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...

By now, it is no secret that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is making a major play to strengthen his country’s presence in the Middle East region. His stubborn diplomatic and devastating military defense of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad alone provides clear evidence of this strategy. Putin has proven himself willing to bear the brunt of worldwide censure for the slaughter taking place under the Syrian regime, and even to take an active role in perpetrating it, rather than hand over the head of the current leader of the 40-year-old Assad regime. Obviously, this is not because of any particular personal love Putin might have for Assad (for the Russian leader, Assad is little more than a puppet, an instrument for execution of his strategy), but because Assad’s regime is the highest trump card Russia has in a game of ever-higher-stakes geopolitics. And, by this time, there can be little doubt in anyone’s mind that Putin’s goal is "to make Russia great again." The shin...

For months now, Aleppo has been in the grip of hell on earth. Indeed, it would be difficult to say whether or not what the people of Aleppo have experienced is worse than any hell imagined by the likes of Dante Alighieri. An evacuation effort that began on December 13 th , and that Russia had vowed to monitor and protect, was suspended on the 16 th , with both sides blaming each other for truce agreement violations. The government accused rebel militias of trying to smuggle out prisoners and heavy weaponry under cover of the evacuation, while each side accused the other of firing on evacuation and aid convoys. At one point this past week, prior to the evacuation attempt, bombs were falling on the shattered, ancient, Syrian city at a rate of one every twenty seconds. It was so dangerous to be on the ground there that war correspondents from major worldwide media were filing their stories from a safe distance outside the city or from neighboring nations like Turkey and Lebanon,...