Syria’s mass murderer is deposed. Why did the West tolerate him for so long?
It is too soon to piece together the causes and effects of the fall of the brutal Assad rule in Syria into a coherent whole. But so many individual pieces veritably scream.
• The wages of credit-taking.
Listen to President Biden. He says that he helped in Assad’s downfall by arming Ukraine and thus weakening and distracting one of Assad’s two main allies, Russia. Biden is right. His support for Ukraine has been critical and admirable.
Listen to Israel. It says that it helped in Assad’s downfall by defying the Biden administration’s push for a ceasefire in Lebanon last September and instead proceded to decapitate Hezbollah, thus denying Assad his main sources of trained fighters. Israel is right.
But there is a critical difference. Not one American soldier gave his life to support Ukraine. Israel has fought Hezbollah with the blood of its people. Very different wages paid for Assad’s downfall.
• The price of bystanding.
Look at Bashar al-Assad’s undisputed record.
It is the mass murder of roughly one-half million Syrians and the exile of millions more. What did any leading country in the free world do? It favored stability over evil. It did nothing substantial. Sanctions. Basically, the free world let Assad be. “Never Again” became sterile, its invocation an exercise in self-rebuke. No country intervened against Assad, nor lifted a finger to counter Russia’s or Iran’s support of Assad. The price? Bloodbaths. Syrian bombing its own citizens. Millions of refugees. Radical Islam taking root in parts of Europe.
There was no greater symbol of the bystanding than former President Obama’s “red line” against Assad — his use of chemical weapons — which Assad crossed and Obama ignored.
There were rare exceptions to the bystanding. Israel did not deem Syria off limits to attacks on Iranian assets there. Turkey — give the devil his due — took in more than three million fleeing Syrian refugees. Germany and Denmark took in refugees, too.
• The policy of Palestinio-centric blinders.
See the parallel approach of the free world and the Arab world to Assad. The Arab League reinstaated Syria’s membership last year. Saudi Arabia, rather than double down on normalization with Israel, doubled down on silence over the civil war in Syria lest a firm policy against a Palestinian ally upset the Palestinians. Saudi Arabia even reestablished diplomatic relations with Syria last May. Saudi Arabia also doubled down on opening a diplomatic relationship with Iran, now weakened by Israel’s military victories and by Assad’s fall.
The price? An old one. A policy that sacrifices the benefits the Arab world could enjoy via peace with Israel in place of a policy of indifference over Assad and tolerance of Palestinian rejectionism. Again, stability over evil.
• The pain of hypocrisy.
Listen to the moral crowing of the International Criminal Court. It “balanced” its arrest warrants for living Israel leaders with its arrest warrant for a dead Hamas leader, both for the crime of genocide. On the hypocrisy front, the key issue is not the “balance.”
The key issue is that in one year of Israel’s war against Hamas, the ICC issued arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, who did not commit the crime they are charged with, but in the 24 years of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal rule, when he committed countless war crimes, the ICC issued no arrest warrant at all.
The pain? Anti-Semitism is aided and abetted by spurious ICC arrest warrants against Israel, alongside inaction over Syria. Stability over evil.
• The pain of handwringing.
Listen to the moral outrage expressed against Israel’s war against Hamas.
But Hamas is not new. Its charter, dating back 36 years to 1988, calls for the destruction of Israel. From the time Hamas came to power in Gaza in 2007 and for some 14 years thereafter, it fired missiles at Israeli civilian areas. What did the current, morally outraged do? They did nothing. Let Hamas be.
Hamas bothered no one outside Israel and laid low for two years, eliciting no major Israeli response. The handwringers over the current war have only themselves to thank, for their inaction favored stability over evil.
Hamas and Assad: of a piece, not only in their evil, but in the indifference they elicited.
The pain? Words against the imagined evil of Israel, coupled with silence overthe real evil of Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria, stoke anti-Semitism and mass murder.
The pain? Hostages still held, as the morally outraged do not demand their right, or the Red Cross’ duty, to visit them.
• The blessed failure of “land [Golan] for peace.”
Recall former Israel Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak.
Rabin in 1993, Peres in 1996 and most intensely Barak in 1999 negotiated with Hafez al-Assad to achieve “land for peace.” Israel would give up the Golan Heights for a peace treaty with Syria. The negotiations failed.
The blessing in Israel’s retention of the Golan Heights? The confirmation of the instinctive understanding of every American politician who has flown over the Golan Heights — the understanding of why the Golan Heights are critical for Israel’s security; why Syria, when it controlled the Heights, could shoot down on Israeli kibbutzim below with impunity; why Israel never wants to expose itself to this danger again.
The blessing in Israel’s control of the Golan? Father-and-son Assads’ barrier against invading Israel. Ditto, the current rebel rulers of Syria, if their intentions regarding Israel are hostile.
The blessing? President Trump’s affirmation of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, a policy praised across the otherwise super-quarrelsome political spectrum of Israel. The annexation was one more piece in enabling the defeat of Iran’s “ring of fire” around Israel.
As over against a civilized world that has been a bystander to evil, favoring stability instead, Israel has defanged Hamas, decapitated Hezbollah, retaliated against Iran — all this, possibly, the primary impetus for the rebels’ decision to strike at the wicked Assad.
Time will tell whether the new Syria will bring stability without evil, or whether Israel has traded one enemy for another. Either way, this week Israel was wise to strike Syria’s chemical weapons depots and air force, and to fill the vacuum in the Golan Heights buffer zone. Next, please: Iran’s nuclear facilities.
© IJN 2024
