The Middle East woke up Thursday morning to haunting pictures of lines of dead kids, each in a shroud. Only their small faces were showing. Their eyes were closed. Anyone unaware of what they were really seeing, would have assumed they were merely asleep. Yet these children were among the victims of the latest attack by the Assad regime on its own people. Every time you think the Syrian dictatorship can stoop no lower, it never fails to appal with a new and greater depravity. Opposition forces are saying that at least 1,300 people were killed by gas-filled shells that were fired into the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on Tuesday. The bodies of the dead children showed no signs of any external injury. Whatever the toxin they breathed in their final minutes, they died in pain and panic, as confused and frightened by what was happening to them, as their families and the medical personnel who gathered around them, were utterly helpless to do anything to save their lives. There will be time enough to establish the truth of what happened, the nature of the poison, who made it and who supplied it and where the order to use this deadly weapon came from. Was it the dictator Assad himself, as it was when Saddam Hussein commanded the gassing of the Kurdish city of Halabja ? In that hideous crime, 5,000 people, mostly women and children, perished in clouds of gas that came from bombs and shells dropped into their community. There will be time enough to finger the guilty men, hunt them down and bring them to justice. This moment is, however, perhaps the opportunity to wonder how any human being could knowingly set out to perpetrate such an appalling act of indiscriminate savagery on innocent human beings. Did not the senior artillery officer who was told to prepare to load gas shells have a moment's compunction? Did not the soldiers who actually loaded, aimed and fired the gun when told to, feel the slightest horror at what they were about to do? Or have they perhaps already become used to raining down chemical destruction on helpless victims, in other bloody scenarios elsewhere in this torn and brutalized country? Was it for them just another day of cruelty? Very probably. Assad's military has always been blinded by violence and hatred in their two year's seeking to do their master's bloody bidding. Those soldier who could not stand their evil orders, long ago defected to the rebels. But what about the others, who stand behind the Assad regime as he attempts to bludgeon his people into submission. What about the Russians? What about Hezbollah? What about the Iranians and what about those Iranian allies in the Iraqi government who give covert support to this monster? After what has happened this week in this luckless Damascus suburb, caught in the tide of war, there can be no doubting the sort of dictator that these people are supporting, what sort of regime they are sustaining in the teeth of the righteous anger of the great majority of its civilian population. Millions of refugees and blasted and shattered cities may be acceptable to these fans of the regime. But with lines and lines of small kids, murdered by poison gas fired by their friend and ally of Bashar Al-Assad … how do they sleep at night?
