When reporters descended on the Coquitlam, B.C., home of Alan Kurdi's distraught aunt last week, she refused to cast blame for her three-year-old nephew's drowning, which riveted global attention on the plight of Syrians fleeing their country's civil war.
"There is only one thing [that] should be done: End the war," said Tima Kurdi, who had hoped to bring Alan and his family to Canada and had written to Immigration Minister Chris Alexander asking for help. But no formal application for refugee status was filed before Alan's father loaded his wife and two sons into an unstable dinghy in an attempt to reach Europe.
For all the tears that have been spilled by ordinary citizens and politicians galvanized into responding to the humanitarian crisis, not much consideration has been given to Ms. Kurdi's plea to end a conflict that has killed more than 300,000 Syrians and displaced seven million others, including four million who have fled to refugee camps in bordering countries.
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper has touted Canada's participation in the U.S.-led mission to bomb Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria to suggest there will be more little Alans unless the terrorist threat destabilizing the region is destroyed. But that is only half of the truth. The other half is that Canada and its allies have entered into an unholy pact that has allowed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to hold on to power, with sickening consequences.
Mr. al-Assad's brutal regime lost whatever legitimacy it had when it violently suppressed uprisings during the 2011 Arab Spring. That August, U.S. President Barack Obama declared "the time has come for President Assad to step aside," though he did nothing to accelerate his departure. Syria descended into full-blown civil war with the rebel groups, from moderates to jihadis, fighting the regime.
As evidence mounted of the horrific tactics used by Mr. al-Assad against civilians, Mr. Obama drew a "red line" on the deployment of chemical weapons, vowing U.S. military intervention if the Syrian President crossed it. He did. But Mr. Obama wiggled out of military action when Russian President Vladimir Putin, who backs Mr. al-Assad, brokered a deal to destroy the regime's stock of chemical weapons.
That did not stop Mr. al-Assad from continuing to kill civilians by dropping barrel bombs – oil drums filled with explosives and shrapnel – in a purported effort to destroy Islamic State and non-jihadi rebels embedded among the population.
Mr. Obama's aversion to using military force against Mr. al-Assad fit with America's post-Iraq war mood. He could argue that Syria's civil war was not a direct threat to U.S. national security, so U.S. forces had no reason to get involved. He could argue that U.S. involvement might even make things worse.
That reasoning had to change once the Islamic State overtook vast swaths of Syrian territory and established its headquarters in the Syrian city of Raqqa. The Islamic State is a threat to U.S. security. Hence, Mr. Obama's year-old bombing campaign against IS targets in Syria and Iraq.
That mission has U.S. and Canadian forces working in concert with Iranian-backed militias, with the effect of strengthening Mr. al-Assad. Iran is his biggest backer, in part because it needs an ally in Syria to ship weapons through that country to its Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon.
Could this mess have been averted if Mr. Obama had followed through with his initial threat to remove Mr. al-Assad from power?
Who knows what might have replaced the al-Assad regime? But the sheer number of refugees fleeing Syria, as much to escape Mr. al-Assad's brutality as the Islamic State, have now made the country's civil war the world's business. One can hope that Europe's better angels will prevail in welcoming desperate migrants. But on a continent witnessing rising anti-immigrant sentiment, politicians on the extreme right are depicting migrants as profiteers.
This suits the purposes of Mr. Putin, who has made common cause with Europe's anti-immigrant right. The destruction of the European Union, an entity he considers a direct threat to Russia's expansionist goals, is his ultimate objective. If a debt crisis hasn't yet destroyed it, the migrant influx just might.
In recent days, Moscow has stepped up its military aid to the al-Assad regime amid evidence it is preparing to send Russian troops into Syria. Any end to the country's civil war, brokered or otherwise, now almost certainly passes through Mr. Putin. And not before countless more Syrian children die.
Konrad Yakabuski