Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail)

The indiscriminate pummeling of particular neighborhoods in the Syrian city of Homs continues, with scores dying every day. That the dead today included the French photojournalist Remi Ochlik and the American born Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin adds international names alongside the nameless Syrian dead. It also brings the bloodshed into our own civilization and media in ways that hit home with those within the Euro-Atlantic political class, and media elite. Many now are beginning to analogize the situation in Homs to that faced by Sarajevo at the outset of the Bosnian war in April 1992.

Its interesting how Bosnia has become a stock of references, metaphors and lessons in the rhetoric of Western policymakers and security intellectuals, not to mention an appealing locale for famous auteur film-making. Hearing officials in the Obama administration, and former Bush administration officials like Paul Wolfowitz, recently evoke the threat of ‘another Srebrenica’ in Libya was instructive about how Bosnia is now a sign system projected onto current conflicts. The implications of this have to be considered empirically in each case but it is interesting that many Euro-Atlantic figures reach for Bosnian analogies rather than regional ones to understand contemporary Syria. Bosnia seems to signify: intervention was the right choice, even though it was hard and did not look promising. Iraq signifies that intervention was the wrong choice, even though it looked easy.

The Lebanese born American academic Fouad Adjami was a terrible guide to Iraq for the US public and Bush administration in 2003. I distinctly remember him claiming that the US invaders would be met with flowers. Such irresponsible claims lead to a massive foreign policy blunder, and its a wonder such false prophets are ever listened to again. But they are. Last night he was on television once more (BBC America) telling us that Homs is like Sarajevo, and that the good people of Syria, like Bosnians in the past, deserve our help and intervention (unspecified). Too simple, too simple by far, an appeal purely to sentimentality rather than a considered argument that empathy for the suffering requires our responsibility to act, and that doing so with regional allies has a worthy normative rationale beyond geopolitical scenarios concerning Israel and Iran.

This evening the journalist John Burns was interviewed by BBC America and also evoked Sarajevo as an appropriate analogy to Homs. Somewhat astonishingly he cited the old figure of 250,000 dead before the West intervened, a figure that has long been demonstrated as inflated. Just over 100,000 died, way way too many of course, but the slip revealed a memory that was not empirically responsible.

Is Homs Sarajevo? Yes and most definitely not. It is, at base, a similar instance of an armed force firing indiscriminately into an urban area, a place of human habitation. It is a war crime, and should be prosecuted as such (I see the UN are now recommending prosecution of officials for ‘war crimes’). But the situation in Syria is one where a predatory regime is seeking to retain its hold on power by bloody and brutal means. This is not comparable to Bosnia at all, which was a nationalist war of aggression against a capital city that symbolized a multiethnic cosmopolitan alternative. Syria is often described as ethnically divided like Bosnia but this is also misleading. The degree to which the regime has successfully ethnicized certain segments of the population is an open question, and we will not know the answer to this until the crisis plays itself out.

There should be intervention to end the bloodshed in Syria but it should be undertaken by Turkey, with allies from the Middle East. NATO and the Euro-Atlantic powers should play a supportive human security focused role. There are no formulaic lessons from the Bosnian war. Spectres of Sarajevo, and righteous outrage over the deaths of these brave journalists, should not substitute for the task of thinking about Syria on its own terms.