Equal Opportunity to Quell Freedoms

"Relentless shelling has killed thousands of civilians and displaced the populations of entire towns. Massacres and other unlawful killings are perpetrated with impunity. An untold number of men, children and women have disappeared. Many are killed in detention; survivors live with physical and mental scars of torture. Hospitals and schools have been bombarded."
"Six million Syrians have fled "previously unimaginable crimes", each absorbed by their own "story of devastation and loss. A society has been ripped apart."
"The Syrian Arab Republic is a battlefield." The regime has committed "gross violations of human rights and the war crimes of torture, hostage-taking, murder, execution without due process, rape, attacking protected objects, and pillage."
While the rebels have committed: "murder, execution without due process, torture, hostage-taking and attacking protected objects."
United Nations report on the state of Syria's civil war

In this Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2013 photo, a Syrian girl poses for a portrait inside her tent at a temporary refugee camp in the eastern Lebanese town of al-Faour in the Bekaa valley, near the border with Syria. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

Both the regime and the rebels have shelled civilian areas indiscriminately. Neither have any regard for human life. They attack one another as though they have fully subscribed to the culture of death, and this is because they most certainly have. Famously, the jihadist extremists once taunted the West by deriding the West's horror of death, its veneration of life, its avoidance of atrocities. They, on the other hand, honoured death, sought it, had no fear of it, for death becomes a martyr who is then honoured by celestial virgins eager to serve his appetites.

A Syrian refugee sits on the ground at a temporary refugee camp in the eastern Lebanese town of al-Faour, Bekaa valley near the border with Syria, on Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2013. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The rebels in Syria may not originally have been of this ilk, but they have been well penetrated by the celebrators and deliverers of death. This may not have been what they had intended for their country as an oppressed majority whom their tyrannical Shia Baathist despot had long stepped upon, but this is what has resulted. It is, after all, what their President, Bashar al-Assad, identified them as representing, not Syrian civilians who had originally requested parity with their Shia neighbours and allowed liberty and equality. Terrorists.

And the United Nations, one of whose cherished human-rights obligations is to mediate between sparring solitudes, to find diplomatic measures that will take the place of violence and war, has been true to its record in its failure to commend to President Assad the better part of valour for a leader. It has, however, been able to assemble facts and figures and to present them as a narrative of the failure of a country to become a nation, of its president to become his office, of a people to respect one another. And the outside world cringes at the descriptions.


Syrian refugee, Mohammed Ahmed, 20, right, who fled his home with his family from Baba Amro, Homs province, carries his son at a temporary refugee camp, in the eastern Lebanese town of al-Faour, Bekaa Valley near the border with Syria, Lebanon, Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2013. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Ever conscious of his position as the world's most powerful leader-in-conscience, U.S. President Barak Obama found it possible to overlook the deaths of 120,000 Syrians and the internal and external displacement of millions until an outdated warning he had issued in the protective halo of his office was challenged beyond dispute and widely dispersed criticisms stung too much to be ignored. Forcing upon him an opinion and an option he sought to avoid, one that matched him fairly squarely with his predecessor whose choices he has denounced.

And then, suddenly, rescue. And from the unlikeliest source. One that now preens itself as a champion of peace over war. Russian President Putin, who never was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize - yet - smirkingly chiding the American people for allowing their Commander in Chief to lead them into yet another unwinnable war that would mire them in civil conflict of opinion and drain their treasury yet again. This, from a man who pursued a deadly conflict in Chechnya and then in Georgia, and who arranged the detention and occasionally assassinations of countless Russian journalists.

Putin and Obama have cordially exchanged hats; President Obama has doffed his white had and surrendered it to President Putin who handed over the black hat to the black man who pledged to restore America's respect within the international community. The former KGB man triumphing over the former Community Organizer. And the achievement an illusory figment of faint possibility that will see some semblance of awkward success in another year or so at the cost of another 50,000 dead Syrians.

Piffling.Trifles.


A Syrian refugee girl flashes the victory sign inside her tent at a temporary refugee camp, in the eastern Lebanese town of al-Faour, Bekaa valley near the border with Syria, Lebanon, Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2013. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)