Sunday, February 05, 2012

The Road to Damascus

Things continue to get worse in Syria. If this dispatch from the Telegraph is accurate, things could get even more ugly:


In his first full-length newspaper interview, General Mustafa al-Sheikh, who has taken refuge in Turkey, gave an apocalyptic insider's view of the state of the regime – despite its attempt to reassert control this weekend.
He said only a third of the army was at combat readiness due to defections or absenteeism, while remaining troops were demoralised, most of its Sunni officers had fled, been arrested, or sidelined, and its equipment was degraded.
"The situation is now very dangerous and threatens to explode across the whole region, like a nuclear reaction," he said.
I'm going to hope that he was using "nuclear" metaphorically.

We have no good options here. There's neither the will nor the wallet for the United States to get involved with this mess, which is now pretty much a full-blown civil war, and frankly I don't see that it would lead to anything other than more death for American soldiers, without any chance of making things better there.

So what do we learn from this? I suspect that events are in the saddle, much more so than they have been in the postwar world. If you think you know what's going to happen, you are almost certainly wrong.

2 comments:

Gino said...

but i do look forwad to seeing assad's body dragged through the streets of damascus.

Mr. D said...

You'll probably get your wish, eventually. And if they're sufficiently angry, they might dig up his dad and drag his body through the streets, too.