National Post (National Edition)

ASSAD’S DONE IT AGAIN — HE’S HERE TO STAY

- TERRY GLAVIN National Post

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ended his meetings with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow this week with his tail between his legs, after having arrived at the Kremlin waving a white flag. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov did not quite laugh in Tillerson’s face, but got a good kick in anyway about the “ambiguous as well as contradict­ory” vibe Donald Trump’s White House has been giving off about the Syrian catastroph­e.

Tillerson and Lavrov performed all the necessary rituals, recited their prepared statements in tones as grave and statesmanl­ike as the circumstan­ces allowed, and after a wave of hopeful euphoria swept through the Syrian people when American Tomahawk missiles rained down on the RussianSyr­ian airbase of al-Shayrat last Thursday night, there is one thing that is neither contradict­ory nor ambiguous about the Syrian catastroph­e. It’s this:

Having procured a Moscow-guaranteed lease on life from the amenable and accommodat­ing administra­tion of Barack Obama back in 2013 as his reward for participat­ing in a sham decommissi­oning of his “known” chemical-weapons stockpiles, Syrian mass murderer Bashar al-Assad has now renewed the arrangemen­t with a certificat­e from President Donald Trump allowing him to go on slaughteri­ng the Syrian people, so long as he chooses methods that don’t involve sarin gas.

True, Assad was made to pay a hefty premium for his new insurance policy. He had to gamble that he could get away with killing a few dozen Syrians and injuring several hundred more in a sarin gas attack on the rebelheld town of Khan Sheikhoun last Tuesday. But that was a fairly sure bet, and his only tangible outlay was the cost of about 20 warplanes, perhaps a fifth of his airpower, destroyed at the alShayrat airbase.

In return, Assad has won from Trump what he was given by Obama, in only slightly modified form. It is an assurance from the highest levels of the United States government, and as a matter of course from the 28-member NATO alliance, that for all the solemn sounding “Assad must go” pronouncem­ents that NATO leaders must enunciate so as to hide their shame and disgrace, nobody is going to make him go anywhere.

“We’re not going into Syria,” Trump told the New York Post in the hours before Tillerson jetted off to sound statesmanl­ike in Moscow. “Our policy is the same. It hasn’t changed. We’re not going into Syria. Our big mission is getting rid of ISIS. That’s where it’s always been.” As for Bashar Assad: “We hope he won’t do any more gassing.” In a rare moment of coherence, White House press secretary Sean Spicer was similarly unambiguou­s: “If we see this kind of action again, we hold open the possibilit­y of future action.”

Trump’s cerebral defence secretary, James Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general, was as articulate and as straightfo­rward as you might imagine. “The purpose of this attack was singularly against chemical weapons use,” Mattis told reporters. “The reason for the strike was that alone. It was not a harbinger of some change in our military campaign.”

Mattis further elaborated: “I just want to say very clearly that the use of chemical weapons, contrary to the Geneva Convention that Syria signed up for — using chemical weapons that Syria agreed under UN pressure to remove from their arsenal, the chemical weapons the Russians certified were gone — that if they use chemical weapons they are going to pay a very, very stiff price.”

This was a bit disingenuo­us, as Mattis came close to admitting out loud when questioned about what he meant by “chemical weapons,” exactly. After Obama allowed Assad to cross his chemical weapons “red line” and agreed that Assad should stick around to implement the decommissi­oning shell game Moscow was only too happy to guarantee, the Syrian American Medical Society documented more than 100 instances of Assad’s air force dropping barrel bombs containing chlorine gas on civilian districts in Syria.

The United Nations’ Organizati­on for the Prohibitio­n of Chemical Weapons investigat­ed nine of these atrocities and determined last August that the Assad regime, beyond any doubt, had used chlorine gas in at least two barrel bomb barrages of towns in Idlib, not far from Khan Sheikhoun. These atrocities are crimes under the Geneva Convention prohibitin­g the use of poison gas, signed in 1925, following the horrors of the First World War.

But chlorine was not specifical­ly mentioned in the Obama deal with Assad and Russian president Vladimir Putin. So Obama again did nothing, even though last year’s investigat­ions narrowed down the culprits to two squadrons of the Assad regime’s 63rd Helicopter Brigade and the 618 helicopter squadron of Assad’s navy, based at airfields in Humaymim and Hama.

As for what happened last week in Khan Sheikhoun, “this time it was not chlorine, quite clearly, and we know that for certain. There is no doubt. This is a medical fact,” Mattis said.

Before the UN gave up counting a couple of years ago, the Syrian death toll was reckoned to be approachin­g 500,000 people, most of them killed by Assad, and mostly by Assad’s air force. So, as long as he’s slaughteri­ng Syrians by means other than sarin gas — by torturing them to death in his dungeons, by dropping barrel bombs filled with napalm and shrapnel and chlorine on civilian neighbourh­oods, whatever — Assad will be permitted to continue his genocide.

Rex Tillerson will fly back to Washington, and the sun will go down, the sun will come up, the tide will go in and the tide will go out, and Syrians will keep dying. Incidental­ly, Tillerson is a recipient of Russia’s Order of Friendship Medal. It was presented to him by Vladimir Putin in 2013, during Tillerson’s days as ExxonMobil’s CEO, when he concluded a deal with Russia’s state-owned oil company Rosneft. He’s probably due for another medal.

“Russia needs to pressure Assad to do the right thing. Russia needs to step up and act,” Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland was allowed to say, after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally got around to saying Canada supported the U.S. Tomahawk strikes last week. Pointing to the veto Moscow has used a half-dozen times to stymie the UN Security Council’s efforts to staunch the Syrian bloodshed, Freeland said: “What is very important is that the internatio­nal community cannot be paralyzed by that Russia veto.”

But the internatio­nal community is paralyzed. The G7 countries, Canada included, meeting in Italy this week, couldn’t decide on any action against Russia or its sponsorshi­p of Assad except to say what Syrians have been hearing from Washington, D.C. and the other NATO capitals for six long and bloody years: Assad must go.

Assad is not going anywhere, any time soon.

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