30 December 2011 | "I Told You So" in Blood

How does one say "I told you so" with the knowledge that it's coming with a stack of dead bodies?

This ridiculous "mission" of the Arab League's monitors in Syria could not have received a worse blow to whatever credibility it had. It's almost as if the idea of "independent" is a foreign thing to Arab leaders, since the observers are being led by the nose by Syrian officials who have every reason to lie or fabricate facts.

Oh, and our hapless media fucks need to stop hiding behind the phrase "sliding towards civil war." Just how many people need to die at the hands of the government before it can be admitted that this *IS* a civil war? The government is killing its own people; it's mowed down people at funerals, for God's sake, all the while blaming this on foreign influences or armed gangs, who somehow managed to escape their notice all these years. How much blood must be spilled before our Media Glitterati just says that a civil war is being raged at the behest of the demon himself, Bashar al-Assad? You get the impression that until that ephemeral threshold is crossed, this might be a bad thing, but it's not a civil war so we don't need to worry about anything.

And when will the observers actually start working on issuing their report? Because the Syrian people have all the time in the world for a useless bureaucratic report that will not help them out at all, but it gives the useless, feckless Arab League a sense that it's actually done something.