Imperialismo e guerra civil no mundo árabe: a tragédia síria: parte 1 a virada antiintervencionista

Abstract

First of a two-part article that analyzes the Syrian crisis within an international context, and defends a more proactive international participation to resolve it. Despite its popularity among sectors of the Latin-American intelligentsia, the concept of imperialism is of little help in understanding current Middle Eastern crises. Although the region’s recent history has been marked by foreign interventions, not all of those had an imperialist character or economic motive. The post-Cold War era was marked by attempts to build a new international order on the basis of new norms allowing intervention in cases of blatant violation of human rights and/or risk of WMD proliferation. The new democratic interventionist consensus that was in the making was, however, broken by the Islamist attacks of 9/11/2001. These led to American-led interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, where a series of failures both external (related to issues of legitimacy, intelligence, postwar planning, soft power, and selectivity) and internal ended up undermining the results of the “war on terror”. This eventually provoked demoralization in Western democracies and in the US in particular, and created an anti-interventionist backlash: the reaction continues until today despite the Middle ast’s unchanged global significance in strategic, economic, and cultural terms. The new tendency toward a certain international disengagement has dictated the West’s lukewarm answers to the 2011 Arab Spring. In Syria reticence to support the anti-authoritarian opposition has not only allowed the repressive Ba`th regime to survive (with Russian and Iranian support) but also opened a window of opportunity to radical Islamists.