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rfmcdonaldIn his post "Another good reason Michael Ignatieff is not Prime Minister of Canada", Noel Maurer links to Michael Ignatieff's essay in the New York Review of Books, "How Syria Divided the World".
Maurer argues that the limited amount of interference and less significant transfer of arms is nothing compared to what went on in other proxy wars, like--say--Vietnam.
Yes, he provides links. And the commenters at the New York Review of Books, in the main part, point out that Syria's near-term future is not likely to include liberal democracy, or ethnic pluralism, et cetera, so Ignatieff's line of argument is severely compromised.
It's a shame what happened to the Liberal Party of Canada, I supposed, but Maurer's right: Canada's lucky not to have had Ignatieff in a position of actual power.
The Syrian conflict has triggered something more fundamental than a difference of opinion over intervention, something more than an argument about whether the Security Council should authorize the use of force. Syria is the moment in which the West should see that the world has truly broken into two. A loose alliance of struggling capitalist democracies now finds itself face to face with two authoritarian despotisms—Russia and China—something new in the annals of political science: kleptocracies that mix the market economy and the police state. These regimes will support tyrannies like Syria wherever it is in their interest to do so.
[. . .]
The Syrian conflict has laid bare how little the West understands Russia and China’s new approach to the world. Kofi Annan’s plan for Syria was based on the assumption that Russia’s real interest was in demonstrating to the US that it was the indispensable ally in the creation of a post-Assad transition. Annan’s attempt to secure Chinese support for his plan made a similar assumption.
What makes Syria a hinge-moment is that Russia and China are proving that they have no strategic interest in transitions beyond dictatorship, not just in Syria but anywhere else. Both Russia and China see Syria not through the prism of international peace and security or human rights, but through the logic of their own despotism. For Putin, Syria is Chechnya; for China it is Tibet. They understand Assad perfectly. He is doing what they have done many times and they want the world to understand that they will support any dictator facing similar challenges.
Maurer argues that the limited amount of interference and less significant transfer of arms is nothing compared to what went on in other proxy wars, like--say--Vietnam.
[T]hree attack helicopters is nothing compared to the massive amounts of materiel that went through Haiphong or over the Chinese border. Here is a CIA estimate of around 2,000 Soviet air defense personnel in North Vietnam circa 1965. There is also a frustratingly vague CIA estimate of Soviet military aid at the beginning of the war, but it gives some sense of the scale, and it dwarfs anything going to Syria. More information is in this 1968 CIA report about Sino-Soviet conflicts regarding military aid to the DRV. The discussion is over trainloads, for months, and massive airlifts, and shipments through Haiphong ... including potential Soviet military responses to a U.S. blockade.
And then the money document from 1968: go down to the last two pages. 2,230 artillery pieces in 1967! 70,000 tons of ammunition! 3,810 surface-to-air missiles! 123 armored vehicles! 700 vehicles from China, another 24,000 tons of ammunition, and 61 MiG fighter jets!
(By the way, did you know the U.S. operated unmanned drones in Vietnam? Page 2.)
Dude, that was a proxy war. This is Russia and China being annoying.
Yes, he provides links. And the commenters at the New York Review of Books, in the main part, point out that Syria's near-term future is not likely to include liberal democracy, or ethnic pluralism, et cetera, so Ignatieff's line of argument is severely compromised.
It's a shame what happened to the Liberal Party of Canada, I supposed, but Maurer's right: Canada's lucky not to have had Ignatieff in a position of actual power.
