The United States and France – though no longer Britain, it seems- are poised to intervene militarily in Syria. While helping to remove the Assad regime is an urgent priority, the expected campaign of air strikes seems like a headlong rush without legal basis. And one which is a form of camouflage for past errors and acts of cowardice, the opportunistic management of public opinion and a possible trigger for a regional cataclysm with incalculable consequences. Yet, argues Mediapart editor François Bonnet, there are alternatives.
Let us say it absolutely clearly. Every true democrat must today want the Assad regime in Syria to fall, and to help it to go. A true democrat, in other words a free citizen, is someone who refuses to look at the world through the eyes of conspiracy theories that regard Western countries simply as docile lackeys of the Great Satan, imperialist America. A free citizen is someone who considers that universal values must be defended everywhere and that the promotion and defence of these values are the only way to establish the legitimacy of international law and its organisations, with the United Nations at their head.
