CSotD: Fire! Fire! Quick! Hand me my fiddle!
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Anybody got a solution to this?
I'm certainly not backing off from my previous gratitude that Russia stepped in to defuse the chemical weapons issue, whether it golly-gosh just happened or was a quiet agreement between Russia and the US.
But the utter lack of improvement since in any other respect also makes me willing to stand by my earlier multi-cartoon, multi-perspective post on the topic, headlined "Hamlet in the Oval Office."
It would be nice to declare the entire Middle East an insoluble problem that is none of our business to begin with, but that rather assumes some kind of 19th century war in which the soldiers all go off onto a battlefield somewhere and shoot at each other, and that's not how war works anymore.
Even in the Stratego days of red uniforms on one side and blue uniforms on the other, wars were hard on the people who happened to live on those battlefields. Now, when every place is a battlefield and uniforms are a mere formality often dispensed with, the collateral damage is an obscenity that cannot be ignored.
And even for those twisted, selfish souls who are able to put the moral obligations aside, there are practical impacts that transcend national borders.
The giant in Paresh's cartoon is very real: Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon are having to deal with a major refugee crisis that seems barely a blip outside of the Muslim world, except to the extent that the Europeans are saying "not here, not here."
Well, the news this morning is that the two sides have agreed to sit down, which may awaken memories — or trigger flashbacks — among my generation of the Paris Peace Talks to end the war in Vietnam, which began with a multilateral pissing match over the shape of the table, the gist of which was how many parties it took to actually be multilateral.
The current stalemate is not dissimilar: The parties are quarreling over whether they are negotiating to end the fighting or — as stipulated in the Geneva I Agreement which launched the talks — to peacefully replace the Assad regime with a more representational government.
The Paris Peace Talks, of course, ended with Henry Kissinger accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, Le Duc Tho rejecting his, the Americans going home and, two years after the last American troops were withdrawn, the North Vietnamese Army streaming into Saigon.
Vietnam is, today, a relatively peaceful, even prosperous, country, but it was never Syria: The pro-West Catholics in the South were an outnumbered elite even there, and it was often argued that the reason the South refused the free elections promised when France withdrew was because they knew the outcome.
My impression is that Syria's divisions are neither that black-and-white nor that lopsided, and that — heartless or not — simply letting them slug it out is not a sensible solution because it will never end.
Then again, I don't have a sensible solution and I'm pretty sure that another round of attempted Middle Eastern nation-building at the point of a bayonet is a very bad idea.
This feels to me like one of those domestic violence cases where any cop who tries to intervene will find that the one thing the combatants can agree on is kicking his ass for getting involved.
(Insert cliche about repeating an action and expecting different results?
No, insert Phil Ochs instead.)
The situation in Syria may not be hopeless, but, as this article says, it's certainly not simple:
Both the Syrian government and opposition are under intense pressure from their supporters not to offer any concessions and from their international allies to remain at the talks. Both sides risk losing international support if they are seen as responsible for torpedoing the peace effort. And ordinary Syrians on both sides desperately want the talks to make at least some progress toward reducing the horrendous levels of violence, adding to the incentive for both sides not to quit.
Fortunately, we have our press to keep the world's attention sharply focused on these crucial issues.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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