I’ve always believed that in order to survive in politics one must possess a particular character trait without which politicians would not last the day.
Unfortunately this trait is not something we’d look for in a friend, but without it we’d have no politicians and no one would take the lead in anything.
It’s their ability to feel lower (much lower) levels of embarrassment for things that for us normal mortals would feel like being caught with our pants down in the middle of Republic Street.
Take Vladimir Putin for example – this is the same guy who doesn’t mind posing shirtless for official photos but who then had a painting seized from a gallery in St Petersburg because it featured him in women’s lingerie. The artist of same painting, Konstantin Altunin, felt threatened enough to flee Russia and is now seeking asylum in France. Putin also had three members of the Pussy Riot rock group arrested and sentenced to three years in prison for their ‘protest’ in a Moscow cathedral.
And now, he sat at his typewriter, probably shirtless, and wrote an op-ed letter about US action in Syria – a letter in which he had the gall to preach morality to ‘the American people and their political leaders’.
As opposed as I am to any type of strike that will worsen the humanitarian situation in Syria, the truth is that Assad would not survive without the weapons that Russia provides, so essentially, Putin is just as responsible for the lost lives in Syria as Assad is.
To strike or not to strike is not an easy decision, but someone with a vested interest as high as Putin’s, should just stay mum.
Admittedly a strike to punish Assad is unlikely to change the course of the tragedy in Syria and, it is unlikely to help Syrians directly, but it might certainly serve a greater good in the future by upholding the international norm against the use of chemical weapons.
People are always going to fight; war is always going to happen, but the world has worked really hard to get almost all of its nations to agree never ever to use chemical weapons. And every time a nation goes unpunished for going against this ‘norm’, we increase the chances that soon enough, it will stop being the norm.
The world decided to ban chemical weapons because they are indiscriminate; they kill anything in their path, not by mistake but by their very nature.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that chemical weapons kill more civilians than a war were they are not used, so as much as the humanitarian side of me is against even a targeted military strike against Assad, it is only by somehow punishing a Government for its use of chemical weapons that makes their use in the future a little bit less likely.