If the ongoing crisis in Syria didn’t seem as though it could get any worse, it just has.
In April of last year, Bachar al-Assad, Syria’s despotic president, authorized the use of deadly forces to disperse the hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors in the streets of Homs, Douma and Hama.
And the United Nations refused to make a move. This wasn’t Libya, we couldn’t just go around blowing stuff up in the Levant — not without risking a major war.
At least that’s how the reasoning went, anyway.
But now the war has found our NATO allies before we could approach it ourselves, and the risks of our collective procrastination may soon be realized on a catastrophic scale.
What began as a nationwide series of protests and demonstrations has become an all-out civil war — a war that has cost the Syrian people roughly 40,000 lives and counting.
Despite the United Nations’ half-hearted efforts to contain the Syrian situation through toothless observers and paper-thin sanctions, that death toll might be about to undergo a dramatic increase. On Oct. 3, a mortar fired from somewhere inside Syria landed across the border in the Turkish village of Akcacale, killing a five-member family preparing dinner in the courtyard of its home.
This wasn’t the first time Syria had inadvertently fired on its neighbor and former ally.
Earlier in the year, Assad’s forces shot down a Turkish fighter jet as it flew over international waters, prompting an emergency meeting of NATO.
Syria also killed a Turkish Army medic as Assad’s soldiers fired indiscriminately into a Syrian refugee column as it fled across the border.
Turkey has had enough — and now it’s determined to respond with a show of force.
“You have to be ready at every moment to go to war if it is necessary,” Turkey’s popular prime minister, Recep Erdogan said over the weekend. “If you are not ready for this, you are not a state. If you are not ready for this, you are not a nation.”
Shortly after the attack on Akcacale, the Turkish Army began firing heavy artillery into Syria.
And because Turkey is a member of NATO, and NATO’s stated motto is “an attack on one is an attack on all,” an emergency meeting of the member states was called once again.
“We have all necessary plans in place… to protect and defend Turkey,” said Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen to the press,
That’s double-speak for, “We’re ready to drop a barrel of hurt on Syria.”
Droves of high-level political and military officials have defected to the Free Syrian Army or simply slipped from the country with hastily crammed totebags full of dollars and liras.
As the regime crumbles, what’s left of the army has decided to play footloose with the international community — alternatively escalating the border conflict with Turkey and Lebanon, as well as shuffling Syria’s massive cache of chemical weapons from one fortified base to the next.
And now all the pawns are lined up, the rooks and bishops are placed upon the board.
We’re looking at the serious possibility of a major military conflict in the Levant — one with much broader international implications.
With Iran backing the regime in Damascus and Israeli officials sending ultimatums in the United Nations, what was the Syrian people’s attempt at reform has been transformed into a worldwide powder keg.
Had the international community acted swiftly and decisively in the beginning of this crisis as opposed to sticking fingers in its ears and hoping everything would blow over, this situation may not have escalated to Cuban-missile-crisis proportions.
And now the United States, a NATO member, is facing the real possibility of another horrific and bloody conflict in the Middle East.
