SYRIA: TERROR WITHOUT END

SYRIA: A TERROR WITHOUT END

We have now seen the pictures that no cameraman should ever have to take.  Chilling pictures of small dead children, wrapped in shrouds, each pale face drawn as if sleeping through a haunted dream that does not end. But they sleep the sleep from which none will ever wake, for in these still terrible pictures we see a land from which all hope has fled.

Syria is the nightmare scenario where all the options that available are horrific, and all its roads seem to lead to a place of destruction and ruin. As it descends into a barbaric civil war involving chemical warfare, civilian massacres, a tyrannical dictator and cast of several insanely radical Islamist groups hell bent on destroying anyone and everyone else, any once fragile opportunity to resolve the crisis has evaporated. The nominally moderate Free Syrian Army is seemingly crowded out in the shouting and shooting of the madmen and mad movements on all sides.

The West has been, once again, left trembling anxiously on the side lines. Afraid to do something, fearful of not doing anything, its only recourse is in sound bite and speech, where, like a minister in an empty church, it sermonises from within the echo chamber of of its increasing irrelevance.

The real power players, Russia ( and to a lesser extent China) observe events through the pitiless scopes of their geopolitical self interest, which, in the case of Russia, is a corrupted lens that finds only satisfaction in the humiliation of the west and particularly the USA. Putin in particular, is the puppet master of the Assad regime, and for him, the real enemy is the USA. Whether it comes in the form of pathetic and frightened pawns like Snowden, or a hellish civil war in the Middle East, all are merely tools with which to wage a new Cold War against an old adversary.

 The UN is again exposed as a toothless old hound, on a chain and issuing forth with the odd bark, the teeth in its jaws blunted rotten stumps that no robber would ever fear. And so too with Obama and his red lines, originally drawn out in the comfortable expectation they would never be breached. Now their only purpose is to demarcate a failure of resolve and to serve as the ribbon for a state policy wrapped in its own indecision.

And for Syria? It has no future. Indeed the worst of all outcomes might be that a victor emerges from this war. For what we are witnessing is the Gordian knott of conflicts, where intertwined are a monstrous collision of nationalistic and tribal aspirations, violently intolerant and militant  religious extremism, sectarian hatreds within Syria and across the wider Arab and Persian world, the interference of unstable neighbouring states, all of which is underscored by the lack of congruence between Syria's current borders, imposed by hastily departing and squabbling colonial powers in the later 1940s, and the long history of Syrianism.  There are no good guys anymore. No cavalry will ride in from the sunset. And if out of this maelstrom of barbarity a victor should emerge, he will more likely than not be consumed with thoughts of revenge.

Towards the end of the Second World War the Germans spoke of their preference for an end in terror rather than a terror without end. For Syria right now it seems they face only a terror without end.