The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday of a car bomb on Friday in Beirut which killed a prominent Lebanese politician opposed to Hezbollah. The article said that the bomb was “drawing Lebanon deeper into the sectarian morass of Syria's civil war and harking back to a spate of earlier assassinations blamed on Damascus and its Lebanese allies.”
The article continued:
“The attack was the latest violence linked to the war in neighboring Syria, which has deepened political and sectarian divisions in Lebanon. The two countries have long been closely intertwined.
It also echoed a string of political assassinations from 2006-2008 that was widely blamed on Syria and its Lebanese ally, the Shiite militant and political group Hezbollah. Rafiq Hariri, too, was killed in a massive car bombing in central Beirut.”
According to the Journal: “Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the ‘abhorrent terrorist attack’ and said it was a loss for Lebanon.”
But seriously, Secretary of State Kerry should probably just be quiet. The United States had the opportunity to try to do something about the civil war in Syria in 2012 and in 2011. But President Obama said no: he couldn’t figure out who to support (and even when he did decide to send a few supplies, they apparently didn’t get there on any kind of a timely basis); he was elected to get us out of war, not do things that might get us involved, even tangentially, in other situations (Libya excepted), etc.
The only thing that seemed to really get him agitated was when approximately 400 children were killed by poison gas. Tens of thousands of deaths by other means, including possibly thousands of children, didn’t get much of a reaction. But the 400 children killed by poison gas did. He even threatened to bomb Syria for a few days because of the attack – until he decided to follow Russia’s lead and just get Syria to give up its supplies of poison gas, ignoring the people already killed.
Now, the civil war in Syria is not only continuing, it’s spreading. We didn’t try to do something two or three years ago because it was thought to be too dangerous and too complicated. Well, it’s more dangerous – and more complicated – now.
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