Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

The announcement this past week that US President Donald Trump would freeze an already paltry 200 million dollars in additional aid funds that were to be used for recovery efforts in Syria would appear to make clear his administration’s complete lack of empathy for the people of that war-ravaged country. The additional funding had been announced during a Middle East diplomatic trip in February by former US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom Trump would unceremoniously sack via Twitter shortly afterward. Trump last week told a crowd of his supporters that the US would be leaving Syria “like, very soon” and said that it would be other countries’ job “to take care of it” from now on. This was not inconsistent with Trump’s stance on Syria prior to his election at the end of 2016, when he said that he thought a good solution would be to let Russia handle it. There can be little doubt that Russia is “handling it” by materially and militarily aiding and abetting the Syrian regime in...

Any inkling of some semblance of peace in Syria following the bombastic “cessation of hostilities” announcements by the men in charge of US and Russian foreign relations last week was short-lived indeed. Granted, in his public pronouncement of an agreement reached more by the Syrian War’s external agents than by its direct belligerents, US Secretary of State John Kerry did everything he could to dissuade anybody of the idea that what was to be implemented was “a ceasefire”. He said that the parties involved were more comfortable with the more ballpark term of “cessation of hostilities”. Even that term, however, proved a total misnomer. It quickly became clear that last week’s Syrian “peace” charade was really a case of unhelpful superpower intervention in a conflict that has gone from a warranted popular uprising against a tyrannical four-decade old regime to being the latest proxy-war battlefield for the new cold war between Russia and the West and for the burgeoning rivalries am...

As of this first week of October, Syria (and the world) became a lot scarier place. Already hell on earth, with half of its population displaced by war, hundreds of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands more injured or mutilated, the Syrian nation is now facing not only the airstrikes by the 60-country US-led coalition on Islamic State targets, but also the direct intervention of the Russian military against any and all rebels seeking to overthrow Moscow’s friends and allies in the harsh, authoritarian Bashar al-Assad regime. Syria is strategic to Russia in its Middle-Eastern backyard, and Moscow has a close-knit relationship with the ruling Assad family dating back to 1970, when Hafez al-Assad came to power after a series of military coups starting in 1963 and in which he gained ever greater control, rising from defense minister to prime minister and, finally, to president, an office he held for 30 years, before handing power down to son Bashar in 2000. Even before the 1970s...