As Syrians began their Ramadan fast last week, dictator Bashar al-Assad was busy killing hundreds of protesters in Hama, deploying tanks and troops in a brutal flash that has scorched cities across the country.
Like father, like son, it seems — Assad pere massacred more than 10,000 civilians in Hama during a month-long crackdown in 1982. And though Assad fils’ butcher bill isn’t quite as large, he’s clearly just warming up.
“What’s going on in Hama is an atrocity,” said Turkey’s deputy prime minister, as tanks rolled through the city square and continued a devastating assault that has killed more than 300, according to refugees.
That ties the White House into a knot. Recall: When Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy turned his tanks on his own people, President Obama decided that America’s “interests and values” were at stake — and went to war to prevent wholesale slaughter.
But the White House blinked when Assad began his newest crackdown, offering potted statements about how the tyrant is on “the wrong side of history” and “his regime will be left in the past.”
The cracks in Obama’s Middle East policy are gaping.
Somehow a murderous regime in Libya “threaten[s] our common humanity,” but its functional twin in Syria doesn’t?
It doesn’t help, of course, that the Libyan regime is still standing, while the NATO/Arab League coalition that sought to bring it down is itself unraveling.
Credibility, once lost, is difficult to regain — and so Assad feels free to send tanks against his own people. So far, no NATO warplanes have darkened his skies, nor are they likely to anytime soon.
Assad has made the calculation that brutality is what will save his throne, and his neck.
The moral here: Kind hearts come to nothing — but killers usually prosper.
The streets of Hama were shattered and empty Friday; Assad’s gambit was working.
A debate is reportedly raging in the White House over whether to call for Assad’s ouster — a threat that no doubt will cause the dictator grave concern.
Not.
What’s to be done? Tough new sanctions might peel away some of Assad’s supporters and compel a crackup of his regime.
But that hasn’t worked in the past — so the administration’s best course may be to quit advertising its impotence in this regard, and simply shut up.