Peter-Vincent Schuld

The war rhetoric about missiles to be fired, coming from the mouth of US President Donald Trump, does not contribute to the hard-to-build stability in Syria.
Forget the word peace, because that is a utopia in a country where, in addition to the Arab socialist-nationalist Ba’athist ideology of Assad and his followers, sectarian clubs with religious-opportunistic delusions want to call the shots using any means of violence available.

Whoever would have been in the White House, escalation would have been lurking under every president. Sometimes the impenetrable limousine of the American president seems like a perfect metaphor for the presidential bubble in which reality does not seem to penetrate. Like this limousine, the words from the White House are often imposing, but they fail when there are real hurdles to overcome. The president’s limousine (Obama at the time) was also once stuck when it left the grounds of the US embassy in Dublin in 2011. At the time of writing this piece, Washington reports that it does not yet have a time frame in which military action will be taken. Are there talks with Moscow behind the scenes?

In the Syrian city of Douma, poison gas appears to have been used against the local civilian population. There are supposedly indications that President Assad is responsible for this.
From a Western point of view, it is understandable that action is being taken against this. But is this wise? Isn’t the cure worse than the disease?
Syria has become such a hornet’s nest that any intervention could backfire.

As unfortunate as it is for the people who lost their lives in this alleged poison gas attack and their relatives; a single wrong action or reaction in response to the events in Douma could lead to a massive escalation in which many more people could lose their lives. A confrontation between the U.S. and Russia however small, limited or large it may be, whether military or diplomatic, is undesirable in a multipolar and highly flammable world.

President Assad of Syria is not a sweetheart, in fact he is a crook. But Assad is not the only crook.
The country is full of thugs who lead or are part of all kinds of militias that fight the regime, fight each other or fight humanity.
The country is now hanging together from, or has fallen apart, depending on the perspective from which you look at it, by groups that are at each other’s throats.

At the very least, it seems that only the Kurdish militias aspire to the status of an independent society to be civilized, this reinforced by the Kurdish aspiration for independence, which is suppressed in all countries where Kurds originally live.

Russia doesn’t support the Syrian government because they think Assad is such a nice person. For Russia, Assad is just one tool in the pursuit of a major power to be taken seriously on the international chessboard.

Russia believes that a form of existing national authority, even if this authority still performs such crimes, is more desirable than total chaos without any form of accountable national government, as in Libya, which has three governments.

In a sense, the West bears a great deal of responsibility for the events in Syria. The Arab Spring should have brought democracy.
With some knowledge of history, philosophical anthropology, tribal and religious contradictions, this idea would not even have entered the mind of a “real politician.”

If there is one thing that countries with a great religious-aggressive diversity should not have now, it is democracy until such time as social evolution has brought people to a point where earthly life must be respectfully fulfilled in connection with an educated middle class.
Until then, a reasonably secular despot gives at least a little chance at prosperity and stability.

In other words, where peoples believe in the murderous sword in the name of Allah the Terrible rather than an empathetic philosophy, progress and science, things are bound to go wrong and democracy is only doomed to lead to outbreaks of violence. After all, there is no common denominator among all political denominations together; namely, the protection and preservation of the democratic rule of law with the associated values and freedoms.

As for the foreign interference of heads of state and government in relation to Syria, it might be advisable to revisit the works of the sometimes forgotten French-Jewish philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson, whose most important quotes are “think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”
That’s what I’m missing in Trump’s actions these days with regard to Syria.

I think that we, as a world population, have to resign ourselves to the fact that Syria and its players who aspire to absolute power have not reached the degree of civilization and that this civilization cannot be imposed. Through the Arab Spring, the evil genie has come out of the bottle and it cannot be easily put back in.

Until natural evolution in Syria has reached the point where we can speak of a society with a hardened form of civilization, we will have to resign ourselves to the knowledge that our food during the eight o’clock news is ruined by images of limbs under the rubble and children who become helpless and hopelessly orphaned. Then go and thank yourselves for any support you may have shown for a democratic process in a society that was not yet ready for it. That’s not called cynicism, that’s called realism. I will welcome the day with joy when the people of Syria have been able to transform their political, religious and tribal hatred into an open, free society. Will I live to see that time? I’m afraid not.