The InterDependent

Ten months ago, when General Muammar Qaddafi's well-armed forces began gunning down Libyans block by block, the international community was galvanized to act. On March 17, the United Nations Security Council passed an unprecedented resolution mandating the use of "all necessary measures" to protect civilians. Within days, the United Nation's first all-out war in the name of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a doctrine approved by the UN General Assembly in 2005, was underway.

Yet just under a year later, as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's well-armed forces target civilians from town to town, the United Nations has been silent-resoundingly so. An estimated 60 people were killed last weekend alone after a renewed government offensive sparked firefights around the country, bringing the estimated death toll to more than 6,000 since the violence began 10 months ago.

What's different this time around?

In the words of one of R2P's original architects, the answer is "unequivocal buyer's remorse." Gareth Evans, the former foreign minister of Australia and co-chair of the International Advisory Board for the Responsibility to Protect, worries that the international community got its first real a taste of what Security Council-mandated military intervention to protect civilians could look like in Libya. And many countries now say it was more-much more-than they had bargained for.

Buyer's Remorse

UN Security Council resolution 1973, which authorized action in Libya, drew its rationale from the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a 10-year-old doctrine stipulating that if a state cannot protect its citizens from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes or crimes against humanity, the responsibility falls to the international community to intervene on the civilians' behalf.

The passage of the resolution on Libya was something of a diplomatic coup. Critics of R2P in the past-primarily Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa-have long suggested that because the doctrine places humanitarian protection above traditional sovereignty, it easily could begin to serve as the legal framework for renewed neocolonialism. Yet when the resolution on Libya came up for a final vote, China, Russia, Brazil, Germany and India abstained rather than veto the motion.

Part of their acquiescence came from assurances that the intervention truly would be aimed at protecting civilians. A UN press release issued immediately after the meeting on March 17 announced that the international community had approved a resolution to establish a no-fly zone, enforce an arms embargo, and take "measures to protect civilians under threat of attack in the country." The press release stressed repeatedly "that the object was solely to protect civilians from further harm."

Instead, some members of the Security Council now argue that NATO and other allied countries used the language of R2P to undertake a protracted proxy war in which the immediate goal was not civilian protection but regime change. By September, NATO bombs were regularly pounding the area around Sirte, where Qaddafi was believed to be hiding, to allow Libyan rebels-who had been trained by British and Qatari Special Forces-to capture and overthrow Qaddafi.

"Libya gave R2P a bad name," said Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri, the Permanent Representative of the Republic of India to the United Nations. India, along with other key players including Russia, China and Brazil, and South Africa, has been particularly vocal about its disapproval of how the situation in Libya unfolded.

One of India's primary concerns was the arms embargo stipulated by the UNSC resolution. Puri worries that NATO enforced a selective arms embargo, funneling weapons directly to Libyan rebels, while pursuing an all-out war to overthrow the Qaddafi regime. Speaking at a conference in New York hosted by the Stanley Foundation to mark the 10-year anniversary of R2P last week, Puri argued that in practice, the Libya intervention was "very different than what was intended."

Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, the Permanent Representative of Brazil to the United Nations, says the problem was not only how Resolution 1973 was interpreted, but also the precedent it set. Because R2P was used as a "smoke screen for regime change" in Libya, invoking it again in other cases, like Syria, is now much more difficult, she said. The humanitarian intentions of R2P have been sullied by politics.

"In the aftermath of the Libyan resolution, what we've seen is distrust on the part of the Security Council Members. Syria is a case in point: Many are saying they don't even want to go down the road of putting sanctions on Syria because they think it could lead to use of force" under R2P, Ribeiro Viotti said.

Calling for reforms

In response to Libya, Brazil has called for stricter limitations on the use of R2P, including a rule requiring that all non-coercive means-such as diplomatic pressure and targeted sanctions-be exhausted before military intervention can be considered. In cases in which military intervention is deemed necessary, the Security Council should provide specific parameters for the operation, and those forces executing the intervention should be responsible for reporting back to the Security Council, Ribeiro Viotti says.

Evans, who helped draft R2P a decade ago and has been one of its major proponents, agrees with the need to discuss limitations on military action, but worries that strict criteria on when military intervention can be considered would undermine the Security Council's ability to act decisively to prevent civilian atrocities. While the international community "should not be fighting outright wars where an enemy would have to be vanquished," states or regional forces should have the capability to pursue "limited action ‘monitor and swoop' missions, to make imminent harm to civilians impossible," he said.

Yet neither of these models of R2P would be particularly easy to implement. Michael Ignatieff, a former head of the Liberal Party in Canada who also helped draft R2P, cautions that intervention to protect civilians will necessitate taking sides. "Intervention will always hinge on giving money or air force to one group of ruffians or another...on the ground that we judge to be marginally better than the people in charge," he said. In the case of Libya, the international community chose rebel forces that were far from perfect. Although opposed to Qaddafi, they too have come under fire for human rights abuses. Ignatieff argues for choosing the lesser of the two evils: "It's all about getting your hands dirty because you have to team up with some very bad people, and that's necessarily going to go beyond the terms of a UN resolution."

"Let's be real about what we're doing when we do this stuff," Ignatieff said. "If you franchise it, if you use proxies, it's going to be messy, it's going to be dirty and sometimes you have to do it anyway. Buyers remorse is part of it."

Syria is different than Libya

Of course there are other-and perhaps more important-reasons that the international community hasn't intervened in Syria. The situation there is more "untidy," to borrow Ambassador Puri's adjective, than the Libya situation was. Politically and militarily, these differences would make intervention extremely complicated-and potentially protracted.

In Syria, rebel forces are not concentrated in a specific geographic area, as they were in Libya, and while Assad has demonstrated his willingness to violently suppress his people, he has not publically sworn to kill every last one of the opposition figures "like cockroaches," as Qaddafi did-which is exactly the type of inflammatory verbiage that tends to galvanize an international response.

Syria is also different than Libya because, to put it simply, Syria has friends-and powerful ones at that. Both China and Russia have vowed to oppose any punitive action taken against Assad's government, while Russia has actively continued to dispatch shipments of weapons to supplement Assad's stockpile.

Theoretically, the doctrine of R2P is blind to such political considerations. In practice, however, the system simply doesn't work that way, says James Traub, a writer and a senior fellow at the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. "What determines action is the degree of isolation of the noncompliant state, and Libya didn't have any friends," he said. "Syria has a lot of friends in its neighborhood."

So, what's next?

During his keynote address at the R2P conference last week, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon issued a blanket warning that the international community should not shy away from protecting civilians in any country, including Syria. "This organization [the UN] cannot stand on the sidelines of clear and present danger," he said, asking member countries "to not let the pendulum swing back to the past," when the world watched atrocities unfold in places like Kosovo and Rwanda.

While the UNSC is unlikely to approve any motion even remotely resembling Resolution 1973, British, French, Qatari and Arab League officials are hoping this week to convince member states to pass a rather more toothless resolution calling for the immediate end of violence in Syria. While both China and Russia have threatened to veto such a resolution, pro-R2P countries led by the Arab League hope to convince Moscow and Beijing to step down. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe is expected to visit Turtle Bay this week to remind the Security Council of "its responsibilities in the face of the worsening of crimes against humanity by the Syrian regime."

At the conference in January, Ban Ki-Moon concluded his speech by reminding the international community that while it allows itself to be paralyzed by buyer's remorse, or by a "minefield of nuance or competing national interests," civilians in Syria continue to die.

"Inaction," he said, "is not an option."