It borders on the obscene to say, regarding the death of Syrian President Hafez Assad, one of the great mass murderers of our time, that “Death has taken another warrior statesman of the Middle East” (Editorial, June 12). Or to refer to him as the “Lion of Damascus” when he is really the butcher of Hama, ordering in 1982 the mass extermination of as many as 20,000 men, women and children in that city.
We curse Pinochet. We praise Assad.
Assad allowed every major terrorist organization on the planet to have headquarters, offices and/or training bases in Syria. Syria has been on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism for two decades. Numerous groups are headquartered in Damascus. Others are granted training areas in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon–which is occupied by 30,000 Syrian troops and which operates as Damascus’ puppet state.
He sponsored and protected Hezbollah, and Syria remains a conduit for Iranian supplies to that terrorist group. For decades, he allowed the communist Kurdish Workers Party to use Syrian territory to terrorize and destabilize our NATO ally Turkey.
Like Hitler in Austria and Czechoslovakia, Assad fomented civil war in Lebanon and invaded in 1976 to keep the “peace” after his earlier effort to incorporate Jordan into his “Greater Syria” failed. Syria today derives much of its revenue from trafficking heroin produced in the Bekaa Valley.
Assad’s departure should be celebrated, not mourned, but to listen to President Clinton talking about the tremendous respect he had for him, one might have thought that the Gandhi of the Middle East had passed on, instead of the Heinrich Himmler.
During his recent visit to Syria, President Clinton missed a chance for a quick tour of Assad’s finest suite of torture chambers at Saha al-T’dhib, only an hour from the capital. Mr. Clinton could have seen the specially designed fingernail pullers, tools for the forced insertion of objects into the rectum, electric-shock equipment, harnesses for hanging prisoners from the ceiling while beaten and chairs that bend backwards to asphyxiate the prisoner or just crack the spine.
Mr. Clinton says he was “very saddened” by Assad’s death.
I say good riddance.
