Comment on “For desperate Syrians, a search for any way out” (Daily Star, 04. February 2013 – David Ignatius)

Arming “paramilitary” forces, which in fact are militias, has rarely been a good idea. They take the knowledge and the arms. Once they got what they wanted, they are loose guns and often the nightmare of their fellow countrymen.

Ordinary people in Syria don’t have an agenda. They want to eat, drink and send their children to school. Life in Syria was not as bad for the majority of people as one might think when now we read about the “dictator” Bashar al-Assad, who was the “President” for ten years before the uprising.

Life has become hell in many places of the country, and the humanitarian situation is dire. The West removed one dictator and threw Iraq into the abyss. The unfinished conflict is heating up again.

A dictatorship is not what one wants to experience as dissident or oppositionist. But Syria has not been Iraq and is not North Korea. It was possible to make some kind of living there.

The Lebanese civil war should remind everybody in charge of the consequences that are looming if militia leaders get their way. Even if the fragmentation of the cedar republic might have been the intention of the exercise: Lebanon could be controlled. Syria cannot.

Western countries face the contradiction of wanting to project and export democracy but being better off with dictators, who – like Bashar al-Assad – are sitting ducks. They guarantee political stability and access to energy resources as is the case in the Gulf region. Kingdom and dictatorship often are two sides of the same coin.

Arabs, as most people in the world, want to be the masters of their own destiny. And they are not holding back when it comes to displaying their capacities in that regard “if we had the chance and not such bad governments.”

Now is the time to make good on such words and forget about “what can we do? We are only Arabs.”

Democracy is the best yet known model of bringing people together in a more or less fair way. Europe and the U.S. had to fight wars leaving tens of millions of victims to come to that conclusion.

The question arises for the Arab world and for Syria in particular: Is it worth to pay a similar price to enforce democracy, which may take decades or even never see the light of the day?

If for once the West wants to make a difference in its Middle East policy it should leave that decision to the Syrian people. Alone.