Normalizing Assad Risks Future Atrocities

By Andrew Quist

During the decade-long civil war in Syria, the regime of dictator Bashar Al-Assad has gassed civilians, bombed hospitals and schools, tortured prisoners, and employed starvation sieges on rebel cities. Assad has avoided accountability for these war crimes, and his regime is now being invited back into the global community. As Charles Lister notes in his recent article in Foreign Policy, Syria was recently re-added to Interpol and granted a seat on the World Health Organization’s executive board. Additionally, the Biden administration has eliminated the position of senior envoy for Syria and has decided to allow US allies in the region to normalize relations with Syria. It’s too late the save the hundreds of thousands of people who have died in the Syrian civil war, but by accepting Assad back into the international community with no accountability, we risk normalizing the atrocities committed by his regime, making it more likely that other dictators will employ these same tactics in the future.

Psychic numbing and prominence bias are implicated in the international community’s neglect toward the war in Syria. As the number of civilian victims rose, due to psychic numbing the deaths were experienced by western audiences as merely a statistic, until the image of a child’s body washed up a Turkish beach briefly brought attention to the crisis. Prominence bias causes leaders to undervalue foreign lives when pitted against perceived national security interests. Due to prominence bias, world leaders failed to intervene in Syria in a way that would prevent the massive number of causalities that have occurred, and it seems that prominence bias is also causing the Biden administration to look the other way as its allies in the Middle East normalize relations with Assad. The Biden administration says that it is “putting human rights at the center of US foreign policy,” yet turning a blind eye to the atrocities Assad has committed against the Syrian people runs directly counter to these values.