This month marks the third dismal year of the war in Syria. The obvious question here is: What if Bashar Assad continues to slaughter more of his people by waging a war of starvation and barrel bombing against them, and what if that slaughter continues unchecked by the international community five years or, God forbid, say a decade, into the future? To believe experts in several think tanks in the United States and Europe, this future is not just possible. It is likely.
In an editorial last Tuesday, the Washington Post lamented the fact that as the US appears to have lost interest, Assad became more emboldened to continue his campaign of terror, “unmolested and almost unnoticed.”
It equally lamented “the bankruptcy of the Obama administration policy” — not surprising, given that policy’s universal condemnation, even by legislators from his own party. The editorial was titled “Syria’s Forgotten War.”
The conflict in Syria may have become forgotten in Washington, or forgotten by a chief executive who has dismissed it as “someone else’s war,” but it is not forgotten by the people of the Middle East. It is, after all, taking place in the heartland of their world and they bear witness to its unspeakable horrors.
As the war enters its fourth year, people outside the Arab world remain so stupefied by what Assad has wrought on the Syrian people that at times they read the news of his atrocities with a measure of skepticism. Consider, as a case in point, that already iconic United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) photo disseminated by AP recently, showing a sea of hungry Palestinians, in their bomb-ravaged Yarmouk refugee camp clambering for food handouts.
When blogosphere skeptics suggested the photo was (surely, must’ve been) digitally faked, UN officials passionately denied that it was in any way tampered with. “The photo is an exact replica of reality,” retorted Chris Guiness, spokesman for the organization. The strikingly arresting photo, re-tweeted eight million times already, has been adopted by 130 humanitarian organizations, including UN agencies that had demanded (in vain) meaningful access to civilians in Syria trapped under siege. There are reports that when the number of tweets reaches 23 million, the number of Syria’s population before the war erupted, the campaign sponsors plan to display it on a giant screen in Times Square.
The gesture clearly will not deter Assad from continuing to maul his people with the facile ease of a tyrant who suspects that no one will make him pay for his perfidy, but it will at least alert people to the fact that, in a way, no man among us is innocent. We are all complicit in that which leaves us indifferent, for by not taking an interest in politics, by not being engaged in what is happening in the now global village we all inhabit together, we will effectively be giving our approval to the prevailing order. Come to think of it, posting that photo on a giant screen in Times Square will be more of a contribution to raising the consciousness of Americans about what is happening in Syria, about standing up to the jeering totem of evil, as it were, than anything President Obama, putative leader of the free world, has done so far.
The conflict in Syria cannot, should not, be allowed to sink into a protracted war that would drag on for another three years, or as many of us dread, a decade. It has already cost the lives of 140,000. Extrapolated to the population of the US, that would be as if the US government had mounted an assault against its own people and killed roughly two million of them. Imagine two million American citizens put under siege, bombed, starved and tortured to death by their military forces on orders of their own political leaders. The only place where this kind of outrage has taken place in modern history was in Russia during the first half of the 20th century, when communist leaders lied to the world, and then lied some more, about what the Soviet Union was doing to human beings in the Gulag and labor camps.
And current Russian leaders, heirs to that tradition of blatant mendacity, tell such improbable lies, so openly and so blatantly, that you wonder at the puerile bent of their minds. Recall, in that regard, what President Vladimir Putin, Assad’s enabler, had to say about the use by his protégé in Damascus of poison gas against his own people last year: “No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria,” the Russian president averred, “but there’s every reason to believe it was used, not by the Syrian Army but by opposition forces to provoke intervention by their powerful patrons, who side with the fundamentalists.”
Almost exactly three months ago this month, in the small town of Dara’a, 15 children (children, in the name of mercy!) were arrested and beaten mercilessly by security forces for writing pro-democracy graffiti on walls, an event that triggered mass protests around the country against the regime. Since then, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, 5.6 million children have suffered grievously. A million continue to live under siege. Roughly 10,000 have been killed. Three million have had their education completely disrupted. Two million need counseling for trauma. All were ripped of their innocence. And the Syrian dictator remains firmly in the saddle — so firmly in fact that he will “run for election” in mid-2014. Not unlike the recent election of Kim Jong-un in North Korea, Assad will win 100 percent of the popular vote. Meanwhile, Syria will continue to bleed. Pity the nation.
