Children die choking and West does nothing
Within 24 hours of a Tuesday morning chemical weapons attack that left the corpses of several dozen innocents strewn in the streets of Khan Sheikhoun, a bomb- cratered town in the Syrian province of Idlib, everything was back to normal again. The single most horrific poison gas atrocity since the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad was allowed to get away with murdering more than 1,000 civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August 2013, and it took less than a day to show that nothing of consequence has changed.
The NATO presidents and prime ministers performed their ritual expressions of revulsion and outrage and shock. Britain, France and the United States brought yet another resolution to an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, which was meeting on Wednesday anyway, so no bother.
The resolution contained language intended to be just useless enough to avoid the embarrassment of Russia and China employing their double veto, for a seventh time, to prevent the Security Council from adopting any effective measure to bring an end to the plodding and now barely newsworthy Syrian genocide. Even so, Russia said the resolution was “anti- Syrian” and based on fake information, and China said the resolution was “distorting” matters.
It has not mattered that the barbarism of chemical weapons has been subject to international censure since 1899, or that the deployment of poison gas in warfare has been a foundational taboo of international law since 1925, or that the Ghouta sarin gas massacre was the most savage of its kind in the 21st century, or that the UN’s first and foremost purpose is to prevent this kind of evil from taking place.
The dead of Khan Sheikhoun are just Syrians. Over the past six years nearly a half million of them have died, and the United Nations has deliberated, and discussed and participated in elaborate ceremonies of displeasure.
Still, it’s possible to drum up enough controversy to fill a news cycle or two. Isn’t it outrageous that Donald Trump’s White House is blaming the previous administration of Barack Obama? Does what happened in Khan Seikhoun have something to do with Trump’s signalling of a tectonic shift in United States’ Syria policy toward the Kremlin’s standpoint? Or maybe Assad was sending a defiant signal of his own to the 70 UN member states meeting in Brussels this week to discuss the measures necessary to secure humanitarian relief not only to the roughly five million Syrians who have fled the country, but also to the six million more Syrians “internally displaced” by the horror?
The Assad regime, as usual, denies any responsibility for what happened on Tuesday morning. Then again, the Assad regime says it has never used chemical weapons, nor has it ever dropped barrel bombs on Syrian cities. Assad’s backers in Moscow, meanwhile, say the poison gas leaked from a terrorist munitions factory hit by one of Assad’s rockets before dawn on Tuesday. Then again, the Kremlin says Assad stopped dropping barrel bombs on its people in October 2015, even though over the following 12 months independent observers calculated that the barrel bombs were falling on civilian neighbourhoods across Syria at a rate of about 220 a week.
As f or what Trump’s White House had to say about what happened on Tuesday: “These heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration’s weakness and irresolution.” On the face of it, that’s a perfectly reasonable assessment.
Obama allowed Assad to cross the “red line” he’d drawn around the use of chemical weapons in the first place, then subcontracted the enforcement of his “red line” to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, and then counselled doing nothing while Assad, by merely switching from sarin to chlorine — as UN inspectors later confirmed — repeatedly broke his promise to the UN that he would not use poison gas again.
The awkwardness here is that back in 2013, when secretary of state John Kerry was initially threatening Assad with what he called “an isolated pinprick” of punishment by way of “a very targeted, very shortterm ... unbelievably small, limited kind of effort,” even that was too much effort for Trump. “Do NOT attack Syria, fix U. S. A.,” Trump tweeted, in one of a dozen such protests at the time. Throughout the presidential election campaign, Trump was saying the same thing. “I would have stayed out of Syria,” Trump told MSNBC last May.
As t hings t urned out, Obama did what Trump wanted and stayed out of Syria, and made sure that NATO stayed out, too.
As for some big “shift” in U. S. policy, it’s supposed to be found in statements uttered last week by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the U. S. ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, to the effect that fighting ISIL is now the American priority in Syria, and Assad isn’t going anywhere. After meetings with Turkish president Recep Erdogan last week, Tillerson said the “longer- term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people,” which is precisely the wording Assad’s patron Vladimir Putin favours. In New York, Haley told reporters: “Our priority is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out.”
You don’t have to be an overly assiduous observer of Syria’s descent into a vast simulacrum of Dresden and Buchenwald to know that this was Obama’s policy, too.
In January 2016, Kerry enraged Syrian opposition groups when he met with them in Saudi Arabia and announced that the White House expected them to ac- cept the preconditions Russia and Iran had set down for their involvement in peace talks. What Tillerson said last week is almost word-forword what Kerry told the rebels at that meeting in Saudi Arabia: “It’s up to the Syrians to decide what happens to Assad.” Quite sensibly, the Syrian rebels took this to mean they were never going to get any American help in overthrowing Assad’s Baathist terror state in Damascus, and that the Syrian people should never expect any UN or NATO help in deciding Assad’s fate. And we are supposed to be surprised, then, that Syrians have sometimes turned for help to such decidedly anti- American outfits as the former al- Qaida affiliate Jabhat Fateh al-Sham.
As for what Haley said, it’s indistinguishable from the public position Obama had staked out as far back as his last State of the Union address to Congress, around the same time Kerry was in Saudi Arabia announcing America’s capitulation to Moscow and Tehran. Obama made it clear that fighting ISIL, not removing the Assad regime, was his priority in Syria.
In any case, while Obama was fond of saying “Assad must go,” it’s Obama who’s gone. Assad’s still there.
The latest of several Syrian peace- talks milestones was reached on March 15 in Astana, Kazakhstan, when Iran joined Russia and Turkey as a guarantor of the “ceasefire” declared last December after the Kremlin’s fighter jets assisted Iranian forces, Hezbollah and Assad in the bloody evisceration and dismemberment of the last key rebel redoubt Aleppo.
That is what our ceremonies of i nternational diplomacy and peace talks and ceasefires have offered the Syrian people: barrel bombs and ceaseless death, the deliberate targeting of hospitals, and heaps of convulsing children foaming at the mouth and dying of asphyxiation in towns like Khan Sheikhoun.
We are all dutifully dismayed and shocked. Nothing has changed. Everything is normal.