Syria: A crime against humanity

It is irony at its best, or utter hypocrisy in fact, to be critical of Russian meddling in Syria. Who has not been meddling in the Syrian conflict up until now? The United States, Britain, France, the European Union in general, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, Jordan, the two conflicting fronts in Lebanon (the Sunni bloc as well as Hezbollah), Israel, Turkey, Iran and Russia have all been active in the Syrian conflict the whole time. 

Besides, it was Western meddling which triggered the so-called civil war after the so-called Arab Spring visited Syria in March 2011. It was the U.S. and Western powers in general who "encouraged" the armed opposition to take on the al-Assad regime. It was an open Western policy to remove the Syrian regime and to support all sorts of armed militias to achieve that troublesome policy. Finally, it was Western pressure which forced Turkey to take an active part in the conflict, form the Free Syrian Army and turn a blind eye to the transfer of foreign jihadists to Syria against the regime. It is true that the Turkish government then refused to comply with the shift of Western policy and to restrain its support of Islamist militias. Nevertheless, it started as a joint effort that was presented as liberating Syria from the al-Assad dictatorship.

In fact, "liberation theology" in the name of bringing democracy worked and resulted with a tragedy in similar ways elsewhere, such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, yet this policy was expected to bring about a different result in Syria. As if U.S. intervention in Iraq did not teach us that such a policy was a grave miscalculation, to say nothing about the problem of legitimacy concerning "liberal interventionalism," it was repeated in Syria. It took Western powers some time to...