Stephen Walt wonders: “Is Barack Obama More of a Realist Than I Am?” While Stephen Kinzer praises his “canny anti-interventionism,” and Syrian prodemocracy activist, Qusai Zakaria, assails him for his failure to punish Assad back in 2013 for launching the notorious chemical weapons attack against the civilian populations in the Damascene suburbs of Moadamieh and Ghoutah.
Is it an ingrained American attitude: battling the symptom while embracing the disease? Creating beautiful façades behind which to hide something that is deeply rotten and festering? If so, if this is indeed the truth, what does it really say about America? More specifically, what does is say about America’s political, economic, intellectual and artistic elite – because no matter how democratic a nation is, it’s always this elite that is ultimately responsible for shaping its image and molding its moral fabric.
Continue reading “From Syria to Ferguson: battling the symptom while embracing the disease”
10,000 Bodies: Inside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Crackdown – WSJ.
Caesar’s revelations referred in the WSJ article might seem old by now to those following developments in Syria at it has been reported months ago, but now, it is the U.S. official investigators who have examined the evidence supplied by Caesar and who are corroborating his story. Indeed, an Industrial-scale campaign of mass slaughter is being conducted by the Assad regime against his opponent, a campaign that was unleashed soon after the beginning of the Syrian Revolution, even in its year-long nonviolent phase.
Some people have enough moral sense to criticize Israel, but not to criticize anything that Assad and his supporters have done and are still doing. They see ISIS stoning women and chasing away Christians, but they ignore all evidence and testimony of torture, mass rape and mass murder in Assad’s concentration camps. They ignore evidence of collaboration between ISIS and Assad. They ignore Iran’s role in the current mayhem in Syria, Iraq and Gaza, and advocate engagement with her. They defend Russia and ignore her duplicity in war crimes in Syria and Ukraine. Clearly these people cannot truly be concerned with human rights. Their stand by the Palestinians at this stage seems motivated more by ideology than any sense of moral solidarity – an ideology that put Israel and America, and sometimes the West as a whole, at the center of all evil designs in the world; an ideology that, in essence, covets the power that these countries have and longs to appropriate it, rather than be truly dedicated to holding all equally accountable for their misdeeds.
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 