Writing at Maclean’s, Terry Glavin argues the pit of blood and despair Bashar al-Assad has created with his own people in his own country of Syria—and the civilized world’s acquiesence to the terror—is ushering in a new age of tyranny around the world.
Here’s an excerpt:
You can bomb your own cities to rubble, commit crimes against humanity, and wholly uproot the majority ethnic population of your own country. Assad got away with it. Russia’s Vladimir Putin got away with it. Hezbollah got away with it, and Tehran’s Qasem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, got away with it. And all over the world, every tinpot tyrant has learned the Syrian lesson. You can get away with it. A United Nations commission of inquiry can declare you guilty of undertaking “a state policy of extermination of the civilian population” of your country, and you can laugh it off, and for any of these “abominable” crimes to be headed off in the dark years to come, the rest of us are going to need to stop telling ourselves comforting lies about “Western intervention.” Entire political careers and the most stellar reputations in journalism have been built around these tawdry, self-exculpating deceptions. They may be ineradicable, but some honest effort should be put into enumerating them and rooting them out. We might start by admitting that it’s not all George W. Bush’s fault. It’s an idiotic claim, but it is deeply embedded in all the alibis and excuses that have paralyzed the NATO capitals in the face of the Syrian catastrophe. And Syria’s death throes are not over yet, not by a long shot.
Read the whole article here.
