1) “We are a bunch of curious people, that’s for sure, who care about the commission of evil in this world,” The Trenchant Observer, Seprember 17, 2013.
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We are prisoners of the moment. News media are very good at telling us everything about the moment they are focusing on, which is usually “breaking news” and new news.
With few exceptions their daily reporting does not encompass the broader historical context that would allow readers to understand why what is happening now is happening now.
Bashar al-Assad has fled Syria as his regime collapsed. That is a good thing.
But before we shift our attention to the new NOW, let us reflect on what has happened in Syria over the last 13 years, and how it relates to broader historical developments in places like Ukraine.
The U.S. and the West turned their eyes away from the massive commission of war crimes by the al-Assad government as it brutally repressed the democratic movement in Syria that was part of the Arab Spring. To be sure, the U.S. supported so-called “moderate” rebels for a while, but then abandoned them after 2012.
After Syria used chemivcal weapons in Ghouta in 2013, crossing Barack Obama’s bright “red line”, Obama flinched at taking resolute military action, punted the ball to Congress, and in the end was suckered by Vladimir Putin’s proposal to resolve the issue by a commitment by Syria to remove chemical weapons and undergo an inspection by an international chemical weapons agency.
Months later, in February 2014, Russia invaded Crimea. After seeing the tepid reaction of Washington and NATO to the February seizure and March annexation of Crimea–sanctions that were but a laughable slap on the wrist, Russia invaded the eastern region of Ukraine known as the Donbas in the summer of 2014, and launched a full-scale invasion by the Russian army beginning in August.
In September, Europe and America imposed serious sanctions on Russia on September 5, 2014, the same date on which Angela Merkel brokered agreement known as the Minsk Protocal (Minsk I) The Protocol broke down due to Russian and Russian puppet ceasefire violations, necessitating a new Minsk Protocol (aminsk II), which was agreed to on February 12, 2015. Throughout the next eight years, some 8,000 people were killed in low-level fighting in the Donbas.
Having observed the weak responses of Obama to these continuing ceasefire violations, Putin and Russia to intervened overtly in Syria in 2015, with Obama’s acquiescence. In an infamous statement, even after Russia had attacked U.S. forces, Obama declared that the U.S. was going to deal with the threat of ISIS by “working through the Russians”.
“Working through the Russians” included standing aside as they committed massive crimes against humanity by bombing Aleppo into rubble in 2015-2016.
In this period Russia built up and secured a long sought-after warm-water port at Tartus.
Putin’s dealings with Obama and Joe Biden, his Viice-President charged with Ukraine policy, seemed to have persuaded him that Biden would not react strongly as he threatened to invade Ukraine in the spring of 2021 and Biden announced the total withdrawal of U.S. forces and contractors from Afghanistan in April 2021, implementing a highly dubious withdrawal agreement with the Taliban reached by Donald Trump on February 29, 2020.
We should never forget the horrors of al-Assad and Putin in Syria. That is where Putin learned he could get away with the massive commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity, with the acquiescence of the U.S. and the West.
In a real sense, the horrors of the Syrian civil war were the prologue to the horrors of the Russian war of agression in Ukraine.
While we denounce the evils of the al-Assad regime, we should not forget the cowardice and acquiescence of the U.S. and the West and their responsibility for the evils that took place there.