Neither [ side ] has the answer in Syria. Indeed, why should there be an "answer" in Syria? Whatever happens, it will be a mess. But what kind of mess do we opt for, what is the least worst mess?
If Britain and France get their way, they will have to accept that the opposition in Syria contains a jihadist current; it includes warlords and people who are not trying to emulate our supposedly model democracy and capitalist enlightenment. And it is also driven by genuine freedom fighters and militias that – whatever their political programme – defend a civilian population under apparently limitless attack.
We know that, post-Iraq, intervention can only have calamitous results, and that its motives are as disingenuous as they are dangerous. We know how toxic the heady rhetoric is from those who have never heard a shot fired or a shell crash, but who from the liberal and conservative salons of London, Paris and New York urge others to war.
But we also know from recollection of the rape camps, Srebrenica, Gorazde and Sarajevo that those who advocate doing nothing can never look the desperate or the dead in the eye. And we know their inactivity is part of what sends hundreds of thousands into the refugee camps along Syria's borders and fills the mass graves, that their dry calculations are in themselves murderous.
Having spent all those nights in trenches, forests and cellars and along treacherous mountain roads with the resistance fighters of betrayed Bosnia and the people they sought in vain to protect, I'd find it hard to look a young Syrian militiaman, or his murdered
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