After the raids all three states participating put up statements by their leaders that their actions were only designed to degrade the capacity to produce chemical weapons, and that regime change was not on the agenda. The raids were said to be a one-off and would not be repeated so long as there were no more attacks using chemical or nerve agents on the Syrian civilian population.
All of the above mean that in effect the status quo has been preserved. President Trump will have pleased his domestic audience, President Macron will have reminded the world that France — a previous colonial player in the region — was still to be reckoned with and Prime Minister Theresa May demonstrated her bottomless capacity to impersonate a robot and said nothing of any import.
President Assad was pictured walking to his office the morning after briefcase in hand. President Putin called the strikes “an act of aggression” — in which he was at least absolutely and incontrovertibly correct.
The Syrian civil war has killed about half a million people in the last seven years and displaced, temporarily or permanently, about eight million or roughly half the population.
The Assad regime is regarded as the victors and has retaken all but a thinly populated largely Kurdish sector in the north-west. There is fevered speculation that the strikes are harbingers of a third World War. They are not.
The many players in the conflict know that there is nothing served by fighting one another, and any intervention they might have made to change the regime is long lost.
President Assad has no need of chemical weapons to butcher his people he has plenty of other ways to do that. Syria is a grotesque theatre, the world the paying audience.
Published in The Express Tribune, April 15th, 2018.
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