Mick Hartley

A powerful condemnation of humanitarian indifference from Michael Young, in Lebanon's Daily Star:

In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in early September, as President Barack Obama was considering airstrikes against Syria, 60 percent of respondents said they opposed such action. This forceful rejection came even though 75 percent of respondents said they thought Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons.

Instead, the focus among Americans was on domestic tribulations. As Jeanette Baskin, a social worker on Staten Island, told the New York Times: “What our government needs to do is work on keeping our country safe. We invest all this money in foreign countries and fixing their problems, and this country is falling apart. Makes no sense.”

Attitudes in Western Europe were little different, and helped undermine efforts by British Prime Minister David Cameron to deploy his forces alongside those of the United States.

In France, where President Francois Hollande didn’t face the same institutional barriers as did Obama and Cameron, public opinion was nevertheless stalwartly opposed to military involvement in Syria.

When three out of four Americans admit that a regime used one of the most lethal and vilified weapons on earth, killing hundreds of people, including numerous children, and still refuse to do anything about it, they essentially undercut any solidarity that would help reinforce and further humanitarian principles in the international system.

Americans complain that they are not the world’s policeman. But the global order in the past 60 years or so has rested on a foundation of principles and institutions that the United States has been instrumental in creating and defending. By virtue of its vast power, America cannot be just another state. Moreover, the new self-centeredness ignores that when Americans are the victims, as they were on Sept. 11, 2001, they rightfully expect the rest of the world to sympathize with their predicament and take their side.

Syrians justifiably lament that they are treated as second-class citizens in a world that has rallied for foreign victims in countless other places. The tragedy is that as most Westerners look at Syria, their revulsion with the inhumanity of the conflict makes them react in a paradoxical way: They want to have nothing to do with the savagery there, because what is happening conforms so little to the standards of humanitarian behavior to which they aspire.

But those standards don’t descend from heaven. They only become stronger and more widespread if states make this a priority. And that can only happen when societies back their governments in making it possible. We’re nowhere near that stage today, especially in the West, where all politics appear to have become domestic politics.