Call him Achmed. He left home about 45 minutes ago to start his shift. He has worked there for more than 10 years. For a country as poor as Syria, Achmed has been paid adequately thanks to the military regime of President Assad.
Achmed is very anxious nowadays - each evening for the past 3 weeks he has said good-bye to his wife and 5 children as he heads to work, not knowing if an air strike on the military base might end his life.
How many "Achmeds" are living in Syria, trying to eke out an existence under a repressive regime, in the midst of a two-year sectarian civil war, and now under the probable bombing by a superpower?
How many women and children have been or will be "collateral damage" from the war or intervention from the west?
How many refugees will flood across borders in an attempt to save their lives?
Military planners will tell you that war should not be personal. It does no good for the cause that we know the name of the lone security guard, or that we know personal information such as whether he is a dad and how many kids are at home. For the purposes of war, it does no good to imagine that this lone security guard is just doing his job at the ammo site and will not know what hit him when the explosion takes his life.
Politicians want to sensitize people to the deaths of women and children due to chemical weapons. It is nothing less than genocide what the Syrian regime has done to its people. Let's be honest about that.
But if we are to be sensitized to that reality, we must grieve deeply at the human catastrophe of Syria being bombed and the men, women, children, families who will be killed by such actions. Let us be fully engaged in both realities and make decisions from there.
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