Mick Hartley

Terry Glavin:

Saturday, August 31, 2013: U.S, President Barack Obama decides that Syrian mass-murderer Bashar Assad should be allowed, after all, to get away with having slaughtered at least 1,429 people, including 426 children, in a sarin gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta.

A year earlier, Obama had said an atrocity of that kind would be a Syrian “red line” he would not allow anyone to cross. But within days of Obama’s bluff being exposed Secretary of State John Kerry was taking tea with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Kerry has been taking tea with Lavrov ever since. The most recent conversations between them involve a White House offer to collaborate with the Kremlin in identifying targets in Syria that both Russia and the United States would be amenable to having eliminated.

Russian warplanes have been busy bombing Assad’s enemies in recent months, many of whom also happen to be pro-democracy Syrian rebels the White House pretends to be supporting, along with quite a few hospitals, and hundreds of Syrian civilians going about their routines in the rubble that has been made of their cities and towns. Assad, meanwhile, with Russia’s support augmented by Iran’s Quds Force and Hezbollah, has been permitted to continue his mass murders, except less with sarin gas and more with crude barrel bombs. Assad’s bombers carry out an average of 24 sorties a day.

The number of dead Syrian civilians was last reckoned with some reasonable accuracy at 470,000 people, several months ago, the overwhelming majority of whom were killed by Assad, by Lavrov’s bombers, by their friends in the Quds Force and Hezbollah. The butcher’s bill racked up by the Islamic State doesn’t even come close….

If Assad has been allowed to get away with mass murder, what possible charge can NATO bring against Erdogan? It has not mattered that Erdogan has become a deranged megalomaniac, that he presides over Turkey like some sort of sultan from a newly-built presidential palace of more than 1,100 rooms, that he is now the world’s most enthusiastic jailer of journalists, that he has shut down the country’s leading opposition newspapers, or that he has threatened his party’s parliamentary opposition with the prospect of being dragged before his hand-picked judges on trumped-up “terrorism” charges, or that he has opened 1,800 criminal cases against his enemies for the crime of “insulting” the president.

“I am the head of executive, legislative and judicial bodies,” Erdogan declared two months ago. So much for separation of powers. So much for the rule of law. And now Erdogan has declared that the United States must extradite the eccentric Islamic liberal Muhammen Fethullah Gulen to face Turkish charges of conspiring and plotting the weekend’s failed coup attempt….

It is hard to say what Erdogan will end up extracting from Kerry in negotiations for Gulen’s extradition, but the Americans’ continued use of the Incirlik air base for its operations against the Islamic State is already on the table. Turkish troops loyal to Erdogan surrounded the base and cut off the power after the coup was put down on Saturday.

It is unclear what Erdogan will be allowed to get away with next, and one shudders to think. This is a moment in time when we’re all supposed to be most concerned with nation-building at home. What this means abroad is that you can get away with mass murder. The United States will not hold you to account. The European Union will not hold you to account. NATO will not hold you to account.

Nothing will. Nobody will.