Humans slaughtering humans. Again. Pointlessly.
by David Atkins
The U.N. Security Council could vote Saturday on a draft resolution that would pressure the government to stop a sustained, bloody crackdown on dissidents.
But hours before Saturday morning’s meeting in New York, reports of carnage at the hands of the Syrian regime surged.
Government forces “committed one of the most horrific massacres since the beginning of the uprising in Syria,” killing at least 260 civilians over the past day, the opposition Syrian National Council said Saturday.
“During the attack, residential buildings and homes were randomly and heavily bombed,” the group said.
Some Syrian residents say the international community is sitting idle as bodies mount in the streets.
“The U.N. isn’t doing anything about it. The Arab League isn’t doing anything about it. … While they’re having their little discussion, people are sitting here and they’re dying,” said an activist identified as Danny.He said the assault on Homs started after a few dozen members of the Syrian army defected and fled to a part of the city.
“The civilians went down to welcome the (defectors) to thank them for their bravery,” he said. “When the army found out, it started randomly bombarding with tank shells, mortar bombs. It’s like they’re killing animals.”
Homs resident Abu Abdo Alhomsy described continuous bombing and snipers perched throughout the city.
“There are so many people on the streets that are wounded and they need help, but we can’t reach them to help them,” he said. They’re ready to kills us all. They have no problem with doing that. Please, we call (on) the international community for help.”
But the difficulty in passing a U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria could drag on.
Russia, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council and a trade partner with Syria, has hinted it is not satisfied with the latest draft resolution.
Russia is dragging its feet on the Syria resolution, ostensibly because Moscow feels it was duped into authorizing greater military force in Libya than it had intended to allow. Moscow is very, very concerned about the potential for intervention in Syria.
It turns out there’s a very good reason for that:
Recent Russian arms sales to Syria are worth $4 billion, including fighter jets and advanced missiles. Russian business investments in Syria encompassing infrastructure, energy and tourism amount to nearly $20 billion. A natural gas processing plant about 200 kilometers east of Homs is being constructed by a Russian engineering company, Stroytransgaz.
But financial investment carries only so much weight in the face of international criticism. The United States, for example, had billions invested in the Mubarak regime in Egypt, yet halted its support as protests mounted.
Russia has refused to follow suit in Syria, demonstrating a willingness to absorb criticism. For the Kremlin, it appears more important to demonstrate a confident and sovereign foreign policy in defiance of the West…
The Syrian regime also provides Russia with a key strategic asset: a deep warm-water port at Tartus. The lack of such a port has plagued Russia’s global ambitions for centuries and is said to be one reason behind its invasion of Afghanistan.
The importance of the port may not be as great as it was in Soviet times, but unfettered access to the high seas remains a driving force for Russian strategic thinking as Russia’s main ports are either ice-locked for much of the year or land-locked by straits controlled by other powers.
Western Europe had oil interests in Libya, so suddenly the West found it possible to conduct a successful operation against Qaddafi. The West has little in the way of oil interests in Syria, so Assad has gotten away with merrily killing his people at will. But no sooner does the West realize the untenable nature of its position, peep up and consider sending a harshly worded letter, than Russian energy and shipping interests do their best to put a lid on it. After all, what’s a few thousand dead civilians to Gazprom?
Meanwhile, a war without end or hope continues apace in Afghanistan–a war that, if it ever had a chance of succeeding at all in routing out the Taliban, rebuilding the country, emancipating its women and actually improving the lives of Afghans so utterly destroyed after the Soviet invasion and shortsighted U.S. funding of anti-Soviet mujahideen, was lost the moment the Bush Administration and its lapdogs in the Democratic Party and the Press decided to abandon it in favor of an insane, murderous, illegal grab at the oil under Saddam’s Iraq. An invasion that should have led to the lifelong incarceration of the American heads of state responsible for it, if there were any justice in this world.
Of course, the quagmire in Afghanistan is made impossible for U.S. or Afghan interests largely because of the continuous ultra-right-wing Koran-thumping reinforcements coming in from Pakistan, which itself is locked in a pointless nuclear conflict with India over religion and control of water-rich Kashmir.
Don’t forget also that Israel is threatening again to bomb Iran, which is still reeling in retaliation against the West due to the CIA coup against its democratically elected leader Mossadegh. That coup was undertaken against the popular socialist head of state to ensure that BP would get unfettered access to that sweet, sweet crude lest it find it necessary to bathe the Gulf of Mexico in oil due to dangerous drilling there, instead. Now the hyper-religious conservative government of Iran is making wild threats about mining the Strait of Hormuz even as American ships rescue their fishermen, and only few years ago successfully stole an election and destroyed a hopeful incipient uprising by liberal youth fed up with its dictatorial control. All of which will be used as a great excuse if a Republican walks into the White House in 2012, in order to start an armed conflict with Iran by 2016–conflict that, at its core, will once again be more about oil and religion than anything resembling human rights.
At some point, various groups of human beings waving different colored flags and shouting to different gods–as though the colors of the flags and the names of the gods will matter to anyone but historians but a few centuries hence–will have to move past slaughtering each other for resources and to prove that their version of the unprovable is the real one. It’s pathetic and disgusting. The only way that is going to happen is a system of international law with credibility of enforcement.
Until then, we’ll be destined to watch this sorry merry-go-round of death and mutilation for generations to come.
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