Let’s go back a little over a year, back to when the Arab Spring shook the media full force.
Sudden protest movements came to life, showing the world how people were being treated in countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Libya and not to mention, a lot of other Middle Eastern countries.
In no time at all, the crisis in Egypt ended with their then president, Hosni Mubarak, stepping down from the presidency and fleeing the country.
Now Mubarak has been sentenced to life in prison but has been severely ill. Even though they fight for freedom, Egypt is forming a stronger, better government that is in favor of the people.
While Egypt was tucked away with a simple 18-day revolution, the story isn’t the same when it comes to Libya’s revolution.
While it did not take that long for Egypt to settle down and get a new order together, Libya’s president Muammar Gaddafi and his loyalists put a fight up against the rebels. For eight months, it was a struggle over territories between the loyalists and the rebels until three days after Gaddafi was killed in the city of Sirte on October 20th, 2011.
An interesting topic when it comes to the involvement with Libya on the American front would be how the crisis was handled and the kind of military support that America offered.
Working with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), America’s approach was ass-backwards compared to other methods used previously.
Instead of just putting boots on the ground, America limited the amount of personnel on the ground and used just air strikes to aid the rebels.
So instead of being forced into a long, drawn out conflict in Libya, everything was taken care of at once, saving lives of our military and the tax payers’ money.
But the conflicts in Syria have been ongoing for the past year and a half. With more than 23,000 civilians killed in a seventeen month period, the Security Council (a main organ of the United Nations) vetoed involvement in Syria. Both China and Russia were against taking action, saying that it is not in the place of the UN to intervene in regime matters, and Russia and Syrian government have strong relations when it comes to military. The only Russian naval base in the Mediterranean Sea, which dates back to the Soviet era, is located in the port city of Tartus.
In response to foreign military action, Syria has threatened to use their stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. At the same time Obama says that if Assad, the president of Syria were to use those weapons against his civilians, there would be military intervention.
On top of that, Syria has purchased an arsenal of modern weaponry from Russia, a deal worth billions of dollars. Besides the arms deal worth nearly 4 billion dollars, Russia and Syria are tied together economically by trade. Russia has a strong grasp on Syria’s infrastructure, tourism and energy industries, along with natural gas projects worth billions of dollars.
Along with Russia, Syria has an interesting relationship with China.
Economically, China and Syria trade even though there are more imports from China to Syria then there are exports from Syria to China. And much like Russia, China has given Syria weapons and in the natural gas market.
Yet, while hundreds of men, women and children die in Syria every day, the United Nations does nothing to step in and stop the deaths of the innocent at the hands of the government, when the whole purpose of the UN is to stop countries from committing such crimes against humanity.
Since the UN said no, America cannot step in and put their foot down and save the lives of the Syrians that are either being killed or being forced to leave their home countries for refugee camps in the surrounding countries.
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