Cain and Assad

About 30 years ago, my family and I were driving through downtown Baltimore in the early evening when we encountered a street scene fairly common then as now.  A man and woman were having a violent argument, and the man was starting to beat the woman severely.  Just on instinct, we stopped and my older son (he was an early teen) and I piled out of the car and approached the fight.  Telling my son to stay back (though he probably would have done as well or better if a real fight had occurred), I told the man to stop beating her, and, surprisingly,  he did.  I then asked the woman how we could help, but she embarrassedly said she was ok and the two went off together.

Afterwards, I reflected on how crazy my stunt had been.  Baltimore’s streets are rough; anyone who has watched “The Wire” knows how really mean they are.  He was probably armed at least with a knife, and I wasn’t; he certainly was younger and stronger and knew more about fighting than I.  I knew nothing about them or their reasons for fighting – husband and wife, pimp and prostitute, drug dealer and addict, whatever.  I would like to think what I did helped, but quite possibly they just went off to a quieter spot and resumed the battle; a more savage beating might have resulted because I had embarrassed him.  All I knew was that someone was being savagely beaten, and I had to do something.

I feel that way now about Syria.  A savage, unpitying beating of his own people is being administered by Assad.  Wise heads all over the place are saying that armed intervention would not work, for many reasons; they cite lack of international consensus, a strong Syrian army loyal to Assad, murky understanding about who the opposition really are, rough terrain that could lead to a long stalemate, and countless other good reasons.  Meanwhile thousands of innocents are being tortured and killed, and the international community is mostly just standing there looking horrified.

At an elevated international level, the impasse results from lack of resolution of an issue that has emerged only over the last twenty years or so; the traditional respect for national sovereignty versus the emerging international doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect” (RTP).  Respect for sovereignty has been around in Western culture since it was formulated at the Peace of Westphalia (called “The Peace of Exhaustion” by contemporaries) ending the bloody Thirty Years War in 1648.  Under it, nations were not to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations; while it has not always been honored, the good guys and bad guys remained clear, and the rules simple to understand.  It has been relatively easy to honor in a period where European boundaries were mostly fixed, religious differences grew less strident all the time, and the ceaseless massacres happening all around the world all were only shadowy rumors heard after the fact. 

RTP is a newcomer in international law, arriving in an age where instant graphic communication makes far away savagery too “up close and personal” to ignore.  RTP doctrine is that when a ruler attacks or neglects their own people in a major way the international community may intervene against the wishes of the ruler to correct the situation.  It’s not a universally accepted doctrine yet – in particular,  Russia and China, because of their own internal histories, are reluctant about it  –  and the boundaries and alternatives remain fuzzy, and will probably stay so at least for another century or so.  That’s the way things happen in international law.  Meanwhile, up close and personal, people die in Syria.

Long before the Thirty Years War or Syria, the issue existed.  It’s really the eternal argument between our heart and our brain that’s innate to being human.  The very first question raised to God in the Judeo-Christian Bible was Cain’s “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, and God’s answer was not a legal treatise on all the nuances of that question; Cain was branded a murderer and banished, which effectively was a “Yes”.  That “Yes” answer, it could be argued, is itself a major mark, one that separates us from wild beasts - the mark of humanity.  In times of horror, the heart mostly outvotes the head. We, unlike gazelles, do not graze along side lions feasting on our comrades, content in just knowing that we were not the target and that the lion for now is sated. We are entitled to ask good questions about how best to do it, but something has to be done.  Simply sitting in the car and watching in horror as savagery occurs will not suffice.  China and Russia, in particular, must determine the mark they bear, that of caring humanity or the mark of Cain.