Disgusting Bedfellows: Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad

No need to search too long for evidence that Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Sryria’s Bashar al-Assad personify the world’s genuine “axis of evil.” Indicia are everywhere.

Putin

1. Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer, uncovered the largest tax fraud in his country’s history exposing top government officials stealing money from taxpayers and was rewarded by being beaten to death in a Russian jail cell in 2009. Magnitsky was on trial, not the government thieves;
2. In response to America’s Magnitsky’s Act, imposing US travel and financial restrictions on human rights abusers in Russia, Putin struck back with an Act of his own effective January 1, 2013.  The new Russian law bans the adoption of Russian children by US families.  Apparently, this despot’s best method of retaliation against the United States for striking out against political murder is to ensure that approximately 1000 Russian children per year, languishing in institutional care, be prevented from adoption by American families yearning for a child to love. You have to admire such proportionate and responsible government retaliation! The new Russian law says, in effect, Americans have called us out once again on our human-rights atrocities—so let us “get them” by perpetrating further abuses on our homeless Russian children;
3. The omnibus Russian legislation does not stop with the children-it also provides a list of US citizens who will be prohibited from entering Russian, suspends legal ongoing US businesses controlled by the Russian state, and, rescinds Russia’s earlier agreement to provide safeguards to children involved in inter-country adoptions. Apparently, abusing helpless Russian children did not go quite far enough;
4. Putin’s16 years in the KGB, the world’s hallmark abuse agency, served as the ideal training ground for this dictator’s mafia style governance. Small wonder his government offers asylum to virtually every one of the world’s other despotic human-rights abusers, soon to include Syria’s al-Assad. Assad will, of course, enjoy a spacious country home, KGB style, with the rest of Russia’s politically protected exiles. Assad will, like the others, bask in the glow of Russia’s warm embrace, despite killing 40,000 of his own people with ostensible impunity;

Al-Assad

1. President of Syria since 2000, Assad has proven himself even more diabolical and depraved than his abhorrent, immoral father who controlled that country for more than a quarter of a century;
2. Calling the brave and desperate citizens of Syria with the temerity to challenge his tyrannical rule, as representing members of a “foreign plot” Assad has systematically killed thousands of Syria’s citizens. Most of those killed have nothing whatsoever to do with an uprising. Assad says that the remaining citizens, that is, the ones he has not yet killed, “want” him to remain as leader to quell the “foreign uprising.”  Perhaps Assad needs to use his training as an ophthalmologist to look a little closer at his dead victims. They, of course, look very much like every day Syrians, even to the untrained eye. At least half of those killed are women and children.  They have been killed while they waited in bread lines and huddled in makeshift bunkers;
3. Because America and its allies hold a natural reluctance to engage in yet another deadly, expensive foreign war, and because Assad enjoys Russia’s unbridled support, a support that cradles all miscreants with an ounce of anti-American sentiment, now Assad’s worst-case scenario seems to be an unapologetic retirement in the snowy confines of Russia;
4. With several recent defections by Assad’s top Generals, one can only hope that the Generals that remain will also turn on him, and then, not let him out of Syria alive.

If Assad makes it to Russia, he will, like the rest of the world’s asylum-seeking tyrants, enjoy the impregnable sanctity offered by Putin, a like-minded totalitarian overlord. As long as Assad does not allege publically that Putin, or any of his political cronies, are stealing taxpayers’ money, he should be safe–free to live out his sorry human existence, without redress or penalty.  His future is likely to be calm and unremarkable despite his murderous carnage. Makes you want to believe in hell doesn’t it?