Rebuilding Syria: The Responsibility Principle

 One is amazed by the audacity wherewith those foreign interveners who have caused the most destruction in Syria call upon the rest of the world to foot the bill for rebuilding what they themselves have demolished. So the First Clause of the Responsibility Principle is that those foreign countries which intervened in Syria to pursue their own political aims – primarily Iran, the Russian Federation and Turkey – should pay up to rebuild everything that they destroyed.
 The Second Clause of the Responsibility Principle is that any other country or international factor should condition any further financial assistance upon the replacement of the current Syrian regime with a plausible alternative, be it through free elections or the installation of a temporary international regime, followed by Nuremberg-type trials of the chief criminals of the current regime and the repatriation and resettlement of all refugees without any form of discrimination. The Russian Federation has the military power to keep Assad the titular president of Syria forever, but it cannot expect the rest of the world to pay for such a Syria.
…The biggest question, however, is the conditions under which the world at large, including countries that played no role whatsoever in the Syrian tragedy, can be expected to finance reconstruction. These conditions must be drastic.
To begin with, there can be no question of using international finance to reconstruct the prewar Syrian regime…Thus the first condition for international finance must be the replacement of the Syrian regime…If free elections cannot soon be organized, there may be a need for temporary international mandate to govern Syria…The second condition is to bring the chief criminals of the Assad regime to trial… The third condition is that all the Syrians displaced by the war, whether within the country, in neighboring countries or further afield, must be enabled to return to their homes. (by gatestoneinstitute.org).

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