Bomb Assad

Brutality incarnate in Syria

The diffident president of the United States watched for five months in virtual silence as Bashar al Assad carried out his campaign of rape, torture, and slaughter, until at last the Obama Doctrine of “calibrated diplomacy”  was deemed a failure and its author was forced to call upon the Butcher of Damascus to step down. Leaders of the Arab League, too, who three decades earlier had given a pass to Assad the father after he slaughtered tens of thousands of subjugated innocents, waited eight months before they were officially shocked to find that the son, their brother Arab, was presiding over atrocities against his own people, and sanctioned Syria out of membership. Even the notorious, sullied United Nations Human Rights Council, which refused for two years to condemn Iran’s gruesome human rights abuses against the Green Movement, and eventually managed to do so only over the objections of its most murderously fascist-totalitarian members, China, Russia, and Cuba, took notice of Syria (five months late) and denounced its brutality—with demurrals by those same red-handed actors—and finally released a report (PDF) whose eyewitness accounts of barbaric acts by Syrian security forces chill the soul.

If the Arab League’s sanctions have the sharpest sting—and the greatest shock value—for Assad, they nevertheless share one thing with censures by the U.S., Europe, and the UN—they’re gestures only; they do no more than demand an end to his barbarity; and they’ve all gotten the same answer: “The hell you say. We do as we please here.”

But where’s the world’s “responsibility to protect” the thousands of Syrians who even at this moment are enduring Assad’s savagery in bloodied streets and interrogation rooms across their country? How many more little boys must be tortured, raped, and slaughtered before real action is taken against him? He is brutality incarnate. Monsters like him can’t be contained—not by tepid demands, too little, too late, for their letters of resignation; and not by condemnation by sullied states with not a little blood on their own hands. Monsters like him proliferate. Only bombs can do them justice.  Ask the survivors.