As our Secretary of State has recently called Assad a "reformer" (though now uses harsher language - but nothing more) and we've taken no significant action to protect the Syrian people, stories like this continue to surface (courtesy http://quitenormal.wordpress.com - full link here):
Meet 13 year old Hamza Ali al-Khateeb. He was snatched by Assad goons and tortured for weeks before being returned to his family with bullet holes, broken bones, covered in cigarette burns, and minus his genitals.How long are we going to continue to let this happen? What options do we have? How would you feel if your adolescent son or daughter was brutally tortured for speaking out against a vile regime? Military intervention may not be productive or efficient, but it is increasingly clear that Bashar al-Assad needs to go. Preferably before an international tribunal for genocide and related charges. Is the U.S. going to continue to "lead from behind", or are we going to support a dissident movement that, for humanitarian and strategic reasons, is of vast import to our interests?
I got rather side-tracked around the 4th of July researching a much longer (and upcoming) post regarding little understood matters of Islamic doctrine that may impact the O.S. mission; the above post was not the only one that I had planned to mark the occasion. I just didn't actually post it.
ReplyDeleteI originally planned to write about societal Balkanization with a link to Mark Steyn's prescient and entertaining defense of Andrew Bolt, which I'm going to embed just above this post.