It’s not a difficult point to grasp, but opponents of action outside the UN framework not only fail to grasp it; they can barely bring themselves to address it: the point, that is, that if the body to which it falls to do something doesn’t do it, it won’t get done unless someone else takes it on. Speaking at a news conference in St. Petersburg today, Barack Obama laid out the argument:
I respect those who are concerned about setting precedents of action outside of a U.N. Security Council resolution. I would greatly prefer working through multilateral channels and through the United Nations to get this done.
But ultimately what I believe in even more deeply, because I think that the security of the world and my particular task looking out for the national security of the United States requires that when there’s a breach this brazen of a norm this important and the international community is paralyzed and frozen and doesn’t act, then that norm begins to unravel.
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You know, over 1,400 people were gassed. Over 400 of them were children. This is not something we’ve fabricated. This is not something that we are looking – are using as an excuse for military action.
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But what I also know is, is that there are times where we have to make hard choices if we’re gonna stand up for the things that we care about. And I believe that this is one of those times. And if we end up using the U.N. Security Council not as a means of enforcing international norms and international law but, rather, as a barrier to acting on behalf of international norms and international law, then I think people rightly are going to be pretty skeptical about the system and whether it can work to protect those children that we saw on those videos.
Pretty sceptical is right. The rest is here.
A different point of view is that of Slavoj Žižek. For him this is part of a false struggle, a pseudo-struggle, which awaits ‘the radicalisation of the struggle for freedom and democracy into a struggle for social and economic justice’ to ‘save us’ from its grim prospect. And until that day, children…