April 24, 2011 - 10:12 pm
al-Assad
In more proof, if any were needed, that liberals are the reactionaries of our time, it was only weeks ago that Hillary Clinton was calling Bashar al-Assad a “reformer” and Vogue magazine was proclaiming his wife a “rose in the desert.”
As we know, and the horrific videos from Syria on PJM show conclusively (they look like living versions of Goya’s The Third of May ), the ophthalmologist is as much a reformer as Josef Mengele and Asma as much a rose as Eva Braun.Since his father Hafez brutally imposed his will over Syria in the Hama massacre, the Assads have been a family of secular fascist torturers and murderers in league with religious fascist torturers and murders in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Gaza (Hamas), and Iran (the mullahs), not to mention North Korea (also secular). They assassinate democratically elected foreign leaders (Hariri), encourage and facilitate global terrorism, and shoot as many of their own people as necessary to maintain power while exploiting the best of their country’s resources for personal gain. In other words, pure evil.
Nothing new there — yet, for some reason, our liberal leadership and their media allies were never able to acknowledge fully something so obvious. Always — as Obama did with Ahmadinejad while the Iranian democracy demonstrators were being shot in their streets and tortured in prison cells — they sought to reason with despotism. Or, more likely, pretended to do so because it was all game for the aggrandizement of the self, for image. The policy itself never made sense.
When the Middle East street started to rebel, our government had no plan. They didn’t know what to do about Egypt and then went into Libya willy-nilly when things started to look bad. So now we are left with the odd situation where Gaddafi — clearly also a murderous sociopathic dictator — is despot number one, with NATO intervening and the U.S. providing Predators, while Assad, demonstrably a much more active and dangerous enemy of the U.S. and its allies, is merely verbally chastised by our president and secretary of State.
Something wrong here?
Indeed there is. Because of the moral confusion at the heart of our administration, the USA and by extension the West have their priorities screwed up. The downfall of Assad would mean big trouble for the mullahs, Hezbollah, and Hamas — good things for the region and the world. The downfall of Gaddafi would mean what exactly? Nobody knows. An al-Qaeda regime? The Muslim Brotherhood? Some oil contracts for the French?
I am not trying to say we should defend the horrendous Gaddafi. Nor, for that matter, although it was a much closer call, should we have defended Mubarak. There is no long run benefit defending secular despots. Also our sympathies must go to the victims of their atrocities, to those seeking freedom, even if we must keep our eyes wide open for unfortunate consequences, notably of the Islamist kind.
But during all this, there is no question that the foreign policy of the United States is simply ad hoc. It doesn’t exist. The secretary of State was in cloud-cuckoo-land when she called Assad a reformer, the same totalitarian-loving cloud she inhabited when she bussed Suha Arafat.
The president himself has no real values, only vague notions received from lamebrain post-modernist professors or, worse, the Walt-Mearsheimer-Rashid Khalidi nexus. But the virulent anti-Israel views of the latter crowd seem particularly laughable today. The Israelis would have to be genuine imbeciles to make the kinds of concessions these people want, considering the homicidally insane behavior their neighbors are currently exhibiting. (That includes recent Palestinian activities like firing missiles into school buses, murdering worshippers, and beheading peace activists.)
So horrifying as this all is — maybe we are in a teaching moment (except for Walt and Mearsheimer who, no doubt, will continue to blame Israel for everything. What’s worth more — a Harvard education or a subscription to Vogue?)
Meanwhile, PJMedia will continue to do its best to bring you the news from Syria as it develops — with the appropriate CONTENT WARNINGS.
