So, maybe the Alawites deserve this. They’ve been massacring Sunni right along. But since the SAA still has most of the heavy weaponry and aircraft, the Alawites have been doing their massacres in a way that the Western public can hardly recognize as massacres—by aircraft, by missile, by artillery. We’ve been trained ever since that allegedly glorious World War II to see massacres like that as just one of those things, an unfortunate fact.
The people whose families were in the apartment blocks leveled by the SCUDs fired by the SAA don’t see it that way. They will want revenge, and they may even be entitled to it by whatever notion of justice strikes your fancy. But I seriously, seriously doubt that you will want to see those retaliatory massacres, no matter how justified you think they are.
Because those massacres will be carried out old-style, up close, house by house. In other words, they’ll be the kind of massacre the Western public does not like.
And right on time: a story about brutality from the other side