The Tinder Box

Revolutions have historically been violently bloody events. To revolt against the prevailing authority is to understand that you place yourself in extreme danger. Revolutions take place only where rigid authority exists. Where tyranny stifles peoples' lives. That tyranny turns to outright, unrelenting brutality to maintain itself, to repress uprisings. Blood flows and staunches the enthusiasm of people determined to live free lives.

Just as in war it is those among the civilian population who suffer most, so too when revolutionary zeal transcends caution and obedience, and innocents, whether siding with the regime or against it, are harmed. Women and children don't fight wars or mount insurrections, men of fighting age do, young, aggressive and arrogant, believing that their will and determination will more than offset superior forces.

Women bring their children with them in support of their men into the public square, to voice their anger at the regime, to assert their need as human beings to live lives of liberty and respect. When the response comes in the form of artillery, everyone is a target and everyone dashes to the assumed safety of home. When those homes are shelled, impassively, deliberately, there is no safety.

AFP PHOTO/HO/LCC SYRIA

A handout picture released by Local coordination Committees in Syria (LCC Syria) on February 22, 2012 shows fire on the roof of a building in the Baba Amr neighborhoud of the flashpoint city of Homs, allegedly during the bombardment of the city. Syrian forces launched a massive bombardment of rebel districts of Homs on February 23, defying a world outcry over the killing of two Western journalists and a citizen reporter who were among the few to bear witness of the civilian toll

Bashar al-Assad is relentless in his response to the main site of the protests against his ongoing reign. The city of Homs is being reduced to rubble. Bodies continue to pile up in the Baba Amro neighbourhood. "Helicopters flew reconnaissance overhead then the bombardment started", Reuters was informed by a Homs activist. The UN-sanctioned, NATO-led air support in Libya might be reflected here, but wasn't there a lesson learned in Libya?

Doctors - even veterinarians, using their knowledge of animal surgery - are desperately trying to treat wounded civilians in primitive ad hoc clinical conditions. "President Assad wants to finish the Homs situation by Sunday to prepare for the constitutional referendum. Then he will turn to Idlib", confided a Lebanese official, close to the Syrian government - undoubtedly a member of Hezbollah.

The "Friends of Syria" talks in which the United States, European and Arab countries, Turkey and other nations will be involved will establish what is obvious; that they are all appalled and disgusted by President al-Assad's bloody, uncompromising push to destroy the centre of Homs and with it the insurrection against his rule. His father extinguished ten thousand lives there decades earlier, and he is on his way to matching his father's record.

Nothing is ever simple, that's why the cow got hung up on that sliver of a moon. Sunni Syrians are held hostage by a Shiite branch of Islam that rules the country and disadvantages the majority Sunni population, therefore they are angrily restive. A condition that prevails elsewhere in the Middle East, and often in reverse order. Behind the rage lurks fanatical Islamism. And in the crannies live very worried Syriac Christians.

Nicolas Sarkozy is fuming that he is fed up. "This regime must go and there is no reason that Syrians don't have the right to live their lives and choose their destiny freely. If journalists were not there, the massacres would be a lot worse." Wrong, he's wrong.

There is reason that Syrians have no human right to choose their own destiny, for this is a tribal society with no social cohesion where sectarian violence erupts to extinguish lives carelessly and viciously. And journalists are smuggling themselves into the scene, risking their lives and losing their lives and acting as witness to the atrocities.

Their presence does not stop the massacres. Their presence details the massacres. And in the process those journalists risk their lives. And they tragically lose their lives. And what if this revolt is unstoppable, and the civil war simply heats up further, embroiling others within the white-heat of revolution?

Turkey, for example, so zealously condemning Syria, and sheltering thousands of Syrian refugees, knows full well that Iran's Revolutionary Guards are in Syria, aiding and assisting the regime, and that Iran's support and funding of the regime helps maintain it.

And Turkey, alongside Russia, in its turn is busy assisting Iran through its banking difficulties, substantially aiding it to acquire the necessities it needs so it can continue defying the United Nations in its drive to acquire nuclear weaponry...