Collin Meisel
“No one should shed any tears over the Assad regime.” US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Daniel Shapiro’s reaction to last week’s toppling of the Assad family’s decades-long rule in Syria is fully justified given Bashar and his father Hafez’s infamous brutality. Having forcibly disappeared nearly one hundred thousand people, including thousands of children, and murdered hundreds of others in 2023 alone, and with a long track record of other atrocities and human rights violations, Shapiro is right. The most appropriate reaction to Assad’s flight to Moscow is good riddance.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time to celebrate. History is replete with short-term victories that have evolved into long-term losses.
In 1917, at the height of World War I and the dawn of the Russian revolution that year, Germany was struggling to bring at least one front of its two-front war to a close. As part of the solution, the German government organized and funded a secret train with thirty-two Russian revolutionaries—chief among them V. I. Lenin—to foment turmoil in Russia and guarantee Russia’s permanent exit from the war. It did. And yet it also led to the founding of the Soviet Union, the future source of a seemingly inexhaustible well of people who were essential in defeating Germany just over two decades later.
No comments:
Post a Comment