Not ALL THAT long ago, the Los Angeles Times ran a headline: "Syria: Is it time to act?"
That was in the summer of 2013.
Since then, the bloody tyrant in Damascus has taken a former president's red line and not only stepped over it, but put his boot heel on it and ground it into the Middle Eastern sand.
The powers that (almost) be in the West still lead from behind. Way behind. If the Western powers have a policy toward Syria, it might be summed up as the opposite of the Roman maxim tace et face--say nothing and act. For while Syria burns and bleeds and dies, the world says a lot but does nothing.
Here's what has happened lately. And we don't mean since the summer of 2013. We mean in the last few days:
• The New York Times reports that at least 80 people were killed Tuesday in a suburb of Damascus as Syrian government air raids and artillery rained hell from above.
• In the Idlib province--where a group from Conway, Ark. continues to support schools and clinics--the government's air war has targeted hospitals and clinics, killing dozens. With an assist from the Russians.
• Footage coming out of Syria shows babies being carried from rubble that was once a hospital. But those doing the videotaping are have a crisis of confidence. One activist from the Idlib area told the Times he doesn't know why he keeps risking his life taking these pictures, for all the good it does: "I don't know what the point is." For few outside the country seem to care.
• The Democrat-Gazette reported last week that there have been more chemical attacks in Syria as the government uses chlorine and sarin to clear the landscape of its enemies.
Nothing seems to change in Syria. Except the number of dead. That figure continues to rise. It has that much in common with hot air.
Speaking of hot air, there's a lot of it coming out of various Western capitals. The apparatchiks at the United Nations have issued yet another call for an immediate cease-fire. They have called the situation "extreme" and have demanded all sides stand down while deliveries of aid are made. The last time evacuations were allowed for humanitarian reasons? Oh, about last November.
All the while the Russians, the Iranians, the Syrian government, the Turks and any other strongman in the region continue to tear the country apart, body by body. And the world issues press releases.
There's another factor in this bloody patchwork: Syria's people also play a role in this war--as targets, pawns and innocent victims. God help them, because nobody else seems about to. Not in any serious way. The West has responded to this ever more tragic crisis with a plenitude of words but precious little action. With predictable results: Some say upwards of 400,000 people have died in the civil war, which is anything but civil.
Peace in our time hasn't changed all that much since the 1930s, which inevitably led to the cataclysmic 1940s. For the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil in the world, as Edmund Burke once observed, is that good men do nothing. Case in disastrous point: A good man but a poor statesman named Neville Chamberlain couldn't understand why his countrymen should grow so exercised about "a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing." He found out soon enough, and so did an imperiled free world.
Call today a revival of the spirit of the 1930s. But just as with others in those dangerous times, some of us will speak up, even if we're ignored or shouted down. We call it bearing witness. It's the least we can do. And never let it be said that, in the West, we don't do the least we can do.
Editorial on 02/09/2018