Oxfam says that the Syrian refugee crisis is ‘spiraling out of control’; Amy Christian reports:
The Real News Network interviews Omar Dahi on this humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, with 70,000 dead, a million displaced abroad, and two million displaced internally. Dahi is scathing on the lack of reporting on the direness of the refugee situation in the mainstream media, and on the paltry character of the Western response to the refugee crisis.
It is difficult to parse a U. S. foreign policy that is based on fear and hostility toward the Muslim world in general in response to clerics and hard-liners who characterize the U. S. as The Great Satan. And at the same time the U. S. is criticized for taking a passive stance toward the atrocities against the citizens of Syria by their own government. This is a can’t-win situation. The West will make no friends by helping depose the Assad regime, even if it is the right thing to do, and there is no political will for another war front in the Middle East where we have been mired in unproductive military action for a decade.
Good questions, Professor. Apparently there’s resounding disinterest and eloquent silence — much more interest, what a surprise!, in “getting weapons to the Resistance.” And having created gadgets like shoulder-fired heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles, and having them spread around by the Great Gamers and manufacturers’ reps in armed and covert “service,” arguing about which entity is more “culpable” for making it possible for one bunch of warriors or another to “level the playing field” by shooting down helicopters and attack jets and as the target environment gets emptier and the conflict conflates, maybe the occasional civilian passenger aircraft? After all, the Navy shot down that Iranian jetliner way back when, maybe simply because the weapon system and training of the swabbies biased their view of actual reality, a situation that I am just SURE our Brass and skilled contractors have carefully cured…
The violence is so much more, ah, energizing and entertaining. And suffering civilians are a feature, not a bug…