Syria’s Putin support shows risk of leaving dictators unchecked
Bashar Assad?
We thought he was dead. Not only is he alive and kicking, but the Syrian dictator is also sending reinforcements to his buddy Vladimir Putin who is currently caught in a quagmire in Ukraine.
The hope is that the Syrian fighters — some 40,000 who have already volunteered — will beef up Putin’s faltering army which, in its retreat from Kyiv and elsewhere, is committing genocide, murdering hundreds of innocent men, women and children.
While the world reacts in horror, no nation seems to be doing much about halting the wanton killing of civilians despite desperate pleas from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
President Biden, who previously called for Putin’s removal — before walking it back — ought to, at the very least, declare Putin a terrorist and his Kremlin gang a terrorist organization, like the U.S. did with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
If Putin is, according to Biden, a butcher and a war criminal, why not a terrorist, too?
Putin certainly qualifies. While such a designation may not add to the economic sanctions against Putin and Russia already in place, Putin will have been branded for the terrorist that he is.
While his savage invasion of Ukraine has blown up in his face, Putin may just survive, just like Assad did despite U.S. attempts to remove him.
You remember Assad. He is the despot who brutally cracked down on the prodemocracy revolt against his dictatorship in 2011. He later used poison gas — deadly sarin — against his own people. Then President Barack Obama warned that Assad would cross a red line if he used chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war.
When Assad did, Obama looked the other way, settling for a promise, soon broken, that Syria would turn over its stockpile of chemical weapons to Russia,
When Assad conducted another chemical attack on his opponents in 2017, killing many women and children, President Donald Trump launched a Tomahawk missile attack on the Syrian airbase where the attack was launched. Assad stopped using them.
Assad owes Putin big time. Putin helped Assad win the Syrian civil war. Putin leveled the historic city of Aleppo in 2015. It was the last stronghold of Syrian democrat opposition forces challenging him.
Putin back then used planes, heavy artillery and missiles to turn Aleppo into rubble, bombing hospitals and schools, and killing innocent women and children, just as he is doing in Ukraine, especially in Mariupol.
Promising humanitarian corridors for civilians in Aleppo, Putin bombed and strafed them too, just as he is doing in Ukraine.
Back then, Obama, Biden, and Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry all insisted the days of the murderous Assad were numbered, and that he had to be removed from power, one way or the other.
Assad must go, became the mantra of the Obama administration, although it did little to expedite Assad’s departure.
“I am confident that Assad’s days are numbered,” President Obama said in 2012. “I’m confident that Assad will go,” he said in 2013. “It’s not a question of if, it’s when.”
Well, Assad is still there, and it is Obama who is gone.
As for Biden, well, he said recently in Warsaw that “For God’s sake this man cannot remain in power.”
But he later said he was not talking about regime change. He was just talking.
Biden as Obama’s vice president was all in on dumping Assad. Assad “must step down” he said at the time.
Apparently Assad did not listen.
Neither is Putin. Putin, like Assad, will still be in power after Biden is gone.
You just don’t ask, hope or pray Putin will go. You make him go. Which is something Biden is too old, too weak and too befuddled to do.
The hope is that the Syrian fighters will beef up Putin’s faltering army which, in its retreat from Kyiv and elsewhere, is committing genocide.