Syrians travelling to Munich

We cannot call it quite a disaster yet, but it is getting dangerously close.

Let's start with a personal disclaimer here: since I did not have a blog when Iraq was invaded you will need to take my word for it that I was against the invasion promoted by Bush II and his colleagues, Tony Blair in particular. You will never find in this blog a positive reference to the Iraq mess, and several as to why the Iraq war favored Chavez a lot, allowing him to slowly but surely transform Venezuela democracy into a neo-totalitarian one while the US was unable or unwilling to do anything about it. Then again Chavez for all of his anti US rhetoric was very careful to send to Bush all the oil he could send him. Afghanistan is another matter and its eventual failure has probably a lot to do on the US also going into Iraq.

I would like to point out that on this particular respect I have agreed with the French governments that went into Afghanistan but not into Iraq, and that are now the lone allied of Obama into going against Syria even though they risk to be left alone as the anglosaxon powers seem to be more chastised than what they should be.

Now, getting back on topic. My position is quite simple: if any rogue regime in the world uses chemical or biological weapons it should be severely punished. That the Russians refuse to acknowledge that, that the Western Democracies who suffered the most from chemical warfare are finding themselves tied in knots speaks ill of the state of the world and its capacity to solve the conflicts looming in the horizon. If the anti Assad debacle is confirmed in the next couple of weeks it will simply be an open invitation for rogue regimes to start thinking about these weapons to help them retain power, such as the thugs now in charge of Venezuela who have already demonstrated their easy use of the strongest forms of tear gas.

What is the hold up? That the UN is held back by China and Russia? That did not stop in the past. That Syria is a civil war? That did not stop the Libya intervention. That we do not know whether Assad or the insurrection used the chemical weapons? Not only the odds are overwhelmingly against Assad for using the forbidden weapons, but a few well placed missiles are the best deterrent against him to use them in retaliation in case the insurgency had managed such a feat!

That the right in the US, and because of it now in France, are feeling empowered to criticize their country's government into action, while the left does the same in the UK is only a witness on how politics are now hostage to populism and welfare preservation at any cost without retaining a minimum of ethics. We are in a stupefying world Munich moment. Some countries like Russia deliberately disregard uncomfortable evidence of the genocide that Assad has been perpetrating in the last two years. Others prefer actually, if secretly, Assad to win because they left the radical Islamism penetrate the insurrection by not helping this one on time. Others like the US have such knee jerks pacifists that think that not bombing Assad will protect them from future 9/11 that they are ready for perverse political coalitions to sink their leader. And some like Germany are only too glad to hide behind a conveniently ineffective UN. And let's not go into the Arab/Muslim world having their little religious proxy war in Syria regardless of the suffering of the population.

I am totally disgusted. Yes, indeed, the Syrian mess looks now like a no win situation. But it did not have to become so, and surely there is a better way to deal with the situation today than what is happening in Western Democracy capitals who will not avoid future terrorists attacks, whether they bomb Assad. Am I the only one seeing that? Am I also the only one that sees that quite a few countries are going to be encouraged in becoming more repressive, from Burma to Venezuela, from Sudan to Pakistan, from Cuba to Russia?