This editorial appears in the April 9, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
EDITORIAL
Blinken and Pompeo Agree:
Death to Syrian Children
[Print version of this editorial]
April 1—The dire situation in Syria is becoming one of the critical junctures in the intensifying battle between the genocidal policies of the British Empire and a new paradigm based on peace through development. After ten years of warfare in Syria, instigated and orchestrated by the Obama Administration with the intention of bombing it into oblivion, arming terrorists to destroy its social and political structure, assassinating its head of state, and looting its raw materials—i.e., precisely what George W. Bush did in Iraq and Barack Obama did in Libya—the nation is teetering on the brink of Hell.
Cardinal Mario Zenari, the Apostolic Nuncio to Syria during these past ten years of war, told the Catholic News Agency on March 25:
Peace, I repeat, will not come to Syria without reconstruction and without economic recovery.... But how long will Syrians have to wait? Time is running out. Many of the people have lost hope. Urgent and radical solutions are needed…. About 90% of Syria’s population is living below the poverty line—the highest percentage in the world.
There are mile-long queues for a loaf of bread or a gallon of gasoline in Damascus, and electricity availability is down to three hours a day. Although fighting is largely over, millions of refugees are unable to return home, due to unilateral U.S. sanctions, which intentionally prevent any reconstruction—sanctions imposed under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo but continuing under Secretary Antony Blinken. President Trump’s expressed intentions to end the illegal and pointless war were flatly rejected by the nation’s military leaders, who obey the orders of their Commander-in-Chief now only when they agree with them. The only reason Syria even survives as a sovereign state is because Russia intervened, joining in a war against the terrorists and defending the sovereign government under President Bashar al-Assad.
On March 29, the UN Security Council held a forum on the situation in Syria, in which the evil of the war party was on full display. Speaking for war and genocide was President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Blinken, who, as Deputy Secretary of State under Obama, advocated all-out war and regime-change against President Assad. At the UN he had the gall to shed a tear for the “urgent needs of the Syrian people that we’ve heard described so eloquently today. It’s clear that those needs, including having enough to eat, and access to medicine, are not going to be met by the Assad regime.” Not a soul at that meeting was unaware that the U.S. sanctions are intended to be certain that Assad is unable to feed his people.
As Col. Richard Black (ret.) told the Schiller Institute conference on March 21, “Sanctions do nothing but attack the innocent, the poor, the helpless! They are the most cruel and barbaric type of warfare that we can wage.”
Responding to Blinken from Russia was Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin:
The reaction of Washington and Brussels to the call of the UN Secretary General to ease and lift unilateral sanctions amid the coronavirus pandemic was, on the contrary, to tighten, in an unprecedented way, the restrictions adopted—bypassing the UN Security Council—including the introduction of the infamous Caesar Act in June 2020. Unfortunately, the honorable representative of the U.S. and other Western colleagues spoke about a lot of things in today’s speeches, but not the U.S. and EU sanctions and their dramatic negative effect on ordinary Syrians.
Vershinin added:
Reports continue to come in that American convoys are trucking out oil and grain from Syria to Iraq daily, while Syrians are suffering from acute shortage of basic products, including bread and petrol..., while the country is simultaneously suffocated with unilateral sanctions which essentially are a form of collective punishment.
How can a nation claiming to be concerned with human rights impose deprivation, and even starvation, through sanctions and war, upon millions of children in Syria, as well as in Yemen? How can a nation which has killed millions of innocent Muslims in order to achieve “regime-change” in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, then claim moral purity regarding Islam by declaring China guilty of “genocide” against the Uyghurs—as both Pompeo and Blinken have done—when any one of their representatives need only travel to Xinjiang to see that it is a total lie?
There has been a drastic failure of morality in the trans-Atlantic world—failing to counter the COVID-19 pandemic’s course of death, failure of compassion for the victims of their wars and sanctions, failure to address the most profound violations of human rights—poverty and starvation—even within their own countries.
The Schiller Institute and the LaRouche Organization are creating the institutional means through which political leaders and concerned citizens can, and must, act to reverse this evil, and to inspire the world to restore a world worthy of the dignity of man, through international cooperation to restore a love of science, of beauty, of Classical culture and human progress.
This issue of EIR contains the transcripts of the third of four panels, “The Indo-Pacific, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, and Southwest Asia: Pivots for War, or Peaceful Development with the New Silk Road,” at the March 20-21 conference of the Schiller Institute, “The World at a Crossroad—Two Months into the New Administration,” with presentations by political leaders from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan, as well as from Europe and the United States.
