Syria is turning into the Spain of our time. Assad has the weapons, and will keep using them on on his people till there are no dissidents left and he will go like Franco unpunished for the next thirty years. Obama could take him out with a drone missile strike and he won’t, and it’s a pity. The United Nations could offer him a secure compound outside Las Vegas or Mecca or St Petersburg or Shanghai and they won’t, and it’s a pity. And the daily killing of heroes will continue, and their wives and brothers and children, the Messiah, maybe, if one believes that sort of thing, among them.
And it’s a pity.
And it’s worth saying this, I think: That Iraq was the last of the ‘missionary wars’ of the American Century and there will be no more. By leading a ‘coalition’ of twenty-eight Christian nations against a secular Muslim one (so secular that Saddam had a Christian deputy, Tariq Aziz, a friend of the Pope, still awaiting execution) America lost for the West all moral authority in the Arab world, and ended forever an era when the Arab world and the Third World yearned for the Disneyland illusion of what might be called ‘free-range capitalism’; which, after the Meltdown, and the punishing of Spain and Ireland and Greece, is seen to be a moral shambles, advancing the rich and punishing the poor without reason or purpose or end or even arithmetic, so seen by the Arab world and their kissing cousins in India and Pakistan and Malaysia and Indonesia and Nuigini and the Katter North of Australia. Missionary capitalism is over, and it will not be missed.
And the killing continues. We have seen on the road to Damascus the enormity of what we have wrought, and there is no forgiveness, and no way back.
Iraq left the ‘democratic’ West with not a leg to stand on. An unprovoked ‘Shock And Awe’ campaign of ongoing massacre that took out the electricity and killed tens of thousands of newborn children in their humidicribs and hundreds of thousands more in the No Fly Zone starvations and the air-strikes and the civil wars, fought street by street, that followed, and drove into exile (in Syria, mostly) three million more in an Arab Holocaust, an Arab massacre of the innocents, that will be remembered as long as the first three Crusades.
And no-one wants us in their countries anymore. We have armed a man as detestable as Assad and they remember. And though we may now attempt to disown him, they remember.
Syria is the greatest moral defeat for the ‘liberal democracies’ since Franco took Madrid. And it’s a pity.
It is to be remembered that Howard encouraged Blair to go to war in Iraq without the United Nations and he did. And Bush would not have gone in without Blair. And the net result is an unnecessary civil war of increasing malign ferocity that will go on for a century.
This is what missionary wars do.
And we Australians are always in them, and we should be ashamed of ourselves.
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Your round about way of calling on Obama to deploy a drone to assasinate a foreign head of state seems cowardly, why don’t we do it, why don’t we take the initiative on this one, let’s get cracking, let us not lay this on the shoulders of the Americans again. What would it cost? Closing down the theatres, ballet companies, film commission, writers festivals for a few years, an additonal $2.00 levy on every book sold, AAA (Artists for Assad Assasination) are you with me comrade?
The initiative doesn’t need to engage the whole defence force, comrade, nor send the Country broke.
Merely a small team to employ the ‘Arafat’ method or perhaps something quicker.
The world would be a better place without him.
We could even outsource it, just make sure the drone is painted in the Southern Cross with “greetings from downunder” and this has nothing to do with the US, this is from Bob Ellis and the undersigned. I just think we should have a real crack at it, not as a junior partner, the missile can have a boxing kangaroo on it for all I care, maybe with a speech from Bob to give it a more poignant purpose. The world may be a better place without Assad, as long as we own up to the fact that we think it is ok to assassinate heads of state.
Mission Let the Sunshine In.
“If allthumbs believes he does not think he believes, if he does not believe, he does not think he does not believe”
Dostoyevsky “Crime and a Good Telling Off”
(It’s really The Possessed and it was Stavrogin) allthumbs appeared in Karamazov.