“Devastating and overwhelming.” Those are the conditions in the ancient and oncegreat metropolis of Aleppo.
The air forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad and his chief backer, Russian President Vladimir Putin, target apartment buildings, bakeries and—this is their specialty—hospitals and clinics. The United Nations is investigating credible reports that Assad again has used chemical weapons, in this case chlorine gas. Water has been cut off from hundreds of thousands of people.
The last surviving physicians in the rebel-held half of Aleppo a few days ago begged President Barack Obama to help.
Why would these brave, forlorn doctors look to Obama for rescue? Perhaps one of them, through the terrible din of war, remembers hearing the president promise to stand by the Syrian people as they were being “subjected to unspeakable violence, simply for demanding their universal rights.”
Obama made his pledge during an address at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in April 2012. He boasted that he had decreed, in a first for any U.S. president, that preventing mass atrocities “is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States of America.” That did not mean that the United States would “intervene militarily every time there’s an injustice in the world,” he cautioned. But when it came to Syria, Obama was clear.
“The Syrian people have not given up, which is why we cannot give up,” Obama said. “And so with allies and partners, we will keep increasing the pressure, with a diplomatic effort to further isolate Assad and his regime, so that those who stick with Assad know that they are making a losing bet.”
Alas, that was many atrocities ago. According to the Red Cross, more than 12 million Syrians—half the prewar population—have been forced from their homes, with millions more under siege. Hundreds of thousands have been killed. Well over 1 million have been wounded. Iran and Russia continue to place their bets on the Assad regime. And Obama no longer pledges to stand with the Syrian people, though he remains clear-eyed about what they are facing.
“The regime and its allies,” Obama observed at a Pentagon news conference this month, are engaged in “vicious attacks on defenseless civilians, medieval sieges against cities like Aleppo, and blocking food from reaching families that are starving.”
But the administration’s response has not changed: a combination of halfhearted support for the rebels, who increasingly gravitate by necessity to more extremist groups; requests to the Russians to behave better; and finger wagging.
“It is deplorable,” the president said during his visit to the Pentagon. Small comfort to the people of Aleppo.