Evil is something that, when you see it, when you know it, it's intimate. It's almost sensual. That is why people who have been tortured know it by i… - Kanan Makiya

I want to look into myself, look at myself, delve into the assumptions I had before the war.

Washington is right to be chastened after its scathing experience in Iraq this past decade. But it also ought to be motivated by that earlier disaster in Iraq, in which so many innocent Iraqis perished while the United States stood by and watched. Syria in 2012 is another Iraq of 1991 just waiting to happen. No one can say he did not know.

... Assad’s survival—if Saddam Hussein’s murderous rampage in 1991 is any indication—will without a shadow of a doubt translate into hundreds of thousands of Syrian dead, mostly butchered after his victory has been assured. The comparison comes to mind because the two Ba’thi regimes of Saddam Hussein and Bashar Assad bear an unmistakable resemblance—they are mirror images of one another, one might say. Both are minority dominated, single party regimes originating in the same quasi-fascist pan-Arab ideology built on the principle that any form of disagreement is an act of “betrayal” to the “revolution.”