Friends of Syria: Obama, Clinton, the Saudi King, All Pusillanimous, One Worse Than the Other
I know that this is harsh. But I use the word pusillanimous in its ugliest meaning—which is the “unmanly” meaning—especially in relation to Saudi Arabia, having stockpiled weapons and trained soldiers for decades so that by now it is the only Arab country capable of taking on the monstrous regime in Damascus … and winning. I say “unmanly” because the kingdom has done nothing of the sort. “For sure,” as the Arabs say in their English, it is wholly a man’s country, ugly and unnatural in any depiction of a crowd, actually camouflaged, and thus preposterous in its laws, mores, culture, and presentation of self. Of course, there are women in the country and they can do nothing for or by themselves, save if they are foreigners when servitude is their lot, like foreigners who are men. In fact, servitude is the only guarantor of gender equality in the kingdom.
Now, the military is a proud lot, mostly deriving from the fact that a Saudi royal (graduate of Sandhurst, Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abd Al Aziz, the nomenclature denoting him as a grandson of the founder of the kingdom, son of the late defense minister and one of thousands of princelings) was commander of the coalition of the so-so allies, including Syria (!), which freed Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991. OK, maybe Norman Schwarzkopf was really commander of Desert Storm. But let’s not quibble. The monarchy also scurried to arms when, during the last year, no Arab force was completely excused from warfare, and the Saudis eagerly took up the cause of the minority Sunni rulers of Bahrain, one sheikh to another, against the vast majority of Shia who are their subjects. And, to be sure, our country patrols the Persian Gulf against what soon may be a very mischievous flotilla of Iranian soldiers and sailors, to say nothing of terrorists who roam the seas already.
Saudi Arabia took the initiative in the Arab League to demand and command that Bashar Al Assad cease the brutalization of the Sunni majority dispersed among the country’s pastiche of minorities. The League designated a certified brutalizer himself—the Sudanese architect of the Sudanese genocide—to bring calm, or such calm as one can imagine to a country that is nowhere near a nation state. Anyway, this seedy initiative increased the killing … and it is increasing still.
Saudi Arabia and the League have not given up, however. The ongoing official murders continue, and the rebels have also certainly not given up. Of course, there is more and more division in the ranks, in all the ranks. Truly ugly allies like Hamas, the premier Sunni organization among exiled Palestinians, which had been sheltered from Israel by Assad, walked out on their long-term savior. And in Haifa, Israeli-Arab citizens, perhaps 500 of them, demonstrated for Assad; nobody bothered them. So there is little clarity in the big Arab street running from Tunis to Baghdad via Beirut, where Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah, his armed mob, is still a force deeply allied with Assad. What you make of the lopsided dictator’s vote for his new Syrian constitution is what you make of it. But remember that Stalin won his elections to “beloved leader” with somewhere between 97 percent and 99 percent.