Please stop caring about Syria.

It’s often said that no one cares about the civilians slaughtered in Syria. We see before and after pictures of children mauled to death by bombs. The Secretary of State cares. Condolezza Rice cares. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch cares. The leaders of the European Union frequently care. Grizzled diplomats like former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford care. Many good, decent analysts like Charles Lister and Hassan Hassan care. Intrepid journalists like Julian Roepke care. The Caesar exhibits, which show the emaciated bodies of those who died in Assad’s prisons, are very popular. It would seem that caring is in anything but short supply.

There is a small problem here, and a big problem.

The small problem is that it’s too late to care. Only one thing has some chance to stop the killing: the armed overthrow of Assad, followed by military occupation of the whole of Syria. Once Russia and Iran got seriously involved there, that option carried with it a small possibility of all-out war — a prospect so terrible that even a small possibility makes the alternative a non-starter. Nothing is going to change in Syria now until Assad wins. After he wins, the slaughter will continue — just not from the air. So it is quite irritating to hear all these ‘calls’ for this and that, all the prattle about how the US or the EU or the UN or ‘we’ ‘must’ do this and that. Since it isn’t going to happen, why not just shut up?

That’s the small problem. The big problem is what led to the small one. Lots of people, in government, among the analysts, among the former diplomats and do-gooders and official human rights folks and ‘committed’ journalists, lots of people ‘really’ wanted the slaughter to stop. But they didn’t really, not one of them. They still don’t.

If they really had wanted the slaughter to stop, they would have really backed the opposition to Assad. But they never did, not one of them. They didn’t want Assad ousted unless it was by nice people, people like us, secularists, young web designers maybe. They pretended this was the ‘ real Syrian revolution’, meaning the one they liked. But Assad was never going to be overthrown by People like Us: they were the English-speaking, internet-savvy, middle class rebels, and they were very brave. But they were not the Syrian people, not the heirs of the Muslim Brotherhood uprising of the 1980s. Their leaders were, often as not, the scions of the same ‘notable families’ that have helped to run things in Syria since Ottoman times. They never had the unity, the charisma, the critical mass, the credibility, the numbers, to make ‘their’ revolution plausible.

This wasn’t their fault. Most of these People like Us were quite prepared to unite with the people-not-like-us: the Islamists, most of whom were radical by politically correct standards, and most of those much more radical than that. But all the decent — the phrase sticks in one’s throat — friends of Syria didn’t want that. Those friends didn’t really want to get rid of Assad, period. They wanted to believe the nice rebels were Syria’s shining, democratic, secular future. And bit by bit, they incited the nice rebels to distance themselves from, even fight the others.

Had nice people really cared, in a serious, desperate way, they would not have been so precious. They would have screamed for all sort of arms, however advanced, to go to all the Syrian rebels, as soon as possible. They wouldn’t have given two shits if much of that had ‘fallen into the hands’ of Syrians who weren’t committed to democracy or women’s rights or religious diversity, who hated the West and Western ways. After all, these people-unlike-us were fighting Assad. They weren’t out to bomb Paris. Whether or not, down the road, this might change, was a mere possibility, not a threat.

But that was more than enough. The human rights professionals treated these Islamist radicals like lepers. The decent analysts warned that Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliate, which suspiciously wasn’t attacking the West, was playing some spectacularly long game — something that might make us say, with Keynes, that in the long run we’ll all be dead. The former Ambassadors and countless do-gooders reiterated that the rebels were lovely people, likely web designers. These lovely people, it was said, had nothing to do with those other types, a lie with which various Assad sympathizers had a field day.

What idiocy. The Friends seemed to think that, if they could throw up this squeaky-clean image of the Syrian revolution, Western governments would pour in real military support. But Western governments knew better. They knew that they could get rid of Assad only if they accepted that much of this military support would go to Islamic radicals. And that was out of the question.

All this was utterly obvious. It turns out that all the nice, democracy-loving, freedom-worshiping, diversity-celebrating friends of the Syrian revolution were quite willing to warn Western governments about the naughty Islamic radicals, and let the slaughter continue. Then came ISIS, which threw hysterical Western governments roughly in alignment with Russia, Iran and Assad, even as Western ‘outrage’ swelled up in a symphony of ass-covering.

So we might as well have a moratorium on caring about maimed children in Syria. True, massive political, economic and military support for Turkey might help, but Turkey imprisons journalists, so the maimed children will have to wait. As Gilda Radner said, there’s always something.