‘Responsible’ is not letting Assad live and let die
Sept. 11, 2020
Nearly 10 years on, with enough evidence to the contrary to fill history books for decades, I have just heard "experts" still speaking of an imaginary US push for regime change in Syria and explaining that this has to stop.
They are devastated that American sanctions are what's really hurting the nice Syrian people who don't seem to have suffered a bit from Assad's barrel bombs, chemical weapons of mass destruction, mass displacement, relentless Russian airstrikes - nor were Syrians hurt by, God forbid, the "exaggerated" killing machines of Hezbollah and Iran.
No no, Syrians would be just fine and dandy if the world embraced Assad and just stopped bugging him with conditions like stop killing your people and we will lift sanctions, or pressured him by saying liberate your 10s of 1000s of prisoners to lift sanctions. That's counterproductive, we are told by these new groupies of the just-let-Assad-be-Assad club as they advocate, without the slightest sense of irony, that we need "responsible" policies.
Such “responsible” statecraft notions have no time to spare for minor principles like accountability, justice, or even agency, let alone intangibles like the dignity Syrians have been clamoring for at the highest cost imaginable. As for democracy, it's just not for the natives.
When we ask for changes in US policy on Syria, amongst others, it’s certainly not to go from bad to worse. If letting Assad live and let die is the top agenda being promoted by such self-proclaimed responsible policymakers, we have much bigger problems than we ever imagined.
