The forces on the offensive in Syria are today’s Khmer Rouge

History never really says goodbye. History says, ‘See you later.’ Eduardo Galeano

Taking place in Syria now as thousands of Salafi-jihadists head dangerously close to the capital, Damascus, in a surprise and lightning offensive, is a dynamic that has the potential to unleash catastrophic consequences not only in Syria but across a region already exhausted from a surplus of conflict and the concomitant human suffering endured.

The depiction of the smorgasbord of medieval-minded head-chopping fanatics involved as ‘rebels’ in the Western media; this is proof-positive that no lessons — zero — have been learned. None learned from the consequences following the overthrow of Mohammad Najibullah in Kabul back in 1996. From the overthrow of Saddam in Iraq in 2003. Or from the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya in 2011.

In each case, the result was not the establishment of a liberal democracy underpinned by the rule of law. Instead, in each case the result was mayhem and carnage wrought by Year Zero fanatics intent on mass slaughter in the name of a perverted rendering of Islam.

This brings us now to the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia of the 1970s, which in similar conditions of a destabilization were able to incubate and grow to the point of taking power. The cause of this…