The West has seemingly not learned the lessons of the past. At least in terms of deploying military might to effect regime change in the Arab world. From Iraq. To Libya. To Syria. All have proved to be games without frontiers and war without tears. As far as those who do the bombing are concerned.
And in the aftermath of the chemical weapon attack on the Syrian city of Douma that left some 85 dead and more than 500 hundred affected, things are no different. Sadly. An emergency UN Security Council meeting did not discuss the chlorine gas supply lines. Which is important given Seymour Hersh’s account of an earlier such assault on Obama’s watch. The American investigative journalist placed the blame for this on Al-Nusra Front and NATO member Turkey. This is not to give the Assad regime a free pass.
The primary task of the UNSC is to maintain international peace and security. Yet none of this was on display at Monday’s powwow. Russia was quick to dismiss charges against Damascus as mere fabrication. Though far more alarming was Washington’s threat to go it alone if members did not agree to play ball. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was good enough to take time out from his Brexiteering prescriptions to call for Downing Street to back Trump Town militarily in the likely event of US strikes; even suggesting that Theresa May could effectively bypass Parliament. Glory days certainly have yet to pass Mr Blair by.
There is much talk in the western media of the need to take the moral high ground. Unfortunately, for NATO war machine members this is synonymous with dropping bigger and badder bombs than anyone else. This is the only way, they say, to avenge the writhing child victims of the gas attack. In other words, those fortunate enough to survive the aforementioned horror have now been unwittingly entered into a game of Alliance roulette. Score.
This whitewashing of the West’s own bloody hands in the region does no one any good. Not when the geo-strategic imperative seeks to construct a hierarchy of death. One that conveniently skirts over how half a million Iraqi children under the age of five died at the hands of American sanctions imposed on the Saddam regime. Or, more recently, the more than 8,000 Iraqi civilians killed during the fall of Mosul; reportedly at the ‘hands’ of their own government’s missiles as well as of those of Britain and the US.
The real tragedy of course is that while the Great Game plays on between Washington and Moscow — the Syrian people are cast as mere supporting actors in their own story. And that is as obscene as it can get. *
Published in Daily Times, April 11th 2018.