Segal urges ‘coalition of the willing’ on Syria
A high-profile Conservative senator says Canada must be prepared to be part of a military operation with a “coalition of the willing” to end the bloodshed in Syria.
Senator Hugh Segal told the Senate this week Canada should work with the Arab League to help the beleaguered city of Homs, and create independent plans “to use air assets to contain and restrain the Syrian military.”
A military option should be considered along with ongoing diplomatic pressure to have the United Nations get further involved in Syria, Segal said.
By doing nothing, Canada and its allies are sending a message to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s administration and “to all the other monsters in the world” that there is no price to pay for killing civilians, Segal said in an interview Friday.
“They will continue to rag the puck, trying to kill more and more of those people who are opposed to the administration … and it will get way worse before it gets better.”
Canada and NATO have been cool to the idea of military intervention in Syria. The UN has approved resolutions on Syria, but none authorizing an air campaign to protect civilians similar to the campaign in Libya.
A call to the Prime Minister’s Office for comment was not returned before Friday evening.
Segal’s comments add to a week in which the Canadian government has focused more on the situation in Syria. On Monday, one day before Segal raised Syria in the Senate, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird announced Canada had closed its embassy in Damascus.
The same day, Baird announced Canada had frozen the assets of seven senior Syrian ministers and the Syrian central bank.
Then on Thursday, Baird criticized the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization after members of the agency’s executive board refused to kick Syria off a committee charged with investigating human-rights abuses.
The Arab League has attempted to bring a diplomatic end to the violence in Syria that has been going on for about a year, but so far has been unsuccessful.
The Arab League did get involved in Libya, aiding Canadian, French and British fighter jets that dropped bombs on forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi.
Segal said the same setup, with the Arab League in the lead, should be planned for Syria. If planning isn’t going on, he said, it should be.
“What you need to have is a coalition of the willing, preferably led by our friends in the Arab League,” Segal said.
Critics of military action argue that going into Syria would be more problematic than action in Libya. Syria is more mountainous and more densely populated than Libya, meaning the risk of civilian casualties is higher.