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Why we should support the Syrian opposition, in spite of everything we know
Good op-ed piece by Joshua Stanton, the proprietor of One Free Korea, the go-to blog about North Korea and oppression in general. He has a more positive view on the events in Libya than I have and credits NATO with engendering more goodwill than I've seen, but I'd like Mr. Stanton to be right about this.
There is no question that, as Mr. Stanton says,
...the Assad family's legacy has been decades of poverty, oppression, torture, massacres, sectarian oligarchy, and the conjuring of pathological hatred for a neighbor that has repeatedly inflicted humiliating defeats on the Syrian Army.
Mr. Stanton advocates rapid development of close links with the Syrian opposition both to put an end to the civil war there and to keep Syria from turning to a Muslim Brotherhood-like organization to fill the gap in Syrian society. As with Libya, I'm not that optimistic -- once Pencilneck is gone, my bet is that the Syrian people will turn to militant Islam, not western liberalism, just as the Egyptians, Libyans, and Tunisians have done. In the end, the culture is Islamic, and in times of terrible turmoil people return to the culture they know.
But the best course for now is precisely what Mr. Stanton suggests, if only to end the suffering of the Syrian people and to keep the Middle East from exploding. |
Posted by: Steve White 2012-02-04 |
