And We All Come Tumbling Down

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Syria's Downward Spiral Continues
(Part of The Darkness Visible series) 

As the two sides wave their flags and celebrate hollow victories the death toll rises. And with each tick upwards in those numbers comes the suffering for those who upon the war if forced... Syria's innocent... the children.

In recent days the battle for Damascus has grown so fierce that the innocent civilians trapped inside the city have nowhere to go. Government troops have been keeping the city on lock down while rebel forces send reinforcements into the area. Bombs continue to rip the heart of Syria apart while bullets fill the air like rain. Government shelling has been nonstop in civilian areas so as to draw rebels out into the open. While rebel bombs have been exploding in the Government's back yard.

Is there no chance for peace?

The answer once again this week seems to be no. The fighting in Syria has no end in sight. The burning of Damascus now threatens to engulf the region. And as a result has put the world on notice... yet nobody is listening.

Washington's ears perked this week when the Assad regime stated boldly that they were willing to use chemical weapons if the outside world intervened. To make things worse, nobody in the West seems to know just what weapons Syria has at its disposal. It is thought by many that Iraq's weapons (whatever they may have been) could have easily been transported across the border when American soldiers first appeared. And then there is the question of what kind of weapons Syria has developed on its own.

We do know that the classic chemicals such as mustard gas are probably readily available to Assad and his thugs. For the unprotected civilians and the Free Syrian Army, this one type of gas alone would spell disaster. All one has to do is think back to Saddam's use of such weapons on the Kurdish population in Iraq.

We can't wait for Assad to become desperate. Even worse we can not wait of terror groups like Hezbollah to get involved in this conflict. It is evident that groups like Hezbollah would simply transport the chemical weapons out of Syria and over to the Israeli border. And in a matter of days the Syrian disaster would become a regional war that could easily spread out of control.

If Israel were to be attacked with weapons obviously leaked out of Syria it would be a spark that could draw the United States back into the Middle East. Our armed forces would be sacrificed to a war that would at that point be out of control. And the fight would be characterized by its critics as "Zionist" despite obvious Islamist aggression.

All of this could be prevented from even being a possibility if the West had just simply ignored Russian interference and acted to end Assad's genocidal regime. We should not have to rely upon murderous countries like Russia, China, or Iran to stop this bloodshed. Instead the free societies of the West should put their principles of liberty and justice to practice and if necessary back these up with the use of force.

Instead we are stuck here... watching the inferno grow as Assad continues to slaughter his own people.