It has been a long time since I found myself reading a newspaper, let alone its proposed digital surrogate, with a profound sense of relief over revulsion, learning over loathing, stern doubt over stark disagreement. Even in these times, or these underdeveloped habits of mine of isolating within a bubble of general agreement. But it is, I can say this without hesitation, many a full moon since I consumed an editorial, from a myriad of mediocrity habitually riddled with and factual errors, with such lycanthropic fury as the late and (predictably) bleak commentary of The Guardian's Simon Jenkins on the imminent resurface of the Ba'athist dictatorship, after seven-year hiatus which has reduced the country to something unfit for the term, and - in O'Brien's words - and putting them together (most of them) in shapes of his own making - barring the solidified reliance on custody - now joint - of a reemergent authoritarian Russia and reemboldened Iranian mullahs. The first sentence, which I will not quote, blew me to the back of the chair, subjected to a slight internal growl of what can best be described as sublime and yet homicidal rage. (Go look it up for yourself. Cut it out, and try imagine you're inside the author's head, and not mine. Then scroll up to the picture, and employ the best of vivid imagination.)
For all the flaws and echoes not of Munich, but the long and shameful and particularly British period it may be said to have put an end to, Jenkins is probably right in his first assumption: Nothing short of a very late, audacious and at any rate unlikely intervention and an uneasy occupation would stop Assad and the Hizb al-Ba'ath from reforging a rump client state, a Frankenstein entity under a tutelage which sooner than usher in peace will only ensure the continual misuse and desolation of the home of Zenobia, Emperor Philip (the first and only Arab to come ever so close to the position as master of the human species) and the apocryphal evangelist Luke, of Julia Domna and Pope Gregory III, and the continuation of the decades-to-go autocracy over whose survival it is fought.
In 2012, I penned a rather pitiful little article, calling - concisely - in no-nonsense but reluctant terms for a military or aeronautic intervention to orchestrate, or rather ease the overthrow the Assad regime. The great tragedy of the Syrian conflict - or massacre, as one may less euphemistically describe it - asides that of a breakdown of a seemingly multicultural, multireligious, secular society (an audacious overstatement) has clearly been the shifting tides of sympathy, with the bulk of Western, liberal democracy-aligned editorials and thinkers once claiming to favour the instatement (shall we raise the bar of audacity, evolving) of a secular, civilised, orderly multi-party system and rule of law of things also in the Arab world changing sides again - with never so little effort - to the sour, bitter claim that the militant fundamentalist may, after all, merit a robust and not always so rose-folded response. Who is to argue against that instinctive proposal?
For a start, one may be forced to study, only for a moment, the proposed contradiction between "secular" Ba'athism and the forty-year prolongation, or rather entrenchment of another more sordid page in the history of ruffian sectarian juntas which - upon the last whiff of imminent rebellion in the air - reduced the ancient city of Hama to a demolition site of rubble and dust and clotted blood, and the battered but thriving remnants of already hostile Sunni Salafi Jihadism it may have pressed further down under the weight of its lid - until the explosion. As anyone paying attention with a narrow mind for these machinations of the past, this Assad's rule and the last have, far from eradicated or put sectarian and religious-fanatic zeal and violence, funded it with one hand, let it grow under the cruel yoke of oppression with another, fed on the friendship kindled with its auxiliary while importing Iranian regular troops, then to fan the flames once the second great revolt spread by infecting it with the most deadly and verminous specimen of the multifaceted opposition. The promise of the Damascus Spring of 2000, quickly and predictably cut short, speaking above all of the proposed untimeliness of a self-serving autocracy and particularly one reliant on a sectarian, violence-based one-party state - one tribe, one leader, one party - and the century which opened just after the fall of the Soviet Union and was awakened in the great upheaval ten years later, to a hideous and unresolved tally. Let it never be forgotten, however, that this "body count" began before most Syrians were born, and will continue after the last thousand per annum, the arbitrary weight of an armed conflict, have been confined to dust.
The more pleasant of the lions... the voice that roused the proposed first First Gentleman, which commanded the occupation of Lebanon, the destruction of Hama, the death of tens of thousands, or the reformer whose sweeter tones boxed on while dooming millions to refuge?
So: what can be done about it, this riddle of blood and gore, of Gordian complexity and naked zeal which has become the premier humanitarian crisis of the decade (barring some we forgot, some others, and those we already knew about, or not, and the proceeds of which were only barely spilling over our doorsteps)? The recents airstrikes have, while offering a glimmer of hope that a restoration of the Assad to its proper place as the monopolistic torturer and enemy of the Syrian people may not be seen just as a return to ordinary state of affairs but rather (I say this with shudder) something like Iraq in the interlude between the wars, only symbolically chastised the capacity for further relentless harm and writ under just as much the failure to rein it in and longstanding Western reservations for a more tide-turning (dare I say revolutionary) effort in the passive-aggressive relationship of the Western European, particularly the French, to his former mandates and client states, and another odd blot on Trump's already insalient, Miro-esquely chaotic record.
Unpredictability may have been the greatest asset of the Nixon-Kissinger effort to bring about, by force and more of it, a long-overdue peace in former French Indochina but will not arrest the march of the tyrant whose victory, as I insist to call it - his physical survival, and well-understandable dread of the fates of Nicolae or Ante, shared by his family and rightly fearful brethren, has been his one and only objective from the start - will be the end of most symbolic and already enveloping tragedy to a first heroic, then shambolic uprising hoping to steer the collective Arab nation to a point of which where there many opinions and hopes, but a stunning agreement that it needed to go. It is an Arabian summer now, and as anyone will know upon inspection, summer is the winter of the Global North. The rot of death is thick in the air. And the flies, vultures and plague are yet to follow.
In this outcome of things, Jenkins is almost certainly true to be right, though forgive me for forgetting my manners in congratulating his Cassandric qualities. But as one may reject without mourning, with tears forged in glee, the vaporising of Western intervention in the Middle East, this outcome - which may yet delay for years of suffering and certainly be the worst one could have feared as the forces of oppression and long-repressed disgust came finally into conjoined motion for a violent and long-expected, dare I repeat long-overdue, engagement - which must most necessarily result in a deep and by necessity heavy-handed rediscovery of the values which founded the United Nations and the European Union, of reexamination of the link between these and our policy standards, the never-ending and never-commenced issue of Security Council reform, of increased European cooperation and a reformation - worthy of the term - of the International Criminal Court (now in a nevertheless shameful decline from its never very viable state of gestation) and above all: the reflection of what constitutes a good nation, a good partner, and the proper response when the scopes of the snipers make their presence known, when the crowds of the justifiably revolting are answered with the methods with which they are so intimately and ruthlessly socialised, but which we so often ignore and subdivide by the shallow veneer supposedly so polarising, so dogmatically upheld by the nouns, tabloid headlines, parrot cries of "war" and "peace". In this reexamination, the likes of Jenkins - and all those who favour peace of any kind, or shall I say for our time - will have small stakes, except the desire to be left out of the horrors of the future by reflecting, with a vigour which displays - unbelievably - both the very worst of the sclerotic and the pornographic, on those of the past.
