There’s a current of what is loosely called thought in the Syria debate that dummies up & goes all agnostic. This is what they whine: “It’s too hard for anyone to understand & no one can know who’s right. I only know for sure there are no good guys in Syria, no side one can defend.”
What a load a crap. Who the hell do they think they’re kidding with that phony evasion? Poke around a little in their defense of ignorance & you find a whole new breed of political animal called the “reluctant Assadist.”
The reluctant Assadist can’t quite face, or at least won’t admit their support for dictatorship & carpet bombing of civilians. So drawing on cognitive derangement, they magically disappear millions of Syrians & make that popular revolution against Assad evanesce into thin air.
They replace reality with a melodrama obsessed with those “US-backed head-chopping jihadist terrorists” & willfully maintain ignorance of what in the Sam Hill those terrorists are doing or where they’re doing it.
That little schtick they act out isn’t unique to politics & it isn’t innovative. The history of genocides & holocausts is filled with reproaches for those who pretended they didn’t see & out of laziness or fear denied solidarity to the persecuted. Who in their right mind would choose to end up like that? But that’s where agnosticism takes you.