Missiles over Istanbul? Or just knock-out-their-eyes tear gas?

So, now that the Turkish government, under the fiats of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip "Facebook is the worst menace to society" Erdogan, is running down nonviolent protesters and shooting tear gas cannisters into their heads and permanently blinding them, should we ask John McCain what to do? Or John Kerry? These are some of the leaders of the conservatives and liberals who want to ramp up the US military aid and action in Syria because Bashar al-Assad is violent against violent insurgents and anyone else affiliated with them or nearby when his Syrian military strikes.

Oh--that's right, Turkey is in NATO. We can't really bomb them. We, in fact, provide them with their bombs. I'm sure we can expect more reports from yet another Muslim country in which pro-democracy demonstrators are hit with weapons marked "Made in the USA."

Just leave it alone. The world of Islam should be answerable to the entire world, not to the US alone and not to some rogue coalition or military alliance unduly influenced by the US. Does the world of Islam need meddling from the outside? Yes, if the reformed UN comes to believe it. What is justified in the name of Islam--beheadings, stonings, ad nauseam--is as ghastly as what is justified in the name of the national interest--or the humanitarian fig leaf--of the US, at least when done by the US military. Even Islamic scholars who claim that they understand nonviolence sometimes do not. An example is Zeki Saritoprak, who authored a journal article in Muslim World in 2005 that first claims that Mohammed was nonviolent and never had a single act of violence attributed to him, and, just two sentences later, notes that the Prophet did 'defend himself.' Well, it's one or the other, Dr. Saritoprak, not both.

A pax on both their houses. The US and NATO should be answerable to the entire world, not just to themselves. Like Assad, Obama and his spokespeople for drones justify killing children by noting the violence of the individuals who were the nominal targets of the strikes--which are made against them or anyone nearby. The inescapable illogic and illegality of these claims should, at some point, challenge us all to help think about how to convert our war system to a peace system.

We should be spending some serious funding on this research into improved sanctions, people power, de-escalation best practices, crowdsourcing early warning, grievance satisfaction, win-win negotiation, and other nonviolent enforcement alternatives. Humanitarian war is oxymoronic, and our solutions are not the military, even though that is by far our biggest investment. It is good money after bad and we have spent ourselves silly, a bit like the cigaret companies of the 1950s and 60s. We have a successful propaganda machine for a product--violence--that has caused and spread a cancer throughout our body politic. We will either learn to fix these problems from a broad-based, racially, religiously, and generally diverse societal democratic effort or we will see the 'solutions' imposed yet again by the elites so used to getting the benefits while we get the costs.


References
Saritoprak, Z. (2005). An Islamic Approach to Peace and Nonviolence: A Turkish Experience. Muslim World, 95(3), 413-427. doi:10.1111/j.1478-1913.2005.00102.x

Stout, Jeffrey (2010). Blessed are the organized: Grassroots democracy in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.