The carnage in Syria inflicted by the regime on its own people has now reached epic proportions. Yet, slammed with it daily in our media, we have become inured to it, as if we no longer possess the capacity to feel outrage anymore — outrage at the spectacle of famished children in besieged Damascus suburbs and emaciated civilians in Homs, cruelly denied deliveries of food and medicine by government officials, outrage at deadly “barrel bombs,” filled with nails and shrapnel, dropped from helicopters on civilian targets, including residential complexes, hospitals, schools and bakeries, outrage at the mass execution of prisoners — and the rest of it.
These are unconscionable war crimes that the minority Alawite regime is now committing with impunity, perhaps convinced that, though the free world is watching, including the world’s putative leader, the United States, no one is likely to punish it. After all, the regime has Russia by its side at the Security Council, ensuring that the UN will take no action beyond sponsoring feckless “peace negotiations” in Geneva and it has Iran covering its back in the region. Does President Obama’s administration have a Syria policy? Ostensibly it does. And that policy is that “no one wants us to undertake an effort in size and scope there similar in size and scope to what we did in Iraq.”
Good, here then are a few thoughts from no one. Inaction is no policy, especially when embraced by a big power. No less a “no one” than President Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry told a group of congressmen earlier this week that the administration’s Syria policy has, very simply, failed.
The US president will travel to the Kingdom in late March, where he will hear from the leaders of an ally about how this fickle Syria policy has strained relations with their country and how America can, and should, do much more to put a stop to Bashar Assad’s war crimes. Surely, whatever steps the US takes need not involve American boots on the ground — war-weary Americans will not go for it, not after Afghanistan and Iraq — or anything remotely similar to that. All the US need to do is demand that the Syrian regime cease and desist from committing any more atrocities, at pain of missile strikes fired at appropriate military targets in Syria, such as airbases from whence Syrian fighter jets and attack helicopters, responsible for all that mayhem and suffering, mount their assaults.
Lest we forget, that approach worked before. When last summer, for example, the administration threatened to bomb military bases in the country unless the regime handed over for destruction its toxic chemical weapons (that it had earlier used indiscriminately against civilians, killing roughly 1,400 people), the regime complied. That’s the least, at this point, that Washington can do to alleviate the Syrian people’s destitution and check Assad’s criminal excesses; excesses he feels he can go on committing in full view of the world because the world has either lost its capacity for moral outrage or has accustomed itself to see the Syrian regime’s savagery as routine. All of which has emboldened the man to believe that anything goes in this war because there is no one out there either willing or able to put the squeeze on him.
What Assad is guilty of, at the very least, is what political scientist R.J. Rummel — who coined the term half a century ago — has called democide (from the Greek “demos” meaning people), which is the murder of any people by their own government, including groups within the country that the leaders feel should be eradicated for political reasons, or due to perceived future threats. And Assad here no doubt is following in the footsteps of his father, Hafez Assad, who in 1982 did away with an estimated 15,000 Syrians in the city of Hama, where major neighborhoods were reduced to rubble, in pursuit of perceived enemies of the state
On Jan. 15, 2012, UN chief Ban Ki-moon, in a keynote address at a conference in Beirut on democracy in the Arab world, told the audience: “Today I say again to President Assad of Syria: Stop the violence. Stop killing your people. The path of repression is a dead end.” As the secretary-general of the United Nations, he spoke for the international community. It is time that that international community, with the US as a major player within it, heeded his call and put a stop to political murder or democide in this tormented land we call Syria, because it is a call that unquestionably Assad himself is not likely any time soon to heed.
