After passing the Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act, the U.S. Congress is raising the heat on the Syrian Baath dictatorship with its proposed bipartisan resolution expressing “the grave concern of Congress regarding the continuing gross violations of human rights and civil liberties of the Syrian people by the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic.” The resolution is also calling for the ending of the brutal Baath occupation of Lebanon–once the Arab world’s most thriving and liberal state.
The State Department has been increasingly adamant in its denouncement of the Baath dictatorship’s human-rights violations and recently published a report finding Syria guilty of committing such “serious abuses” as arbitrary arrest and torture, making “enemies of the state” disappear, exiling reform-minded oppositionists, exercising total state control over the media, denying fair trials, not holding free elections, and refusing to recognize the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. In essence, the world’s last Baathist regime was called out by the American government for what it really is: A brutally outdated Stalinist murder-machine that would just as well rule over a land of corpses rather than allow some measure of dignity and liberty to the Syrian people.
We are living in an age where the West (America in particular) has finally wised up to the folly of attempting to see, hear, and speak no evil when it comes to the machinations of manic terror states in the Middle East and in Asia. It has become painfully clear that one cannot coddle despotic regimes whose megalomania knows no bounds and which are incapable of maintaining an ounce of respect for human life.
The Baath have literally been getting away with murder and terror for the past three decades, but Saddam’s time of reckoning eventually came, Khaddafi capitulated, and the plutonium-addicted Iranian mullahs cannot seem to get their house in order in the face of student opposition. The political and social milieu of the Middle East is slowly but surely changing in a radical way. Bashar Assad in Syria is now poised to rule a hermit kingdom isolated from both reality and the rest of the world–punished and ostracized for its obstinate clinging to a discredited past.
Secretary of State Colin Powell recently stated in an interview with the U.S.-funded Middle Eastern television channel, Al Hurra, “It is time for Syria to really take a hard look at the policies they followed in the past and whether those policies are relevant to the future in light of what’s happened in Iraq.” Bashar Assad, ever the desperate despot, would do well to relinquish the tired policies of proxy warfare and brinksmanship so shrewdly employed by his late father. American and European policymakers must make it clear to the current Syrian dictatorship that there can be only two choices: capitulate to the will of the Syrian people and let a new democratic, free Syria emerge or face the humiliation suffered by your fellow Baathist neighbors in Iraq. The flame of liberty has left in its wake the ashes of an Iraqi Baathist regime that just did not know when to die; it is time to show the other wing of the Baathist terror axis that the end is nigh.
In a land where children are taught to love hate and to live for death, where martyrdom is an instrument of statecraft, and chemical weapons the preferred choice of arbitration for internal disputes, we must act swiftly and decidedly to secure the American homeland and the flank of our armed forces in Iraq from the tyranny of terror that is Baathist Syria.
–Oubai Shahbandar is the U.S spokesman for the Reform Party of Syria. He is a fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.