A Thought on Syria

Brigadier General Salim Idriss, Chief of Staff of Free Syria’s Supreme Military Council, has a question that pretty much says all there is to say:

I don’t understand the West.  Why are all of them just looking on?

There were related questions and answers in the SOI interview:

SPIEGEL: But no one plans to deliver [anti-aircraft missiles] to you out of fear that they could fall into terrorist hands.

Idriss: Terrorists?  We experience terror every day.  A short while ago, I spoke with one of our commanders in the east.  The air force had just bombarded the Euphrates dam again.  If it breaks, billions of cubic meters of water will destroy everything.  Is that not terror?

And

SPIEGEL: One of the West’s fears is that the jihadists could take power if Assad falls.

Idriss: Do you know who vacated their positions in Idlib and Aleppo when a US attack seemed imminent?  The radicals from the “Islamic State.”  Since they have absolutely no interest in the fall of the regime, they thrive in war and profit from our weakness.

But with the West—at least that portion of it represented by the US, the only nation in the West with the physical, if not the moral, capacity to act—having ceded policy vis-à-vis Syria to the Russians, there’s little the West can do other than stand on the sidelines, looking on.

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