You can predict these stories as surely as you can predict the rising of the sun. Humanitarian disasters are ignored by alleged aid groups under Democrat presidents and then become front burner issues under Republicans.
If you look back to 2003, one of the salient reasons for invading Iraq was because the international sanctions regime was falling apart. You heard scarcely a peep about the effect sanctions upon the Iraqi people from 1993-2000 but starting in January 2001 the story line was Iraqi children dying because of malnutrition caused by sanctions. Likewise wholesale genocide in sub-Saharan Africa was page three news under Clinton and Obama.
Now the left has suddenly discovered that Syria’s Bashar Assad is capable of killing large numbers of civilians just for grins.
The Syrian government committed “slow-motion slaughter” of unknown numbers of Syrians trapped in besieged and hard-to-reach areas by willfully denying them food and health care, according to a new report Tuesday from a civil rights group.
Physicians for Human Rights says in the report that the Syrian government consistently exploited a new U.N. aid delivery system, depriving millions of Syrians unable to leave their towns and cities of critically needed food and medicine. The group called that a war crime.
The New York-based advocacy group said a new two-step approval process for aid convoys that Syrian and U.N. officials agreed to in April 2016 “fell abysmally short” of its aim of ensuring access to all Syrians in need because the government in Damascus retained “unilateral authority” over who received assistance.
Just as you could predict the rise of homelessness and the discovery of a low workforce participation rate on January 21, 2017, you could also anticipate a cry for US intervention to mitigate these various humanitarian disasters. Though, in all fairness, if we adhered to Colin Powell’s infamously silly “Pottery Barn rule,” you-break-it-you-buy-it, we are responsible for the majority of the humanitarian disaster in Syria as we helped foment the Syrian civil war and were complicit in the rise of ISIS.
Keep an eye out. If past is prologue you are going to see more and more heart-rending stories on just how sucky the situation is in Syria and before you can say Mogadishu, we are going to have troops on the ground trying to separate warring factions, bring warlords to justice, and ensure innocent bystanders get fed. What could ever go wrong?
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