All of a sudden, “20/20 hindsight” has become more significant than Monday morning coaching: where evil has bloomed, the good of the world may need to recover the memory of its beginning.
Assad should have “leaned west”, accommodated some political challenge from his people, and come into the modern fold. Instead, he responded to an actually mild civil challenge with the barbarous arrest and torture of young students (Darra, 2011).
Shall we simply forget how it started?
The American position appears to leave Syria a Russian client without challenge, but perhaps Washington had hoped for a more modern approach to a) accommodating political challenge and b) hunting out the al-Qaeda types that got going on the troubled landscape.
Instead, effort seems to have been put into incubating and producing ISIS, and the indiscriminate bombing that has destroyed much of Aleppo and Homs has proven similarly help to energizing the very forces Assad claims to be fighting! However, the same are the weaker forces and may be chased or surrounded and destroyed IF Damascus chooses to concentrate on just that.
Syria, In The Beginning – Sadism in Steps
Ashkar, who has been posting videos of the carnage, said Syrian troops were executing civilians on the streets, including women and children. Similar allegations have been reported by other residents to the United Nations and activists in Aleppo.
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