As with any post, it would be great to have discussion about the points I’ll raise below. They’re still unrefined, but I hope there is some truth in them. I react to three fallacious soundbites that seek to detract from doing more to help Syrians remove the Assad regime. I call these cheap pop-tarts, which we can buy easily, but really don’t have much substance at all.
1. “Syria’s opposition is too disorganized to merit more help.”
In the Warsaw Rising and the German-Russian museums I visited recently in Warsaw and Berlin, respectively (the latter on the Nazi-Soviet theater of WWII), I felt I was encountering an obvious but important theme: the sheer messiness of war. I read about the Nazi and Soviet armies, ethnic Ukrainian fascists collaborating with the former, both nationalist and communist Polish partisans, the Polish government-in-exile, Jewish partisans taking to the forests… terror tactics everywhere, rape, plundering, propaganda, and reprisal attacks everywhere. I could feel my head spinning. (more…)
The Medford Pact 