generalspeaking

Kindly Clarify: Do Exactly What?

Do nothing and the death toll in Syria will clamber even higher. The figures variously cited range from 70,000 to 100,000 dead. With millions of Syrian refugees both internally and externally displaced. Living in miserable refugee camps, children becoming ill from hygiene-opposing diseases, hunger stalking the desperate. And both the regime and the rebels being accused of using chemical weapons. But just a little, just a bit of a try-out. For starters, you know?

Do something, as in getting involved, and the same will happen. Britain and France consider overflights, and giving additional arms to the rebels, claiming they will bypass the jihadists and only arm the rebels, and good luck on that one. Since, for the most part, the rebels prefer now to have the terrorists do their efficient work as only they are so capable of doing, given their experience, their training, their own pilfered Libyan arms.

Egypt is hosting 62,000 Syrians, Iraq 143,000, Turkey 320,000, Jordan 450,000 and Lebanon another 450,000. That's a lot of people to attempt to give shelter to, to 'house', to feed, to care for their medical needs. Even with the help of the United Nations, the economies of those sheltering neighbours are certain to take a hit they can ill afford, with the exception perhaps of Turkey.

But they all have their own problems, each of them is threatened by their own potential revolts through their straitened economies, through sectarian violence, through terror jihadist attacks, through instability of one kind or another, prevalent at the best of times, much less the worst of times, common to the region. Still, they all want the U.S. to go in, to stop it all. Saudi Arabia and Qatar would like that; no need for them to do something practical aside from gloomy predictions.

Syria has succumbed to the last stages of dysfunction in its agony of bloodthirsty barbarism. The regime succumbed fairly swiftly to the perceived promise of a violent response to peaceful protest on the theory that violence would stifle the protest and everyone would decamp and matters return to normal. Arresting and torturing and killing adolescents who dared to join the protests did not endear the regime to the majority Sunnis.

That was then, and much time and carnage has passed, with government forces bombing its own cities and neighbourhoods laid waste, while those who could, fled. The horrific loss of life and the maiming and the grief and migration was thought to signal the end of everything, but nothing ended, the carnage simply continued and intensified, and then chemical weapons became a threat.

Carla Del Ponte reported "there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas ... on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities", causing the UN team of which she is a part, to scramble to disown her statement. With the United States incredulously denying that possibility, and reiterating its belief that the regime had used the chemical - just a tad.

The news continues to trickle out. The rebels gain a town, then fall back as the regime re-takes the area. Each issues statements of triumphantly having prevailed. Hezbollah has replaced the regime military on the Golan border. The regime has given subtle warning to Jordan, to Lebanon, to Turkey through 'inadvertent' firing across borders. Turkey is threatened that Syria will make use of its Kurdish paranoia.

And Israel has most certainly outlived the hostile truce that has existed between it and Syria for so many years, now that the regime can claim Israel has committed to siding with the terrorists against the Syrian government, and all barriers to attacking Israel have now fallen. Syria is committed to transferring all the advanced weapons to Hezbollah, the more powerful, more far-reaching rockets; all theirs.

While the regime lasts, for however much longer it can, even with the desperate aid of Iran and the quiet conspiratorial aid of Iraq. What then happens to the Syrian Alawites, the Druze, the Christians, when Bashar decamps with his ruling elite? Assuming he can in fact escape a fate that can be held to be worse than death; dishonour, dismemberment, then death.

Bloodlust will overtake the humanity of those who were oppressed and who suffered the deranged response of the regime to a majority-population revolt. They will seek to expunge from the country all vestiges of those who prospered under the Baath regime of Bashar al-Assad. Before they are themselves consumed by the triumphant Sharia-imposing Islamists for whom moderation is a sin.

Labels: Aggression, Atrocities, Chaos, Conflict, Hezbollah, Iran, Revolution, Syria, Terrorism

posted by Pieface @ Friday, May 10, 2013