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Bashar Assad?
We thought he was lifeless.
Not solely is he alive and kicking, however the Syrian dictator can also be sending reinforcements to his buddy Vladimir Putin who’s presently caught in a quagmire in Ukraine.
The hope is that the Syrian fighters — some 40,000 who’ve already volunteered — will beef up Putin’s faltering military which, in its retreat from Kyiv and elsewhere, is committing genocide, murdering a whole bunch of harmless males, girls and youngsters.
Whereas the world reacts in horror, no nation appears to be doing a lot about halting the wanton killing of civilians regardless of determined pleas from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
President Biden, who beforehand referred to as for Putin’s removing — earlier than strolling it again — should, on the very least, declare Putin a terrorist and his Kremlin gang a terrorist group, just like the U.S. did with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
If Putin is, in keeping with Biden, a butcher and a conflict prison, why not a terrorist, too?
Putin definitely qualifies. Whereas such a designation might not add to the financial sanctions towards Putin and Russia already in place, Putin may have been branded for the terrorist that he’s.
Whereas his savage invasion of Ukraine has blown up in his face, Putin could survive, similar to Assad did regardless of U.S. makes an attempt to take away him.
You keep in mind Assad. He’s the despot who brutally cracked down on the pro-democracy revolt towards his dictatorship in 2011. He later used poison gasoline — lethal sarin — towards his personal individuals.
Then President Barack Obama warned that Assad would cross a crimson line if he used chemical weapons within the Syrian civil conflict.
When Assad did, Obama regarded the opposite approach, settling for a promise, quickly damaged, that Syria would flip over its stockpile of chemical weapons to Russia,
When Assad performed one other chemical assault on his opponents in 2017, killing many ladies and youngsters, President Donald Trump launched a Tomahawk missile assault on the Syrian airbase the place the assault was launched. Assad stopped utilizing them.
Assad owes Putin massive time. Putin helped Assad win the Syrian civil conflict. Putin leveled the historic metropolis of Aleppo in 2015. It was the final stronghold of Syrian democrat opposition forces difficult him.
Putin again then used planes, heavy artillery and missiles to show Aleppo into rubble, bombing hospitals and faculties, and killing harmless girls and youngsters, simply as he’s doing in Ukraine, particularly in Mariupol.
Promising humanitarian corridors for civilians in Aleppo, Putin bombed and strafed them too, simply as he’s doing in Ukraine.
Again then, Obama, Biden, and Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry all insisted the times of the murderous Assad had been numbered, and that he needed to be faraway from energy, by some means.
Assad should go, grew to become the mantra of the Obama administration, though it did little to expedite Assad’s departure.
“I’m assured that Assad’s days are numbered,” President Obama mentioned in 2012. “I’m assured that Assad will go,” he mentioned in 2013. “It’s not a query of if, it’s when.”
Effectively, Assad remains to be there, and it’s Obama who’s gone.
As for Biden, nicely, he mentioned not too long ago in Warsaw that “For God’s sake this man can not stay in energy.”
However he later mentioned he was not speaking about regime change. He was simply speaking.
Biden as Obama’s vp was all in on dumping Assad. Assad “should step down” he mentioned on the time.
Apparently Assad didn’t pay attention.
Neither is Putin. Putin, like Assad, will nonetheless be in energy after Biden is gone.
You simply don’t ask, hope or pray Putin will go. You make him go. Which is one thing Biden is just too outdated, too weak and too befuddled to do.
Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.
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