Thursday, August 2, 2012

After Assad Falls: When his regime ends, will a new slaughter begin?

Call me a squish but I can’t be blasé about mass murder. The genocide carried out by the Communists in Cambodia in the 1970s, and the slaughters of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, of Muslims by Serbs in Srebrenica in 1995, of Darfurians by Sudanese jihadis in recent years — these were shocking, appalling atrocities by any standard. They also were failures of American and European leadership, proof that the “international community” is a fiction and that the United Nations is useless.
So when President Obama justified the intervention in Libya based on fear of a “bloodbath” — following Moammar Qaddafi’s vow to show “no mercy” to rebels in the country’s east — I was supportive. “We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi — a city nearly the size of Charlotte — could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world,” Obama said.
Across the Mediterranean, many Syrian opponents of Bashar al-Assad took that to mean there was a red line the dictator would not be permitted to cross. Other Syrians argued that Obama was not sincere: that his concern for Libya derived from Europe’s thirst for oil and distaste for North African refugees. As the Syrian death toll has mounted — estimates are now near 19,000 — this interpretation has become difficult to dispute.

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312893/after-assad-falls-clifford-d-may

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