Just shrugs all around

SOME OF us have been fans of Frida Ghitis’ writing since before she went to work as a regular columnist for the Miami Herald. Her column has been published on these pages for the better part of a decade. It’s a rare find for an editor when a columnist’s work is not only thoroughly researched, interesting, sprinkled with personal recollections from her world travels, but also . . . readable. Which is why she’s a regular.

Frida Ghitis’ column last ran on this page way back on, oh-last Thursday. Her topic, not for the first time, was Syria. Her point: People around the world are paying less and less attention to the civil war and ongoing passion that’s tearing Syria apart, but that war is still the most neglected in the world.

Or as Ms. Ghitis put it: “There’s a dangerous human tendency to gradually pay less attention to crises that unfold over long periods of time.” The first cry of a tortured people may attract attention. After that, not so much. The rest of the world that has enough to eat, a place to stay, a measure of hope . . . it loses interest.

Frida Ghitis wasn’t kidding. The bureaucrats at the United Nations who have to keep up with the dismal numbers say little Lebanon alone now has 1 million refugees from Syria’s turmoil crowding into its narrow borders. Another 8 million are spread around the Middle Eastern neighborhood. The best estimate spokesmen for the exiled can come up with is more than 150,000 people dead. And the world’s leaders? They mainly shrug. Oh, it’s just Syria again. Even as its war, hunger, bloodshed homelessness and desperation spread.

ESS THAN 48 hours after Ms.Ghitis’ column ran in your newspaper came the latest but all too familiar news story: Over the weekend, chemical weapons were used again in Syria, this time in a village called Kfar Zeita, which was taken by rebels months ago.

Time quoted a witness who said a helicopter dropped a container on the village, and some sort of yellowish dust, carried by the wind, coated the place.

The Washington Post reported that two people had died.

The Associated Press reported that dozens of adults were being treated in a hastily set up field hospital and given oxygen while children gasped for breath between fits of crying.

The next day, Sunday morning, the Obama administration dispatched Samantha Power, this country’s ambassador to the UN, to ABC’s This Week. Her mission: Make soothing sounds.

“We are trying to run this down,” she said. “We’ve shown, I think, in the past that we will do everything in our power to establish what has happened and then consider possible steps in response.”

We’ve shown in the past . . . .

Everything in our power . . . .

Consider possible steps . . . .

In short, this crisis, now entering its fourth bloody year, calls for immediate discussion.

It all sounds familiar, much like this administration’s indecision as Ukraine disappears down the Russian maw. And our lady at the UN only gabs. As children gasp for breath. The ones that survive, that is.

Syria’s murderous regime is still headed by Bashar Assad, a true son of his homicidal father. His government claims the rebels gassed themselves in order to frame the regime. Well, sure, isn’t that just like those treacherous victims of Bashar Assad’s ruthless regime-trying to frame an innocent man!

Bashar Assad’s spin machine has said all this before. As it did last year when a chemical attack near Damascus killed hundreds of people in a rebel-held neighborhood. It would not seem to be the most prudent of strategies to kill your own people, but that’s what the regime claims those tricky rebels are doing. And it’ll probably make the same claim the next time poison gas is used against the rebels. Few believed Bashar Assad’s government/gang last year, and who would now?

Last summer, ever so briefly, the administration in Washington seemed out to build a coalition of allies that would support air strikes against the Syrian regime in retaliation for that earlier chemical attack. That was after the president’s red line was crossed the first time. Instead, the newest tsar in Moscow, one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, stepped in to negotiate a deal: All agreed the Syrian government would give up its chemical weapons instead of paying a price for its bloody deed.How’s that working out?

Slowly if at all. Damascus misses deadline after deadline to turn over all its chemical weapons. According to dispatches, the country still holds a significant amount of poison gas in reserve. Why? The regime blames difficulties in transferring the deadly cargo. That is, it’s stalling. Imagine that.

There was a time when the president of the United States at least talked a good game: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”-The Hon. Barack Obama, August 20, 2012.

But that red line the president of the United States spoke of in 2012 first turned pink, then disappeared altogether.

AND WHAT did the secretary general of the United Nations say after his own organization confirmed the first use of chemical weapons in Syria last year? “It is for others to decide whether to pursue this matter further to determine responsibility.” Pontius Pilate couldn’t have put it better as he washed his hands, hoping to get rid of the blood that would forever stain them and his name.

Now, after the latest attack last weekend that left people dead and children gasping, the reaction from world leaders was . . .

Shrugs all around.

Again.

Which of course raises the next question about Bashar Assad’s war against his own people: Not whether there’ll be another poison-gas attack, but when.

What is to be done? Those of us who can do little else can at least shout bloody murder. And record these war crimes, and the reactions to them, from the world’s leaders-or rather their non-reactions. If the war in Syria is a slow, ongoing crisis, as Frida Ghitis says, some of us are going to do our best to make sure it doesn’t go unnoticed. For we learned long ago that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

cc: The Hon. Barack Obama, Samantha Power, John Kerry, Jay Carney, and the rest of evil’s enablers in this tortured world.