America Disapproves

"[The United States is] deeply concerned by the dire and tragic situation in Homs."
"We strongly condemn the regime's breaking of the cessation of hostilities and its brutal assault against residents of Old City, Homs."
"The regime's bombardment and encirclement of the city is a despicable example of its starve-and-surrender battlefield approach."
Jen Paski, Washington State Department

In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, Flames rise from damaged cars at the site where two car bombs exploded at a commercial street inhabited mostly by members of President Bashar Assad’s minority Alawite sect, in Homs province, central Syria, Wednesday April 9, 2014. Two car bombs exploded Wednesday in a government-held district of Syria’s battleground city of Homs, killing at least 25 people and wounding more than 100, state media said. AP/SANA

Well, always sensitive to criticism from the United States, that statement will no doubt injure President Bashar al-Assad's self-esteem beyond measure. He will retire to his bedroom in inconsolable sobs and no doubt order his troops to cease and desist. To stand back and stop bombarding the citizens of Homs, to allow food, potable water, medicines, to reach them. They will no longer be on the verge of starvation, but will hail the compassionate humanitarianism impulse of their glorious tyrant.

The dystopian, destroyed world of Syria cannot possibly sink any lower. Its citizenry divided beyond the possibility of restoration of even the state of affairs that led the Syrian majority Sunnis to tentatively approach their government in a reproachful protest against the minority Shia-Alawite enjoying quality of life and entitlements denied them, and pleading for equal treatment befitting a decent nation.

Their response from the government was unanticipated even by the recalled standards of Mr. Assad's father who had infamously chemical-bombed the Sunni-majority city of Hama, burying the residents in their tens of thousands in their destroyed, then bull-dozed homes. But while Hafez al-Assad destroyed the lives of an estimated 30,000 Syrians, his son has outdistanced his father five times over, and sent millions of Syrians as well into the exile of refuge in neighbouring countries.

Thanks to the militant intervention of Lebanon's Hezbollah acting as Iran's proxy militias with their Iranian-supplied weapons and Republican-Guard training, the Syrian regime has been able to route the Syrian Rebel Army from its captured redoubts to reclaim whatever is left of once proudly heritage areas of the country, now reduced to rubble and sad memory. The Islamist terrorists that Bashar al-Assad once named his Syrian Sunni opponents have made their presence in Syria an added instrument of destruction.

Alawite worshippers leaving the Bilal Al-Habshi mosque in central Syria saw their Friday peace shattered with the explosion of a bomb that killed 14 of them and wounded another 50; Sunni revenge for Shia-led regime military advances against the rebels. Just as the offensive by government forces retakes the last of the rebel bastions in Homs, the rebels seek their revenge on the regime's supporters. The regime targets its own civilians and the rebels targets alternate sect civilians.

Death rules the day. And the United States condemns all the blood-letting in its unrelenting fury. The Obama administration has surrendered its authority in the Middle East to Russia and to Iran. President Vladimir Putin and Ayatollah Khamenei's new President Rouhani have managed between them to foster the trust of naivete in Barack Obama that a new era of peaceful conciliation will satisfy the power lust of both.

Through its passivity and negligence the United States has lent itself to jihadist/terrorist-supporting groups and the nations that incite them that has resulted in over ten percent of Syria's population on the move to avoid death, with 150,000 Syrians having been clasped in its everlasting embrace. Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia play their own game in the Syrian civil war; Saudi Arabia with its influence struggle with Iran.

It is difficult to assess which country has been more instrumental in fomenting violence and terrorism; Iran or Saudi Arabia. Iran with its direct influence on Hezbollah, and on Hamas. And Saudi Arabia with its funding of madrassas all over the world, and particularly those it has installed in Pakistan and in Yemen which have become the crucible of fanatical Islamist ideology churning out mujahadeen at a furious rate.

But it is exceedingly relieving to know that America disapproves.