Rather bizarrely for a man of letters known for his utter lack
of innocence (and I say that with much admiration), Elias Khouri declared
the other day in Al Quds al Arabi Newspaper that “the time of innocence has
ended.”
I am not sure whom he had in mind when he opened his piece
thus, because I don’t recall that innocence had ever come visiting on this side of the
Mediterranean. In Lebanon, his and my hometown, especially, the term is so
alien we always opt for “tourist” by way of a put down.
And still, it clobbers you every single time, death on the face
of a child. Nothing touches a hard heart quite like innocence snuffed out. But
then, what currency has more political purchase for hard hearts at war than the
visage of toddlers stopped dead in their tracks? People tend to think it’s the
race for the moral high ground that imbues such images with such import, when
in fact it’s equally the race away from it: in their name, revenge is
excusable, slaughter even, permissible. After all, the reasoning goes, it was
because of them that innocence in us is lost.
I don’t know if the recent display of Syrian youth in their
white shrouds, so serene and so dead, gassed into oblivion signals a new twist
in Syria’s epic collapse. But I do know that whichever way the politics turn it will do so over a mass
of shards.
Should this have been the purpose of the West, as our
conspiracy theorists claim, then it must be the most bitter irony for them that
Assad, on cue and as promised, brought the whole Syrian house down. Even if he
were, in the end, to win this battle royale, they need but for a minute imagine
a shattered Syria over the next 20 years and they will know that the deed, if
indeed it was ever that, is done. Conspiracy or not, Syria, that old country,
is already gone.
Sure, with a victory in hand, Hezbollah and Iran will have retained
their foothold in this Godforsaken queen of the Levant. And, for the West, what
exactly would be wrong with that? At a minimum, Iran and Assad will own the
fight against Sunni Jihadists, with the US et al content to watch and tinker
(sometimes even help) from the sidelines. By way of an explanation for Western reticence, there is none more
compelling than that.
If Syria is the
plague, what of the danger to the neighbors, one might ask. Indeed what of
them? The obvious truth is that the region is floundering about in rivers of
morass. Even the most likely scenarios stand on shifting assumptions. We have
an Arabic saying for when we are unable to pin down the future: “For every
event, a conversation.”
But there is one
fact we can hold on to as we look ahead. When the dust settles—as it
always does—only Syria and the dreams of those who truly loved it will have
died. The whole lot of them—the Assads, Hezbollah, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar,
Israel, Turkey, the US...—feel free here to add all your favorites--can crow
over the remains, happy that whatever Syria is, it is not the other camp’s.
