AUTOCRATS VS. DESPOTS By

artappraiser — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 06:29:59 +0000

In reply to U.N.: How countries voted on human rights in Syria

AUTOCRATS VS. DESPOTS
By Steve Coll, Daily Comment @ newyorker.com, Feb. 17, 2012

[....] Qatar’s activism, however, has now helped goad the full membership of the Arab League, a previously moribund body, to extend the ideas that guided the Libyan campaign to the case of Syria and the mass killing of civilians by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. This has proved a more complicated endeavor, not only as a matter of geopolitics but also as a forum for action on the basis of principle.

The League has twenty-two member states, including Syria, which has been suspended. Only three League governments—Lebanon, Iraq, and Tunisia—could even be described as shaky sort-of democracies. Two more—Egypt and Libya—may be incubating such constitutional systems. Several softer monarchies—Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait—are liberalizing a little. Otherwise, the League is a club of self-protecting authoritarians, generals, kings, and dictators. Its members went after Qaddafi not because he offended their ideas about governance, but because they didn’t like or trust him; in the past, Qaddafi had organized assassination plots against some of his dictator brethren.

In the case of Syria, the League’s mainly Sunni Muslim-led members are motivated largely by their fear of Iran, which is mostly Shiite. Iran uses its alliance with Assad’s regime to maintain a land bridge to its radical ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon. If Assad falls, Iran will be weakened, a goal that is particularly compelling for the Gulf monarchies, which live in Iran’s shadow across the Persian Gulf and worry about its export of Shia revolution to their own soil. Also, the League’s members, like Western governments, do not want an unmanaged Syrian collapse to cause a regional war—a war that Iran might exploit at the expense of the Gulf monarchies.

To rally global support for action against Assad, at least some of the League’s illiberal members have at times adapted the terminology of the global human-rights movement [....]

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