"Geneva 2", the complete fiasco of the pacifists
Il Giornale, February 1, 2014
Everything, but everything, has gone wrong with Syria. The agreement sponsored by Russia has gone badly, through which Obama, renouncing military intervention after his "red line" was violated, had obtained the dismantling of Assad's chemical weapons. The Geneva peace conference went badly. It had the pretext of ignoring the hatred for the sea of bereavement inflicted on two parties (130,000 dead) which are both still well-armed, have strong friends, and hold cities and villages... In Geneva, the pacifist hubris wanted to bring the irreconcilable together: Alawites protected by Shiites protected by the Russians against the Sunnis who are more and more attracted to al Qaeda's orbit; both convinced they are fighting for the glory of Allah and their lives against the terrorist enemy; both determined not to look each other in the eye and to not speak to each other except to Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy.
The only result Brahimi has obtained was to reconvene the conference for 10 February, while he failed on a fatal mission: to let trucks with food and medical aid into the city of Homs, surrounded by Assad's troops, saving about 3000 unfortunates, women and children, who are by now dying of hunger. The guardians of the city, from what we read, have however insisted in impeding access to those who according to them were perhaps providing help to the "terrorists." But the worst failure, which promises new massacres and blackmail, is the failure to hand over weapons of mass destruction, which were about to cause American armed intervention. Even during the State of the Union address, Obama boasted of having avoided war and of having obtained handover of the weapons. But the truth is that Assad is using the signed pact as a form of modulated and poisonous blackmail. In fact, within a few days the regime was to have taken all of the chemical reserves to the port of Latakia, but instead only 4% of the weapons possessed by the regime were handed over and only two cargo ships left the port with about 15 tons of material.
The Department of State spokeswoman Jen Psaki declared that the USA is very concerned, and that the Syrian regime has no excuse for the delay because during the war it moved its reserves many times. The Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel asked publicly if they failed to hand over the material because of incompetence or for other reasons. You can bet that Assad knows that as long as he has gas in his hands, he has a poisonous grip on power. The delay could also be brought to the UN Security council, but Syria has Russia on its side. The Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has said that asking her to put pressure on Assad is like asking Mussolini to disarm Hitler. Obama is not looking good, but we are very used to that. Maybe he is preparing for what he will do when it becomes clear that Iran too is cut from the cloth where promises made to the West are only a weapon to beat it with.
This article originally appeared in slightly different form in Italian in Il Giornale; English copyright, The Gatestone Institute