Mick Hartley

Powerful stuff from Terry Glavin, reflecting on Syria and the surprise Trump intervention:

You could say, for argument’s sake, that Syria now exists only for argument’s sake. That there’s no such thing as “Syria” anymore, and in its place there is now mostly just a howling wilderness of murder and madness and pain. In whatever way we make sense of how it has come to pass that the world has allowed nearly a half million Syrians to be killed these past six years, the search is on for an ulterior motive, an explanation more convincing than the account U.S. President Donald Trump gave of himself on Wednesday for what had happened inside his own head this past week: “I will tell you, that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me, a big impact.”

It is not being too worldly to wonder out loud whether this can be true of a man whose public professions of concern for Syria until now have addressed mainly the constitutionally permissible means by which America’s gates might be permanently barred to Syrian refugees. Then again, Trump stood there in the White House rose garden and confessed: “My attitude toward Syria has changed very much.” He referred directly to the handiwork of Syria’s chief executioner, Bashar al-Assad, in this way: “These heinous actions by the Assad regime cannot be tolerated.”…

It could be that Trump has not changed a bit, that he’s still an egoistic, impetuous, grudge-nurturing narcissist, and it’s just that he’d had quite enough of being dismissed as Vladimir Putin’s poodle, and his manliness was on the line. This alone would be sufficient to explain why Trump relayed the order to U.S Navy destroyers in the Eastern Mediterranean to release that barrage of tomahawk missiles at the airbase of Al Shayrat, near Homs—the Kremlin be damned.

Maybe it’s as simple a matter as Trump having only lately emerged from the unseemly influence of that Dungeons and Dragons character Steve Bannon, and he’s been paying closer attention to his national security adviser, Lieutenant-General H.R. McMaster, and to his Secretary of Defence, the retired Marine Corps general James Mattis, both of whom have been only recently appointed. They’re both proper soldiers. Hard as nails. Principled men.

It could be that the obliteration of Al Shayrat, rather than being just a one-off thing, signals the end of American indifference to Syrian agony, and that Trump genuinely intends to put his back into it, that he will lead NATO, in partnership with the Arab League, and we’ll have our eyes on a horizon with Syria put back together again somehow. Whatever happens, we’ve still got all our work ahead of us….

A great gaping wound has been opened up in humanity. It is going to require healing. It is going to cost a great deal, and the brutes who did this, Bashar Assad, the Islamic State, the Kremlin, the Khomeinists, all of them must be made to pay dearly. But it is going to cost the rest of us, too, and it will cost us one way or another, whether we would want to pay down our debts to the innocents of Syria or not.

That is one thing that was not changed by anything Donald Trump did this week. The burden of the world’s debt to the Syrian people will be borne by all of us, one way or another, sooner or later. We will all bear the burden. The bill will come due. And we will pay it, whether we would want to or not.

Meanwhile – it goes without saying – Stop the War have protested the Trump airstrikes. And shouted down a Syrian who wondered why they weren't protesting against Assad. The poor man clearly has much to learn. Stop the War are concerned solely with protesting against Western action, as a way of signaling their moral superiority. They have no interest in actual Syrians.