In his speech on Tuesday, President Barack Obama argued that the United States is not the global police force.
However, the situation in Syria remains tumultuous, and the White House seems to believe that the only imperative is securing chemical weapons despite earlier demands for Bashar al-Assad’s resignation.
From a geopolitical perspective, it is clear that intervention in Syria is not only necessary but also inevitable.
The Syria we know today was sculpted by a callous French architect after World War I.
Unfortunately, the French failed to account for the complexity of the Middle East’s rich history and diversity.
Sunni, Shiite and Alawite Muslims and Christian Arabs were housed together with a religious and ethnically different Kurdish people in the Levant.
More than 90 years later, the unstable lines drawn by the French are witnessing a civil war where, according to http://www.CNN.com, the ruling Alawite Assad family faces the Sunni Free Syrian Army, and both factions are brutally sinister.
However, the belligerents of the conflict aren’t monolithic — there is a plethora of sectarian alliances on the ground in Syria.
For example, last month an Al-Jazeera report declared that the Shiite group Hezbollah was officially backing the Assad government.
Hezbollah — which, according to the U.S State Department, has been an official terrorist organization since 1997— is bolstered by a predominantly Shiite Iran.
On the other hand, an NBC report published this week warns of the radical elements of the Free Syrian Army, specifically al-Qaida.
With such a complex and hostile environment, it’s obvious why Obama and Washington policymakers are hesitant about intervention in Syria. Instead, U.S. officials have used words like “limited” and “surgical” when referring to intervention in the fractured Levant.
If the U.S. does not intervene, there will be severe consequences in terms of human rights.
According to The Huffington Post, more than 110,000 people have already died as a result of the conflict, and an often-neglected horror of the civil war is the use of mass rape.
The number of refugees illustrates just how dire the situation has become.
The United Nations reported that nearly 2 million people have fled Syria.
This creates regional instability as well, as Syrians seek a new home in neighboring countries such as Turkey and Iraq.
So, if there are both idealist and realist reasons for intervening in Syria, and a limited strike will not suffice, what is the solution? The answer is intervention. Because there is no moral authority on the ground in Syria, the U.S. must intervene as it did when there was no authority in Kosovo.
Ideally, Syria should be Balkanized, therefore reshaping the arbitrary political liens that the French created. This would give a home to every group of people living in Syria.
Intervention will consolidate the U.S. role in the world as a leader and end a humanitarian crisis, delivering a decisive blow to al-Assad and his sponsors.
Richard Vieira is a UF political science senior. His column runs on Fridays. A version of this column ran on page 6 on 9/13/2013 under the headline "US should intervene in Syrian civil war"
