Doing the Right Thing in Syria

U.N. observers have confirmed the horrific massacre that took place in Mazraat al-Qubair, a farming village of about 160 people in central Hama province. Nearly 80 men, women and children were shot, hacked and burned to death by Assad’s bloodthirsty death squad known as ‘Shabiha.’ The observers could smell the stench of burned corpses and see body parts scattered about the village.

The massacre follows one in which 108 people were slain in the Syrian town of Houla on May 25. Reports have surfaced, particularly in Germany, that Syrian rebels were actually responsible for the Houla massacre but most sources close to the ground, including a UN Human Rights Council group, said evidence pointed towards militia loyal to Assad in the region.

Bashar Assad has been exploiting Kofi Annan’s peace plan to continue his genocidal suppression. In the 15 months of bloodshed, he has been instigating fear among the country’s 2.1 million Alawites – 12 per cent of the population – that they will be massacred by the Sunni majority – 75 per cent - if he were to fall.

As the moment of truth nears in Syria, the opposition has been at pains to assure the Alawites that they will not be targeted in a post-Assad Syria. “We are all in this together,” has become the opposition’s motto as they implore ordinary Alawites to defect.

For many pundits and policymakers in America, however, the situation in Syria can only be understood in the context of a geopolitical chess game.

Writing in the Washington Post, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger summarized his analysis of the Syrian situation this way: “Military intervention, humanitarian or strategic, has two prerequisites: First, a consensus on governance after the overthrow of the status quo is critical. If the objective is confined to deposing a specific ruler, a new civil war could follow in the resulting vacuum, as armed groups contest the succession, and outside countries choose different sides. Second, the political objective must be explicit and achievable in a domestically sustainable time period. I doubt that the Syrian issue meets these tests.”

In other words, let the killings continue because we are not sure who will inherit power and whether or not they will push America’s interests. A well-known columnist, writing in the Los Angeles Times, raises the same concern: “The situation in Syria is further complicated by the familiar question of who's the good guy. The bad guy is clearly Bashar Assad. But his opposition is a mixture of unattractive clerics and their followers, liberal reformers and left-wing radicals.”

The question of what is just and what is right do not figure in the equations of these analysts.

One consistent voice in the wilderness has been that of New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof who wrote in a recent column that “when a government devours its own people, as in Syria or Sudan, there are never easy solutions. That helps explain President Obama’s dithering … Yet the president is taking prudence to the point of paralysis … In Syria, we should make clear that unless the security forces depose Assad in the next 30 days, our Middle Eastern allies will arm the Syrian opposition. We should work with these allies, as well as with major powers like Russia and China, to encourage a coup, or a“retirement” for Assad … Stopping a government from killing its own is an uncertain business. But our existing policies in Syria and Sudan alike are failing to stop the bloodshed, and they also are putting us on the wrong side of history.”

Muslims are aware of the serious problems that can follow the fall of Assad. The path to openness and responsible governance after decades of tyranny and dictatorship is not achieved in weeks or months. Just look at Egypt and Libya. The peoples’ revolution is far from complete. It will take time for a new era to dawn. So it will be in Syria.

Besides, Western fear that intolerant religious zealots (always a minority but exaggerated by Western media) will find a way to turn the Arab Spring into a Winter of Despair is unfounded. Using a statistically sound sampling technique called “controlled snowball,” 186 opposition activists were asked about their preferences for a post-Assad Syrian government. 73% said it was important for the new Syrian government to protect the rights of Christians. While many respondents voiced support for religion in the public square, only a small fraction favored clerical influence in government. As to which country they would like to see Syria emulate after Assad, 82% chose Turkey. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that the U.S. earned 69% favorable rating as a political model, followed closely by France, Germany and Britain.

Bashar Assad may soon be forced to flee to Moscow as opposition forces overcome their differences and mount a united assault against the government. There will, of course, be chaos and turmoil. Some Syrians will be tempted to settle old scores. Sectarian conflict may raise its ugly head. UN observers may have to be deployed to ensure a peaceful transition so that one tyranny is not replaced by another.

But there is also reason to believe that Syrians will come out stronger through their trial-by-fire and forge a government of consensus, justice and accountability, with “malice toward none and charity for all.”

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

Scanning the latest double-issue of The New Yorker magazine yesterday, I saw a single-page piece by Ray Bradbury called “Take Me Home.” The Transit of Venus would begin soon, and I had just enough time to read it. I read it once, then re-read it, then read it a third time. The language was so lyrical and evocative and the word-images so vivid that I was transported to the porch of Bradbury’s grandparents’ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois.

“I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red lights of Mars,” Bradbury wrote, “and say, ‘Take me home!’ I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities.”

Has anyone ever written anything so redolent about the red planet, or about the longing of a bookish boy wanting to hop on a balloon or a spaceship and soar away?

“While I remained earthbound, I would time-travel, listening to the grownups who on warm nights gathered outside the lawns and porches to talk and reminisce … it was the special time, the sad time, the time of beauty. It was the time of the fire balloons … I’d helped my grandpa carry the box in which lay, like a gossamer spirit, the paper tissue ghost of a fire balloon waiting to be breathed into, filled, and set adrift toward the midnight sky … Once the fire got going, the balloon whispered itself fat with the hot air rising inside …”

Surely you can see that fire-balloon! Not any fire-balloon but that specific balloon that the writer's grandpa had saved for him so that together they could set it “adrift toward the midnight sky.”

If the image is still vague, don’t give up. More stunning visual clarity is coming.

