Monday, February 20, 2012

What do we do about Syria??

I'm watching Anderson Cooper this evening and they're talking about Syria.  It's horrible.  The government is killing it's people with impunity.  The world seems paralyzed as to what to do.  I find myself getting frustrated by the US's current inertia on the matter, but even more so at the rest of the world.  The USA has surely done some dastardly stuff in the past, but most of the time its outward goals are positive, especially in the past 20-30 years.  There's talk of a proxy war going on with Russia and Iran pulling the strings, but…when it comes down to it, THOUSANDS are being slaughtered and thousands more have no food, shelter, or medical attention in the middle of winter, and yet the country's all glued to minutiae such as which sweater vest Rick Santorum is going to wear next while he talks about how if he was president, he would home school his kids in the White House.  

Even though there is clearly not means to ameliorate the situation, good people of conscious should wake up and demand that SOMETHING is done to help these people. 

Another deadly day of bloodshed... as the world stands idly by and watches Syria's government murdering its own people.
Opposition groups say more than 50 people were killed today. Hundreds more were reportedly killed in the city of Homs over the weekend.
And the killing has become butchery. One Syrian told the New York Times of seeing the beheaded bodies of women and children lying on the roads.
And the civilized world looks on and does nothing.
A syrian activist called "Danny" says this:
 "The women died. Children died. We have more than 30 children dead from four days ago. We have loads of children injured. My friends are in a hospital. I hope they'll be OK. Lots of them have been hit by fighters yesterday. (Some were hit) today just because of trying to cross the street. 
Snipers hit women, children, men, kids, doesn't matter. The Syrian army - I'm not going to call it the Syrian army, they have no humanity in them, they kill anything in front of them. They are hitting civilian houses.”

This is worse than bad.  This has been going on for a several months. The world needs to step up.  The United States has been a leader, whether asked for or not, in the past. I have to say, I'm kind of tired that we, the US, seem to be doing all the heavy lifting in the world. It's time for the rest of the world, who seem to think that the US is so heavy handed and autocratic in dealing with world issues, to demonstrate their leadership capabilities. Obama began pushing in this direction with his republican loathed, "leading from behind" strategy on Libya.  And frankly, that turned out pretty well.  But it's time for us to be the follower, the backup, the muscle that stands in the corner while England, Japan, Australia, dangit, ANYONE steps up and addresses this insane business.

1 comment:

  1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWVa_KuSryE

    “The US is hugely hypocritical in this regard. They've long been the largest arms dealer and most of those weapons that the US has sold historically – more than $400 billion worth since the 1960's – have gone to the Middle East. And you can't argue seriously that it’s made that region any more stable in the past five decades,” Corey Pein, editor at warisbusiness.com, told RT.

    In the past few years, nearly 50 per cent of US weapon exports have been flowing to the Middle East. Many countries with the biggest appetite for American weapons can be called anything but pillars of democracy and champions of human rights. Some of them, like Bahrain, have also made headlines for carrying out brutal crackdowns against dissidents and opposition groups.
    The double standard approach is hard not to notice, says author and journalist Chris Hedges.

    “If you're our thug, you're ok and if you're their thug, you're not. For all of us that have been overseas, the duplicity and hypocrisy of American foreign policy is painfully evident,” he told RT.
    According to congressional figures, America has sold $1.4 billion worth of weapons to Bahrain since 2000. America struck its single biggest arms deal with Saudi Arabia, which ordered $60 billion worth of arms.

    The US has long subsidized the Israeli military and recently supplied them with bunker-buster bombs. Those are handy for attacking other countries’ fortified sites, for instance, Iran’s underground nuclear facilities.

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