America … One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

We’ll keep beating a dead horse, insisting that the United States give up its strange policies and shift positions with regard to the Syrian crisis, which will soon enter its fourth year, just as Americans keep taking one step forward and then two steps back. In the beginning, a red line was drawn at the use of helicopters against the opposition. This opposition began peacefully and has ended up armed and militaristic. Then the red line was replaced with the use of warplanes, then heavy missiles, barrel bombs and, finally, chemical weapons. This all was while the U.S. did nothing in the face of sectarian armies and militias.

Because of these strange policies and shifting positions, which included denying sophisticated weaponry to opposition groups (even to the Free Syrian Army and other moderate groups), Russia has taken control in Syria and used its veto power, along with China, three times to block the U.N. Security Council from a decision; the distribution of humanitarian aid, food and medicine to camps inside Syria has also been hampered.

In all of this, the United States, the only world power since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early ’90s, has become an inefficient secondary player. The U.S. cannot look Sergei Lavrov in the eye while he continues to tell John Kerry what to do. Vladimir Putin comes out as a world leader, forcing the president of the largest nation on Earth to finally disappear from the world stage and learn, along with the people of his country, that it is better not to go head-to-head with the Russian boulder. It is better to keep a low profile behind the oceans separating America from the new world.

Of course, the United States’ excuse for shifting positions is that it doesn’t need the oil and strategic water resources of the Middle East after discovering shale gas. The U.S. is looking more toward the Far East and relying on China, which has become quite the economic giant. This is really an excuse for the “penniless,” and it is politically dishonest to deny the irrefutable evidence that the area of the Middle East will remain the knot tying the whole world together and the most important strategic area in the world for maybe a century or more.

After the failure at the catastrophic Geneva II conference a few days ago, it has been assumed that Washington was changing its position toward the Syrian crisis and that the U.S. and its European and Arab allies had devised a plan to increase the shipment of sophisticated weapons to the moderate Syrian opposition. But no sooner had this information surfaced when a high-ranking official from the American administration denied “major” changes in Washington’s policy toward Syria: “Some may believe that we have arrived at new options … but this just isn’t the case … You could maybe say that there is a change in perspective, but not in policy!”*

If this is true, and most think that it is, then Syria will, at best, become a second Iraq which is fully occupied by Iran. The country will, in the end, be split in two. The rate of killings will reach astronomical numbers, and the displacement going on within and outside the country will continue so that the majority will become a minority. History will hold the United States responsible for the ravages, woes and tragic end this country will suffer if this miserable path is not given up for a truly better one.

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.