All talk and no action
DESPOTS OF THE WORLD HAVE TAKEN OUR MEASURE. THEY FOUND US WEAK.
It was seven years ago this week that the bright hopes of a nonviolent, democratic revolution erupted in people singing and marching peacefully in the streets of Syria. Since then, seven decades’ worth of solemn UN covenants, international treaties and binding conventions have gone up in flames in the hellhole of corpse heaps, concentration camps and ruined cities that the Baathist mass murderer Bashar Al- Assad has been permitted to make of his country.
Out of a population of 22 million people seven years ago, half have been rendered homeless. Six million people are subsisting in the shambles of rubble and bomb-collapsed buildings. More than five million people have fled as refugees. The death count released Monday by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights: 511,000. Almost all of them were killed by Assad’s barrel bombers or his shabiha death squads, or Vladimir Putin’s fighter- bombers, or Iranian militias, or holy warriors from Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah. For all its savagery, the Islamic State was never more than a bit player in the bloodletting.
Throughout the political classes of the G7 countries — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, t he United Kingdom and the United States — there is enough cowardice and shame to go around, across the spectrum from left to right, that the straightforward reason why this catastrophe has unfolded is rarely mentioned out loud: Assad has taken our measure, and his calculations have been right on the mark. He’s not alone. It started with the clever and swaggering Barack Obama, but every tyrant in the world has now had the benefit of a good long look at the Donald Trumps, the Theresa Mays, the Justin Trudeaus and the Angela Merkels, and they have reached a perfectly sensible conclusion. All of our talk about the inviolability of the liberal democratic order, the superiority of Western values, the strength of our resolve and the bright horizon of universal human rights, gender equality, and democracy — we don’t mean what we say.
Vladimir Putin knows it’s well worth the risk of committing something approaching an act of war with the United Kingdom by resort to Novichok, a nerve agent far deadlier than sarin or VX, in the attempted murder of the former Russian spy Sergei V. Skripal last week in the Wiltshire village of Salisbury. Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found catatonic on a park bench March 4. Prime Minister Theresa May sternly warned that her government would not put up with this sort of thing and gave the Kremlin until the end of the day Tuesday to explain away what British intelligence agencies concluded was a Russian job of some kind. You could watch the sneer curling on Putin’s face. The deadline came and went. The U. K.’s ambassador to Russia was called i nto t he Kremlin and given a dressing down. Should May be so belligerent as to, say, shut down the British operations of the Kremlin propaganda channel Russia Today in retaliation, “not a single British media outlet will work in our country,” Kremlin mouthpiece Maria Zakharova warned.
In Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party meeting this week undertook a massive reorganization of China’s entire state apparatus, bringing all ministries, departments, agencies and state- owned enterprises under even tighter party control, further consolidating Xi Jinping’s powers and amending the constitution to allow Xi to rule as president for life. While Xi’s surveillance state tightens its grip on the ability of Chinese citizens to speak freely with one another, to read uncensored material and to communicate with the outside world, as many as 800,000 Muslim Uyghurs have been frogmarched into re- education camps in Xinjiang, and we barely bother to notice.
While Canada has been the most notably supine of the G7 countries in its approach to Beijing, Prime Minister Trudeau’s kowtowing has been matched lately by Facebook, Apple, Audi, Marriott, Mercedes-Benz, Delta, Quantas, Zara and quite a few other Western corporations. Each in their turn have collaborated with Beijing’s vast censorship apparatus or grovelled with abject apologies for mentioning t he Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, or for failing to have expunged references to Taiwan in their advertising campaigns. Not even Pope Francis can muster the moral gumption to stand up for China’s Catholics, as they retreat into the catacombs. With the Vatican approaching a final agreement allowing the Beijing regime to appoint their bishops from a cohort of already excommunicated, state- puppet clerics, China’s Catholics have been left to feel abandoned by Rome. “Definitely,” says Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen.
Another Canadian died in Iran’s Evin Prison last month, to no particular consequence. Iranian- Canadian professor Kavous Seyed-Emami was picked up on bizarre espionage charges, and the next thing you know he has “committed suicide” in Tehran’s infamous dungeon. His two sons were allowed to return to Canada last week, but not before a final indignity: at the very last minute, just before boarding a flight to Frankfurt with them, their mother was hauled away, forced to stay behind. On Tuesday, for the crime of giving an interview to German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle that the Khomeinist regime didn’t like, prominent Iranian academic Sadegh Zibakalam was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Meanwhile, the regime has ratcheted up a campaign of intimidation against the BBC’s Persian service staff in London. The intimidation includes the arrest of relatives back in Iran, travel bans, and threats. The BBC has been forced to turn to the corrupt and powerless UN Human Rights Council for some sort of statement.
They’ve all sized us up accurately. Vladimir Putin, Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei, and China’s Xi Jinping. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan is aping Putin and Xi, crushing all dissent, and is now waging a land war against nominal American allies, the Kurds, in their Afrin enclave in northern Syria. Turkey is still a member of NATO. Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi has presided over a genocidal campaign against the Rohingya Muslims of Rakhine state, and she’s still an honourary Canadian citizen.
Over the past two weeks, despite sternly-worded American warnings and a UN- mandated ceasefire, Assad’s air force has been dropping bombs with napalm and chlorine gas on the civilians of Eastern Ghouta, the last, bloodied and besieged enclave of Free Syria. The medical authorities in Eastern Ghouta say more than 1,400 people have been killed since Assad’s endgame assault began on Feb. 18. The hospitals have all been destroyed. Makeshift shelters have been turned into smoking tombs. On Monday, UN Secretary General António Guterres told the UN Security Council: “Syria is bleeding inside and out.”
But Syria has been bleeding inside and out for seven years now. It’s because Assad took our measure, he sized us up, and he figured right.
They all did.
THERE IS ENOUGH COWARDICE AND SHAME TO GO AROUND — GLAVIN