Syrian shambles

As the West’s dream of turning yet another Middle Eastern dictatorship into a Western-style democracy collapses into a desperate calamity for Syria’s inhabitants, are we in America and Britain prepared to face up to just what a disastrous shambles of millions of people’s lives we have engineered in that area?

Of course Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria were ruled by dictators who operated in partnership with Islam.

To Western eyes this was far from being an ideal situation, but it gave stability, a balance, which with hindsight was in all probability the best that could be achieved for the citizens of those countries.

Possibly what we are watching unfold in Syria is the greatest tragedy of them all. For all of their many faults, the Assad family’s Syria was the most stable country in the region; the only country left in the Middle East where various religious minorities lived in close proximity, and we encouraged Syria’s people to rebel on a whim then turned our backs on them.

We have their blood and suffering on our hands.

Shame on us this Christmas.

Irvine Inglis

Reston

Berwickshire

The decision by the US and Britain to suspend military aid to the Free Syrian Army underscores the stupidity of the venture in the first place. Many people warned that the aid sent to the Syrian “rebels” would end up in the hands of fanatical anti-Western al-Qaeda-linked jihadis and so it has happened

While failing to unseat Assad, the Saudi/US/UK-financed insurgency has razed much of Syria, killed more than a hundred thousand, forced seven million from their homes, fanned Shia-Sunni tensions across the Middle East and enabled al-Qaeda and its allies to carve out a sizeable enclave in northern and eastern Syria.

Washington and her allies have carried out a monstrous crime in Syria, organising and arming the most reactionary forces so as to remove a regime viewed as an obstacle to un-bridled Western domination of the world’s most important oil- exporting region.

The propaganda they spout dresses up a US-Saudi-fomented Sunni Islamist insurgency as a “revolution”.

Just as 9/11 was a consequence of the stupidity of arming jihadis against the Russians, so future terrorism here and abroad will be by people the US/UK governments helped in Syria.

Alan Hinnrichs

Gillespie Terrace

Dundee