Terry Glavin assesses the most recent round of carnage in Syria:
All over the world, every tin-pot tyrant has learned the Syrian lesson. You can get away with it. A United Nations commission of inquiry can declare you guilty of undertaking “a state policy of extermination of the civilian population” of your country, and you can laugh it off, and for any of these “abominable” crimes to be headed off in the dark years to come, the rest of us are going to need to stop telling ourselves comforting lies about “Western intervention.” Entire political careers and the most stellar reputations in journalism have been built around these tawdry, self-exculpating deceptions. They may be ineradicable, but some honest effort should be put into enumerating them and rooting them out. . . .
Oh, but Syria. Fiendishly complicated, [they tell us]. No good guys, and “there’s nothing we could have done” now substitutes for “there’s nothing we can do.” The “we” in that lie is always intended to mean “the Americans.” The record of lost American opportunities and unmade decisions speaks loudly enough for itself.
A no-fly zone before the Russians got involved. Accelerated arming of patriotic and democratic rebel groups instead of letting freelance Gulf-state Islamists fill the blanks. A swift and punishing rain of drone strikes after Assad crossed Obama’s professed “red line” on the use of poison gas. Supplying the early Free Syrian Army units with anti-aircraft weapons to shoot down Assad’s barrel bombers. A green light to the CIA’s proposed long-game overthrow of the Assad regime. No, Obama said. No. I’m smarter than everyone here. . .
It was never about what the United States could have done. It was about what President Obama would not do, and he would not do anything to upset the Khomeinists in Tehran. Hurt their feelings enough and they’d pull Iran out of Obama’s “legacy” foreign policy of nuclear rapprochement. The whole thing has been a failure, from beginning to end.
Read more on Maclean’s: http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/welcome-to-the-age-of-the-despot/