at least once before. In 1950, the General Assembly passed resolution 377A,

 

known more famously as ?Uniting for Peace,? which granted itself the authority to meet and

 

discuss possible actions if such action was blocked by a veto in the Security Council while the

 

majority member states desired such action. Backed by the Americans, especially Secretary of

 

State Dean Acheson (for whom the resolution is nicknamed), and designed to circumvent Soviet

 

veto power and its support for the North Korean invasion of South Korea, one scholar of the UN

 

has called this ?perhaps the boldest attempt ever to shift power between the UN organs and had

 

great appeal.?20 Indeed, it led to the creation of the emergency special session concept, which

 

has been used ten times since, in the wake of a deadlocked Security Council.21 Invoking the

 

ESS, however, even if procedurally successful in the short run would only strain relations at the

 

UN and open up the Charter to further abuse in the long run. Thus, it might be a possible course,

 

but it would not ultimately be a wise one.

 

A second option is to convince Russia and China that it is in their interests to abstain

 

from voting or encourage their absence when the vote occurs. The Korean War, where the

 

Russians did not vote to support the UN-backed US led invasion of Korea, represents a historical

 

case where this happened. However, it is not likely to be repeated since the Russians were

 

embarrassed by their mistake and vowed never to be absent again. Indeed, Russia has since

 

vowed to use the veto as much as possible on principle to show its power in the P5.22 11

 

The final option is to convince the Russians and the Chinese that supporting UN

 

peacekeepers in Syria is in their best interests. In reality, this is the only viable option that will

 

not lead to abuse of the UN Charter or to open hostilities among P5 nations. Since China?s lone

 

objection to outside intervention of any kind is that such action sets precedence for future similar

 

actions especially in China, it is not willing to back intervention in Syria. But a UN

 

peacekeeping mission that places sufficiently armed troops along the borders of Syria, that is

 

designed to protect all Syrians regardless of ethnic makeup or loyalties, and that is not

 

implemented to choose sides, is easily shown not to be the kind of interference in domestic

 

matters that China offers as its objection. Since Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey can be convinced

 

of the benefit of such peacekeepers along their borders by showing how they will prevent the

 

carnage from further spreading into their nations, it is hard to imagine how China?s objection

 

could stand up.

 

Russia has likewise argued that outside intervention amounts to a violation of Syria?s

 

national sovereignty. But it clearly has other interests in Syria far beyond those of China that

 

lead it to block UN resolutions on this matter. The first is that Syria is a sovereign nation and the

 

Assad government is by definition the legitimate government?this even as it admits that

 

President Assad has made numerous mistakes and that its army has committed numerous

 

atrocities (though it likes to point out that the FSA has done so as well). As such, the Russians

 

contend the crisis in Syria remains a domestic matter, however much the indiscriminate killing

 

goes on. Second, although Russia has been less vocal about this point, Syria remains a Russian

 

ally. In fact, it is one of its last in the region. While it is not impossible to imagine that Russia

 

will eventually decide to abandon Syria, for now it defends and upholds those relations. Indeed,

 

there is ample historical evidence from the Cold War, where then Soviet policy in the Middle 12

 

East was not very effective at pulling the nations of the region into its sphere of influence, that

 

the Russians will hang on to Syria because that coarse is the only way to maintain its influence in

 

the region. Hardliners in Russia, especially the FSB, still believe that the Middle East is worth

 

fighting for in an imaginarily renewed Cold War with the West. However unlikely such scenario

 

is, it...

 

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