The Choice Not Ours

"If there is no international intervention in Syria it will become a second Afghanistan, a second Somalia."
Fahad al-Masri, Free Syrian Army spokesman

"These forces feel that all groups formed abroad without returning to the country do not represent them, so the forces will not recognize them.
"These forces call on military and civilian forces to unite under a clear Islamic framework based on sharia law, which should be the sole source of legislation."
Liwa Tawhid, Aleppo

Men search for survivors amid the rubble of collapsed buildings after what activists said was shelling by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo's Fardous neighborhood on August 26. (Malek Alshemali) 

With the agreement between the United States and Russia over giving a chemical-weapons-attack free pass to the Syrian regime of Alawite President Bashar al Assad, after President Barack Obama had announced unequivocally that the United States in concert with allies like France and Turkey was prepared to launch a limited, disciplined but consequential attack on Syria, the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian National Coalition have been devastated.

Turkey, a fierce critic of Syrian President al-Assad has been muted. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly its president has condemned the world community for its reluctance to produce any meaningful measures to halt the slaughter of Sunni Syrians. Turkey has taken in fleeing Syrian refugees, it has given refuge and support to the FSA and representatives of the Syrian National Coalition.

But it has failed to sunder its relations with Iran, the Islamist country that is the patron of Syria, and whose Shia Lebanese-based Hezbollah militia has been instrumental, along with the Iranian Republican Guard, in giving the Syrian regime military assistance of a nature more than sufficient to retake critical areas from the rebels determined to retain them as rebel strongholds. The regime's superior arms, numbers and foreign intervenors will not suffer with the surrender of chemical agents.

(In a sign of the realpolitik that expresses the alliances of the region, a rapprochement between Turkey and Iran, reflective of Islamic realities is proceeding behind the scenes. Turkey's president and its prime minister do not quite appear to be singing from the same hymnal. And while Turkey may express its loathing of Syria and its president, it sees cooperation with Iran to its own benefit.)

But that surrender has formed the basis for the hypocritical pretense that the United States with the assistance of Russia which has consistently stalled any forward momentum within the United Nations to sanction Syria, has provided the thin pretext that something meaningful has been done to halt the bloodlust and destruction wreaked upon desperate civilian Syrians.

The Islamist groups battling the regime, consisting of those with links to al-Qaeda; the Islamic State of Iraq & the Levant, and Jabhat al-Nustra along with Ahrar al-Sham and a number of like-minded brigades have stated their divorce from the hugely numerous but relatively ineffectual Free Syria Army militias to form their own united force. Whose focus they state as the creation of an Islamic state under Sharia law in Syria.

The initial perceived failure of Western interests to adequately support and arm the rebel cause is now blamed for the utter deterioration of the opposition cause. While Qatar and Saudi Arabia will continue to arm the rebels with all means at their considerable disposal, the West now has good enough reason to continue sitting on its hands. The situation has developed where two dismal evils present themselves without equivocation.

The choice is stark and clear enough; return of a murderous tyrant who will resume his totalitarian rule with a secular slant that will in the end preserve the nominal rights of minorities, most emphatically Syria's ancient Christian demographic, or the defeat of the regime, ushering in an era of outright, unstoppable slaughter of Shia Muslims and Syrian Christians, resulting in a totalitarian theocratic reign of terror.