“But I could not let it go. It was so beautiful, with the light and shadows dancing inside. Only when Grandpa gave me a look, and a nod of his head, did I at last let the balloon drift free, up past the porch, illuminating the faces of my family. It floated up above the apple trees, over the beginning-to-sleep town, and across the night among the stars.”

Up, over, across. The words trace the flight of the balloon as lyrically as any poet or stylist ever could, carrying with it the enormous sadness of the boy who had just let it go.

“We stood watching it for at least ten minutes, until we could no longer see it. By then, tears were streaming down my face, and Grandpa, not looking at me, would at last clear his throat and shuffle his feet … Twenty five years later, I wrote ‘The Fire Balloons,’ a story in which a number of priests fly off to Mars looking for creatures of good will. It is my tribute to those summers when my grandfather was alive.”

After savoring the piece, I hurried off to see the Transit of Venus at a local observatory.

This morning I learned that Ray Bradbury has passed away at age 91.

I read only two of Bradbury’s work: “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Martian Chronicles.” What interested me even more than his work was his work ethic. Bradbury worked almost every day of his life (fans of Stephen King can identify), pounding out a thousand words a day on his typewriter. No computer or word processor for him. He was self-taught. The library was his refuge, his teacher. These days, people cite examples of tech icons like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg to prove that you don’t have to go to school to make your mark. We forget that before tech titans, there have always been self-taught writers who made lasting contributions to literature and civilization. Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature without having ever seen the inside of a classroom while growing up.

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.”

Bradbury’s own words perfectly sums up what inspired and motivated him.

Go out tonight and look up. See that tangerine light overhead? That’s the planet Mars, with its “strange dusts that blow over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities.” It is the celestial body that Bradbury made familiar to millions of us through literature.

Venus as a Beauty Spot

We gathered at the Montgomery Hill Observatory in the northern hills of the Evergreen Valley College (EVC) around 3 in the afternoon, all agog about the celestial drama unfolding in front of the sun. Venus was moving across the solar disk, something that would repeat 105 years from now, in 2117, making viewing it literally the chance of a lifetime.

Parents brought their infants (one of whom promptly let out a wail to the amusement of all), toddlers and teenagers. Several grandmothers in saris and flowing dresses lined up like kids to peer through the telescopes.

Inside the dome was the 7-inch refractor telescope that Dr. Celso Batalha, professor of astronomy at EVC, fitted with an H-alpha filter to let in only the red light (wavelength of about 656 nanometer) emitting from the sun. Outside the dome, he had also set up four 8-inch portable, parabolic Dobsonians with clear filters. He was wise to do so because the space around the dome was soon milling with eager and curious visitors.

My first view of the transit was through the refractor telescope. The dark, perfect circle of Venus making its shy entrance at the lower left edge of a crimson sun was wondrous, simply wondrous. I looked for as long as I could before the next person in line gently nudged me to remind that there were others waiting for a chance to glimpse the wondrous sight as well.

Last night I read a piece in the New York Times by a professor of astronomy named Jay M. Pasachoff who wrote that “people on Earth can see with their own eyes the beauty spot — as beautiful as Marilyn Monroe’s — bestowed by Venus on the Sun.”

The imagery seemed perfect as I was viewing the transit: Venus was indeed a beauty spot on the sun, and its changing location only enhanced the fierce beauty of the duo. I also reminded myself to look up a picture of Marilyn Monroe. The sun as MM? I bet no poet ever thought of that. Kudos to Dr. Pasachoff.

If there was a hush of awe inside the observatory, outside was noisy celebration. Kids and grandmothers gave running commentaries on the minute-by-minute progress of Venus’s journey from left to right as they squinted through the Dobsonians. Of course, the experience had to be preserved for posterity, and so everyone (and I mean everyone) brought out their iPhones, Androids and SLRs and tried to capture the celestial scene. It was no simple point-and click, though. Only at certain frustrating angles could the view be captured and that required endless trial-and-error.

A teenage girl grew impatient with her father who kept fiddling with his camera for the perfect shot. Finally she could stand it no longer. “He will be doing this until Venus has completed her journey in six hours,” she said to everyone around. “He will still not be done.”

The girl’s mother, also getting angry at her husband, corrected the daughter. “No, Casalco will still be looking for the perfect picture when Venus returns again in one hundred years.”

As laughter erupted, the otherwise-imperturbable Mr. Casalco sheepishly withdrew.

Through the Dobsonians, we viewed the bright-yellow sun and the backlit Venus in the clear California sky. There were clouds but they were near the horizon. I helped Dr. Celso adjust the eyepieces as excited kids kept moving them.

The atmosphere was festive and yet there was an undertone of sadness. This was it for us. No more view like this in our lifetime. I felt the chill of mortality.

Scientists have correctly predicted the transits of Venus that come in pairs of 8 years: 1761 and 1769, 1874 and 1882, 2004 and 2012. What will the earth be like in 2117 and 2125? Will we still be fighting wars? Will there still be 1-percenters and 99-percenters, tyrants who indulge in unimaginable luxury while the rest survive on crumbs? Or will our succeeding generations conclude that our ways were unimaginative and untenable, and after much sacrifice and soul-searching, design a peaceful world where everyone led a reasonably good life?

Who can say? The thought  that I came away with from the celestial drama was that we were a part of what we had witnessed, no more and no less, and that the fate of our earth was entwined with the fate of the big, beautiful star and the planet moving across it, not only in a scientific but also in a transcendental sense.