The American journalist Michael Weiss wrote recently, “Tony Blair can’t be a war criminal. If he were, George Galloway would support him.” The joke
works on the assumption that the backers of despots in the West are always from the Dostoevskian dregs of extremist politics: wild and frothing men, far from the polite and sensible mainstream in
which the British establishment resides.
With Bashar al-Assad committing war crimes against his own people, ask yourself what kind of man wrote this article in that eminently respectable journal of international affairs, Foreign Policy.
As the Arab spring reached Syria at the beginning of April, he began the piece by warning readers that they must not show their lack of sophistication by falling for Western stereotypes. ‘Assad’s situation is indeed so very different to that of a Mubarak or a Ben Ali – which [has] become the unique lens through which his response was being judged –particularly in the West.’
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