A Country Destroyed

Hafez al-Assad kept Syria under tight control. He responded to threats to his authoritarian rule by launching attacks that horrified the international community, but it was seen as Syria's business and who would intervene in any event, in a religious familial war; two opposite parts of the same family. And this is, after all, the Middle East, where tribal, sectarian issues are settled with the kind of violent finality that brooks no second response.

Now, Bashar al-Assad has proved to be his father's son. Where his father merely destroyed thousands of lives of dissenters and threats to his fledgling dynasty, the son can claim hundreds of thousands of lives. But they are only pretenders of Islam, after all, and Quasi-Syrians who would be better off in Lebanon, in Turkey and in Jordan, and that is where they have fled to, proving his point, and leaving Syria to the Shia-Alawite Baathist contingent of Islam.

Chemical attacks, helicopter gunships, artillery, the razing of entire neighbourhoods in Syria's largest cities, encircling the stubborn who protest they are entitled to equal treatment by their government, and barrel bombs to complete the picture of utter contemptuous rejection of criticism of the regime. The four-year pathology of comeuppance for Syrian Sunnis has resulted in millions of displaced persons, internally, externally.

Millions of people across Syria are now relying on international humanitarian aid 

 

A situation that the United Nations calls the worst refugee crisis that the world has seen in living memory. Not that the world hasn't seen many other refugee crises in Africa, in Asia, and in eastern Europe, but this one is huge even by the dreadful standards of Sudan, Cambodia, Rwanda. Humanitarian aid is in maintenance mode, keeping millions of people sheltered, fed, treated, but as for hope for the future, it has gone missing.

Nothing is ever simple in the Middle East. Remove a dictator, be it Saddam Hussein or Moammar Ghadaffi and you upset the balance of power between pitiless tyrants, and the brutality of death-dealing Islamofascists whose fascination with atrocity-laden slaughter and their social-media skills in entertaining and enthralling new recruits to their universal caliphate goes unchecked. Introduce the opportunity for 'democracy' to take shape and the target shape-shifts to chaotic calamity.

Appealing to Bashar al-Assad to restrain his cold rage against his opponents, to rein in his army to allow humanitarian aid to reach those in desperate need of life-saving interventions, and you speak to the wind scattering the words imploring cessation however briefly of the killing machine. And yet, another conundrum introduces itself, since this is, after all, the Middle East. What to do with al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's group, and what to do with Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham?

The Butcher of Syria's Sunni population is still a stabilizing force of sorts; having destroyed civil life between Sunni and Shi'ite, he now battles the Sunni Islamofascists with the considerable aid of Shi'ite Hezbollah battalions and the al-Quds Iranian Republican Guard units dispatched to help Syria keep intact at least part of its former territory, so hugely useful to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Suddenly, the Western democracies which so decry and detest Syria's Baathist President see him as an ally, however reluctantly, in holding back the brutal ravaging mob that calls itself Islamic State. Fear of the Islamic State has overtaken revulsion over the terrorism-inciting Republic of Iran and the ferociously brutal Syrian regime.

Suddenly the West believes it can talk a sort of union of common interest with Iran and Syria, to take Islamic State and al-Nusra out of contention for the crown of mass slaughter.

Should such an arrangement with the devil take place, as it certainly is shaping up to, defenders of liberty and democracy will find themselves in bed with the devil, as a reluctant consort preparing to give birth to the legitimizing of state terrorism in an extremely loathsome coupling.