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 perpetrating war crimes and mass slaughter against the very
people that it rules.
That said, the fact is that US presence will probably not be terribly
missed in Syria. Up to now, Washington’s attitude toward the horrendous war
that has been raging there without respite for the past seven years has been
lukewarm at best.
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| Assad and Putin, a living hell of fire and fury. |
Even ostensible US invention in failed peace efforts under the
administration of Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, was less than hearty and
quickly gave way to an apparent desire to tread lightly around Russia and to
avoid helping rebels attempting to overthrow the pro-Russian regime there,
rather than seeking to protect the most vulnerable victims of that conflict,
innocent Syrians on whom the Russian-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad is
raining down a living hell of fire and fury.
The fear of the West that jihadist groups fighting Assad could end up
being even more anti-Western than the current regime is behind their apparent
indifference to the horrific plight of the Syrian people. Nobody but Putin
among world leaders wants Assad in power but the rebels fighting him are an
unknown factor. Assad at least pays lip-service to the idea of a modern,
secular—albeit dictatorial—Syria, rather than a radical fundamentalist regime, and
Russia will make sure that he sticks to that policy since Moscow doesn’t want
to have to deal with the whims of an Islamist theocracy either. So Assad has
the unconditional support of Putin (and his UN veto) and has garnered the tacit
preference of the West, despite pseudo-humanitarian chest-beating to the
contrary.
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| A US media fireworks show with no encore |
Trump’s own 2017 attack on a Syrian air base—in which 59 Tomahawk missiles
worth 100 million dollars (half the amount of the Syria recovery funds that the
Trump administration is now cutting) were launched from a US naval vessel in
retaliation for one of many chemical warfare attacks that Assad has ordered
against his own people—was, as it turned out, largely a media fireworks show
that hasn’t been repeated since, despite continuing gross human rights
violations and war crimes being committed by Assad and foreign forces backing
his nefarious regime.
Furthermore, what Western intervention that there has been in
Syria—whether direct or through regional surrogates—has mostly been aimed at
destroying ISIL, the worldwide Islamist terror organization that Washington had
long seen as the number one threat to US security. Precious little of what the
US has done in that war has had anything to do with shielding the Syrian people
from the inhuman violence being waged against them by their own authoritarian
government with the indispensable help of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
More specifically, Washington’s fight against ISIL in Syria is considered
by the current administration to be basically over. Even if efforts to destroy
the last pockets of ISIL resistance have not so far met with success, the
US-led coalition fighting there has, indeed, taken back most of the positions
that ISIL once held, and it apparently seems clear to the current Trump team
that if Russia hopes to keep Bashar al-Assad in power, the ragged remains of
the ISIL combat groups still in Syria will have to be dealt with, if not by
Damascus, then more than likely by Moscow in order for the dictatorship to
prevail. So the only thing Washington and the West as a whole need to do in
order to declare their role in the Syrian tragedy finished, is to celebrate the
“win” over ISIL and look the other way as Assad, with the help of his Russian cohorts,
continues to murder and maim innocent men, women and children by the thousands in
that nation, where the war has so far claimed nearly half a million lives. |
| Iran, Turkey, Russia...and Assad forever |
No sooner had the US president announced that he was stepping back from
Syria than Russia, Iran and Turkey let it be known that they would seek to
broker “peace” in Syria. It should be pointed out once again the only goal of
Russia in Syria is to keep Assad in power, since Assad protects and enables
Russian interests in the region. But it is worth noting too that the Iranian
government has also long backed the Assad regime, finances Hezbollah guerrillas
that are a major pro-Assad force in the war and that, while Turkey is
ostensibly opposed to Assad, it has long been maneuvering around its US ally in
order to attack Kurdish forces fiercely opposing both ISIL and Assad in Syria,
since it considers the Kurds to be enemies of the Turkish state. Seen in this
way, it is hard to imagine how any action that these three countries might take
will lead to any sort of peace except one in which the Assad regime remains in
power and his opponents end up being crushed in a war that will continue to
generate overwhelming collateral damage.
Clearly, there can be no doubt that the innocent civilians of Syria—the
ones remaining there, since the fighting has given rise to an exodus of more
than 5 million refugees and of some 6 million homeless migrants—find themselves
trapped in what has become a living hell, a term that is clearly more literal
than figurative. The devastation wreaked by the war is obvious. Nowhere in the
country is there anywhere in which entire neighborhoods or entire cities have
not been reduced to rubble. The extent of the humanitarian crisis bred by the
war is mind-boggling and there is no sign of peace in sight.
Like the Rwanda genocide before it, the war in Syria is a humanitarian
horror show in which a common world front to save an entire people from mass
violence and murder is conspicuous by its absence. The major powers have forsaken
the Syrian people in pursuit of their own geopolitical interests, while dogged
Russian diplomatic resistance has tied the hands of the United Nations.
Emboldened by Western indifference and Russian collaboration, Bashar
al-Assad has renewed and heightened his cold-blooded campaign of murder and
mayhem against his own people in recent weeks, as the world looks on and does
less than nothing, and while the neighborhoods where Syrian men, women and
children once thrived have become the blood-soaked battlegrounds for a super-power
proxy war and for a regional power war of attrition that seems to know no end. As
such, Syria has become yet another ugly blot on the history of humanitarian
intervention, and an indictment of shame against world leaders as a whole.
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