robotnyck 10:54 pm on July 29, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment Tags: inaction ( 70 ), international hypocrisy ( 36 ) #Syria #Assad - Assad is responsible for the carnage in Syria washingtonpost/opinions/assad-is-responsible-for-the-carnage-in-syria/2013/07/28/c2d8d5fe-f57e-11e2-9434-60440856fadf_story.html [...] The immensity of death, flight and destruction in Syria, with these refugees being among the more fortunate flotsam, has not been a natural catastrophe. The all-encompassing criminality of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the clique around him remain the central reality of the evolution in Syria since March 2011. Unfortunately, this truth has been obscured, even sidelined, by the standard “post-modern” impetus in the West to equalize parties to conflicts and to indulge virtually any self-serving narrative or conspiracy theory. The West can thereby walk away from what has become the crime of the 21st century. Syrian regime criminality and responsibility have multiple dimensions, but three can serve as illustration. First, there was the regime’s initial determination to respond to unarmed protests with terror, torture and mass murder. According to none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking in June, “what is happening would not have happened” had Assad not spurned serious reform. Second, having given the opposition no choice but armed resistance, the regime escalated the violence by using every level of heavy weaponry and did so for months, overwhelmingly against defenseless civilians. Indiscriminate government use of long-range ballistic missiles against its own people registered a historic first. Human rights organizations have consistently been unanimous about the regime’s unrelenting perpetration of war crimes and crimes against humanity. While misdeeds by jihadists and others — often atrocious — should not be excused, opposition war crimes have been of a far lesser scale. Third, the regime has stoked the fires of radical Sunni Islamism. Of course jihadist sentiments already existed, and the Assad regime played its part before 2011 in manipulating them to trouble the divided neighboring societies of Lebanon and Iraq. Their inflation, however, relates above all to the regime’s military assaults in 2012 and 2013 that have pushed provincial, rural and suburban Sunni Arab Syrians to the wall. The jihadist absolutism that has metastasized across northern Syria reflects Assad’s brutalization of Syrians by almost every conceivable mode of abuse and violence, and it derives from the firestorm that he unleashed. That firestorm has attracted foreign fanatics. It is a pity that anyone in the West gives the time of day to the Syrian regime’s lying narrative that it is a defense against jihadism; few arsonists have ever paraded so impudently as firemen. [....] More in the article
Posted on: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 21:52:32 +0000
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