While mentioning that civilians are also sometimes killed by rebel and Islamic State fighters, Slaughter posits that "Assad represents the greater threat, and thus will have to be removed from power before attention can be focused on defeating the Islamic State." Hillary Clinton makes basically the same argument -- and, like Slaughter, can't really enlighten us as to what a successor Syrian government would look like.
Avaaz is thus allied with those for whom a no-fly zone is a euphemism for -- a stalking horse for -- regime change in Syria, regardless of the organization's stated goal of protecting civilians and saving lives, and not of producing regime change.
But as Adam Johnson, associate editor of AlterNet, put it in an article for FAIR.org:
""A no-fly zone would only be applied to Assad because anti-Assad forces don't have an air force"While it may sound like a simple humanitarian stop gap -- and that's no doubt how it's being sold -- literally every no-fly zone in history has eventually led to regime change. Which is fair enough, but those pushing for one should at least be honest about what this means: the active removal of Assad by foreign forces. Indeed, if one recalls the NATO intervention in Libya was originally sold as a no-fly zone to prevent a potential genocide, but within a matter of weeks, NATO leaders had pivoted to full-on regime change."
Johnson also makes the important point -- in reference to the devastating, poignant picture late last summer of the drowned Syrian Kurdish refugee, 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose body washed up on a Turkish beach -- that this boy and his family were not fleeing the Assad government's bombing of cities. Rather, they were "escaping ISIS and the U.S. bombing of his hometown of Kobani, far from anything the Assad government is doing. A no-fly zone would not have saved his hometown""
Since Johnson wrote that, and since Avaaz's dramatic New York Times ad last June, the Russians entered the air war on the side of Assad and in opposition to rebel forces and ISIS. Although Russia announced its withdrawal from military action in Syria in mid-March, it is keeping in place "its powerful S-400 air defense system"That would maintain Russian dominance of Syrian airspace-- This would mean that any U.S./NATO effort to impose a no-fly zone would surely meet with Russian and Syrian resistance.
So the questions for Avaaz and other advocates of a no-fly zone in Syria include: Are you thinking beyond a no-fly zone? If not, why not? Doesn't it matter? What comes next or in conjunction with a no-fly zone? Ousting Assad? Replacing him with whom? How? Full-scale bombardments and drone strikes that somehow miraculously avoid killing masses of civilians, and that avoid triggering more killings by Assad's forces? More special ops assassination missions? Those "boots on the ground" so beloved of armchair militarists everywhere?
What if Turkey and Saudi Arabia invade Syria, as they have threatened to do? What happens in the fight against ISIS if Assad is out of the picture? What does Russia do? Does some miniscule crew of supposed Syrian moderates that the U.S. has identified take power, and ISIS just pauses while the new government organizes itself (or rather is organized for it by the ever-helpful United States, United Kingdom and other enlightened western governments)? What happens to Assad's military? How will a no-fly zone affect not only government violence, but also ISIS violence, or other opposition violence, against civilians? And on and on.
Shouldn't the still unfolding Libya tragedy make an organization like Avaaz a little gun-shy (so to speak) in calling for the same kind of policy in the even more complicated, confusing case of Syria -- what with the Syrian military, various countries, the anti-Assad rebel opposition groups, ISIS and al Qaeda and al Nusra and their spinoff groups, and Kurds, and Assad loyalists all slugging it out to the death?
In a Syrian war with atrocities on all sides, isn't there something to be learned from the Libya experience in which Gaddafi's crimes were exaggerated to inflame the western public against his regime? As Patrick Cockburn of The Independent in London reported in November 2014, human rights groups in Libya "discovered that there was no evidence for several highly publicized atrocities supposedly carried out by Gaddafi's forces that were used to fuel popular support for the air war in the U.S., Britain, France and elsewhere."
These included, Cockburn continued, "the story of the mass rape of women by Gaddafi's troops that Amnesty International exposed as being without foundation. The uniformed bodies of government soldiers were described by rebel spokesmen as being men shot because they were about to defect to the opposition. Video film showed the soldiers still alive as rebel prisoners so it must have been the rebels who had executed them and put the blame on the government."
And, wrote Cockburn, "The majority of Libyans are demonstrably worse off today than they were under Gaddafi, notwithstanding his personality cult and authoritarian rule. The slaughter is getting worse by the month and is engulfing the entire country."
Writing more than a year later, The New York Times reported on February 29, 2016 that in the aftermath of the killing of Gaddafi and regime change in Libya, that country "dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States in now desperately trying to contain."
Syria, of course, is not Libya. But there is a lesson there that "humanitarian interventionists" should learn.
When Members Pushed Back, Avaaz Defended Its Syria No-Fly Zone Advocacy
Although Avaaz has ignored most of our specific questions, it did last summer post on its website a "Syria No Fly Zone Questions & Answers" page in response to "thoughtful concerns" expressed by members that, according to Avaaz, boiled down to these main objections: "a) Avaaz is relying on unverified news reports and has the facts wrong. b) Avaaz is pushing for more war in the Middle East. c) Avaaz is serving the imperial interests of western powers, notably the U.S." (As noted earlier, the Q&A page was deleted sometime last month, and when you click on the above link you get a blank Avaaz page as of this writing.)
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