“Syria’s Descent into Madness” is the cover story of the May 27 Time magazine, recounting the act of ritual cannibalism by a Syrian rebel commander that transfixed the West last week. The sort of atrocities viewable on YouTube - the slaughter by government troops of entire families including infants in Tartus province this month, mass rape of women in rebel-held zones, or the rebel leader Abu Sakkar eating a piece of the lung of a dead government soldier - are becoming Syria’s new normal.

Westerners cannot deal with this kind of warfare. The United States does not have and cannot train soldiers capable of intervening in the Syrian civil war. Short of raising a foreign legion on the French colonial model, America should keep its military personnel at a distance from a war fought with the instruments of horror.

There is nothing new about the use of atrocities to persuade one’s own forces to fight to the death because defeat would entail a dreadful retribution. The Nazis “deliberately insinuated knowledge of the Final Solution, devilishly making Germans complicit in the crime and binding them, with guilt and dread, to their leaders,” as the Atlantic Monthly’s Benjamin Schwarz reviewed the latest research. [1] Both sides in Syria perpetrate crimes against humanity for the same reason. The Assad government encourages its irregulars to rape as many women as possible in towns controlled by the opposition. [2] Abu Sakkar’s videotaped cannibalism was allegedly retaliation for such rapes.

Something more sinister is at work in the killing fields of the Middle East, however.

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