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The Assad dynasty is not content with slaughtering its own people in great numbers. It is also destroying Syria's rich archaeological past. Writing last month in the US Weekly Standard, Victoria Coates described the devastation in detail. The tattered landscape of magnificent ruins, which the desert preserved for centuries is being blown up under a barrage of mortar fire. Crumbling stones are nothing compared to the mangled bodies of Assad's tortured victims, of course. They are a good illustration, though, of the price of our impotence and the hypocrisy of our policies.