Tag Archives: Syrian conflict

Syria and Dante’s Inferno

“. . . the Syrian conflict, with its bloodshed, destruction and human suffering, seemed immune to all our efforts to find a diplomatic solution.” (William Roebuck, “Raqqa’s Inferno: A Diplomat Reads Dante in Syria,” The Foreign Service Journal, May 2021.)

Such are the words of a weary U.S. diplomat, retiring after a 28-year career, on his last assignment to war-torn Syria, another country ripped apart by a dictator’s desire to hang on.

My own diplomatic career didn’t take me to places as devastated as he experienced. I was assigned to Saudi Arabia for two wars with Iraq and was in Algeria at the start of civil conflict, but I was never close to the terrible suffering recounted in Roebuck’s article. Nevertheless, I identify with the hopelessness of conflict which never seems to cease.

Lacking easy hookups to the internet, Roebuck caught up on his reading in off hours, including Dante’s classic Inferno. This is Dante’s literary picture of his imaginary journey through concentric rings of Hell.

Roebuck fits his daytime journeys into Syria’s destruction with his evening reading of Dante: “I had never seen anything like it—blocks and blocks where every single building had been hit. Slabs of concrete jutted out at wrong angles, like fractured limbs broken beyond any cast would ever repair. More concrete hung from blasted ceilings, dangling in a mesh of wrinkled steal rebar like insects caught in some horrific, oversized spider web.”

At night Roebuck returned to the Inferno. “Dante’s intense, bizarre, even grotesque imagery seemed to my mind to capture the depth of suffering and destruction in Syria.”

The situation in Syria is still bleak, but Roebuck took some comfort in the defeat in Syria of the Islamic radical group, ISIS, leading to a chance for recovery.

In the Inferno, Dante eventually makes his way out of the underworld, where he then notes a refreshing view of the stars. Roebuck compared that to evidences of life again in the broken towns of Syria: some refurbished schools, a bit of night life, families chatting on carpets outside their homes.

War-War or Jaw-Jaw?

 

Acording to The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, not everything that happens in the Middle East is about us. At some point the region has to grow up.

We no longer have the desire nor the means to do the heavy lifting, not to mention that our past military excursions there have shown mixed results, at best. The possibility that the United States might bomb Syria if Assad didn’t give up chemical weapons was hugely unpopular in this country. A couple of decades or so ago, pictures of children dying of starvation in Somalia led us to intervene militarily in that country—disastrously. Today, even images of grotesque deaths from chemical warfare do not move us to consider similar actions.

Friedman’s column suggests that a lack of pluralism plagues the Middle East. The region will be forever convulsed, he says, unless it embraces diversity. The Iraqi Shiites have to allow Iraqi Sunnis to be part of the power structure, as well as other minorities.

When the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt overplayed its hand by trying to turn a fairly secular nation into an Islamic republic, people revolted. Now the military may be doing the same thing in reverse by persecuting the Islamists.

Don’t even begin with the Syrians: each group appears to lust after the annihilation of the others.

Perhaps when enough blood has been shed, the principals will no longer confuse governance with religion. They may reach that stage sooner if we stay engaged and provide opportunity to change from “war war” to “jaw jaw.” Winston Churchill coined this phrase during the time of another seemingly endless confrontation called the Cold War.

Failed States

 

After two wars, Americans are exhausted financially and morally. We have pulled out of Iraq completely and are drawing down from Afghanistan. Though Iraq technically was not a failed state, at least not until we entered it, our involvement there appears part of our desire to change regimes and rebuild nations.

Michael J. Mazarr wrote an article in Foreign Affairs discussing our involvement with “failed states.” (“The Rise and Fall of the Failed-State Paradigm; Requiem for a Decade of Distraction,” Foreign Affairs, January-February 2014.)

At the conclusion of the Great Power struggles of the Cold War, we confronted the “non-state” terrorist. Our entry in the 1990’s into Somalia and our intervention in other failed states since then came about, Mazarr suggests, because we wanted to cut the poverty and corruption out of which terrorists come.

Certainly, many terrorists come from failed economies and societies. The leaders, however, are more likely to emerge from a fairly well-off middle class. Often they are incensed at government corruption or at decadent habits (pornography, broken homes, etc.) that they perceive as drifting in from Western cultures.

In the current world scene, the United States is unlikely to engage in invasions of other countries or to become embroiled in land wars, because we perceive that these policies haven’t worked. Should we than turn our backs on violent human rights abuses, as is happening in Syria?

Perhaps we should choose a more patient path. That includes working with other nations in painstaking efforts to build trust between enemies. Efforts include talks that seem endless—in other words, in tasks that may continue into our grandchildren’s time. But sometimes if we stand in the wings, we can take advantage of war weariness to find workable solutions. We have to be present. We do not have to invade.

Syria: Praying in the Peace

 

This afternoon Christians of all persuasions in our small island community came together to pray for the situation in Syria. The most peace I have felt in days washed over me in that quiet sanctuary.

I prayed for the people of Syria, for leaders in this country and abroad, for peace between Israel and Palestine, for the people of my faith in the Middle East, and for the people of all faiths in that conflicted land.

How often do we take time out of busy days to surround ourselves with listening silence, to pray without distractions?

I didn’t know such a quiet simplicity was so powerful. God grant peace to the nations such as I felt this afternoon.