Odiously Crafty

Syria's conflict, its revolution, its regime's war against its own people is heading into its fourth consecutive year of tyrannical bloodletting beyond the feverish imagination of most intelligent, thinking human beings. If and when at some future date the millions of Syrian refugees who have not found permanent haven within the international community grudgingly willing to take in a few here and there, do return to their home country, it will be an utterly destroyed landscape and urban infrastructure that will greet them.

But that alone is not all that terribly unusual in the Middle East. Think Lebanon, or Libya, Iraq or further east, Afghanistan. All of which are trembling on the miserable cusp of just what lurks menacingly on their own landscapes, spillovers from the Syrian regime's success in exerting its powerful influence on the Middle East and North Africa, drawing in Islamists of the Sunni variety eager and prepared to do jihad in the name of the Prophet and all that is holy in Islam.

When Iran ordered Hezbollah, its Lebanese satellite militia, the bane of Lebanon sovereignty and its own national military, to enter Syria dedicating its battle expertise and advanced weaponry to the defence of Syria and Bashar al-Assad's continued rule, the rescue of that continued rule was effected. President Assad's foray in the use of poison gas against civilians helped to raise the death count of the revolutionary war to 130,000, a milestone he is doubtless proud of achieving, and aiming for more.

It is his duty to Syria, after all, although the Syria that will eventually emerge from his full-on assault against his population will never again be the same. Quite apart from the destroyed civil infrastructure, the destruction of people's lives, hopes and dreams, part of the country will now be forever absent from the original cohesion over which the al-Assad dynasty ruled.

This man who assumed the presidency on his father's death was viewed initially by the international community as a dim-witted inheritor of a country's future. "He's more clever than all the Western and U.S. politicians, for sure", former Assad advisor Ayman Abdelnour, recently said to a journalist from his exile. It certainly didn't seem like that in 2011 when the tentative Syrian Arab Spring expressed itself in a mild protest.

Which Mr. Assad instructed his security to address as a full-blown insurrection requiring the force of dissuasion in the form of arrest, torture, death, regardless of the age of the miscreants daring to confront the regime by requests for equality irrespective of sectarian differences. When the first of the demonstrations resulted in one hundred of their members meeting their maker, their president described them as foreign agitators.

They were, in fact, he asserted with complete guile and the entitlement of a conscienceless butcher, terrorists. So when jihadists from abroad streamed into the country to take up the the Sunni battle, he was completely validated. The dreadful fear that Islamist jihadists inspire through their pitiless slaughter of enemies and the innocent alike, makes President al-Assad appear 'moderate' in contrast, although he is more than capable of producing atrocities equally horrible to those the Islamists mount.

Western sensibilities dead set against this new Butcher of Islam, suddenly began to view him distastefully but of necessity as the lesser of two blighted evils. The al-Qaeda faction claiming independence for the area it has named the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq is a ferocious jihadist group. Bashar al-Assad appears downright amenable and kindly in contrast, chemicals and helicopter gunships aimed at unarmed civilian enclaves aside.

In a spirit of one hand clapping, the peace negotiations slated for late January will see the presence of the Syrian regime in attendance. And Syria insists Iran must be present as well. Syria's prime minister has stated that anyone thinking power would be divided or handed over to the opponents of the regime would have to be delusional. And there is no sign that the rebels will decide to attend the farce called a meeting to negotiate for peace.