Truce means to stop fighting for a certain amount of time.  Two righteous powers making war in the same country, Russia and the United States of America, have been trying to bring about in Syria something they're calling a "ceasefire."  The idea, I guess, is to take a breather, give the tormented civilian population a chance to bury family members, have a drink or read a book without wondering if they're about to swallow or scan a written down sentence for the last time.  It's part of the "peace process."  Diplomats like Secretary of State John Kerry and the man always described in American news as his Russian "counterpart," Sergei Lavrov, talk on the phone, meet occasionally, along with Syrian representatives as well as Arab representatives from other nations, to figure out how to unravel the biggest Gordian Knot clusterfuck on the planet.
     I offer my views on this horrible subject, recognizing my limitations: a) I'm not Syrian or an Arab or a Muslim; b) I've never traveled to the Middle East; c) I have no military experience, I've never been shot at, I've never witnessed a bomb explosion or an attack on civilians; d) I have relatives dead and living who fought in World War Two and in the Vietnam War, so I have loved ones who have been wounded physically and psychologically in the practice of warfare, which includes killing people, something I know these loved ones have done and did not relish.
     Syria's Russian connection predates the rule of Bashar al-Assad.  The Russians have a warm water naval base in Latakia.  Their lack of warm water ports for their navies has been a problem for the projection of Russian might for centuries.  The Russia-Syria connection isn't going away.  Putin supports Assad because Assad holds the country together better than some rebel group, or ISIS, could.  Assad's reaction to the Arab Spring was to fire bullets and shoot tear gas canisters at it, killing hundreds of protestors who were waking up, with the example of Egypt especially, to the possibility of ending the reign of a dynastic dictator.  In the much smaller nation of Bahrain, the U.S.-supported dictator there also brutalized and killed protestors, but President Obama had no problem with that because Bahrain is home to the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and the U.S. Fifth Fleet.  Short of raping Obama's dog, Bahrain's leader can do whatever he wants.
     The truce proposal of February 2016, after at least 250,000 Syrians have been killed in a civil war both United States and Russian leaders have been looking at for years now without doing shit to stop it, sounds like a good idea.  Ceasefire, stop fighting, come on, people!  American, Russian, and Syrian government forces, however, directed by their leaders' wishes, want the ceasefire to have conditions; namely, that Assad's loyalists can still kill "terrorists," i.e. anyone against Assad, which includes rebel groups supported by the United States.  The U.S. wants to continue bombing ISIS and al-Nusra Front targets, while Russia will also keep up its bombing, probably in support of Assad's wishes.  This will not, as proposed, be a ceasefire, that is, if words mean anything.
     Still, Vladimir Putin is optimistic, calling the ceasefire agreement "a real step that can stop the bloodshed."
     As his military forces, along with Assad's and Obama's, kill people.
     Why are these motherfuckers bothering to do this?  Is it for show?  The showy proposal of holding meetings in Munich, applying their surrogates' brainpower to an impossible situation, and trying to show they care about all the murdered Syrian civilians, while reserving the right to kill for peace, shows how diseased world leaders are when they mess around with countries doomed by manipulative first world policy making in regions of the planet treated as playthings for centuries.  When killers claim they have the solution to the problem they caused in the first place, it's likely their motives are hostile.  All three nations, Russia, Syria, and the United States, are using this ceasefire proposal to further their military efforts against rebels fighting Assad, al-Nusra Front (an al-Qaeda affiliate), and ISIS, all while Syrian Kurdish forces fight ISIS, opposed by perpetual Kurdish enemy Turkey, a NATO member supported by the U.S., which also supports and arms the Kurds who are also armed by the Russians.  These three nations are simultaneously fighting friends of their friends, enemies of their enemies, and enemies of their friends.  All three nations fight ISIS, which occupies one third of Syria, meaning that that geographical fact alone makes the words "ceasefire in Syria" a joke.
     A man in Damascus, reacting to news of the ceasefire, told Elizabeth Palmer of CBS News, "We don't want a ceasefire until all the terrorists are out of our country."
     Was he referring to all those terrorized by Russian bombing?  By Assad's bombing?  Terror against civilians caused by U.S. bombing?  State terror is the blackened lung denied by those in power and those supporting them in the news media, when it comes to the health of any nation using force to get what it wants.  We like to pretend our leaders never terrorize people, but they do.  Obama wants to kill a suspected terrorist in Yemen; he sends an armed unmanned aerial vehicle over the target area, sometimes for many days and nights, the thing flying over a village, high up enough that it can't be seen but it can be heard, and the people down below know something's going to happen, and maybe, as in the past, many times, a "mistake" will be made, and dozens of innocent people will lose body parts, get their organs pasted to trees, lose friends and family if they survive, and maybe a few atypical Western journalists will investigate and give a shit, while the perpetrators boast proudly about protection of the homeland, their consciences long ago ruined by repeated involvement in underhanded murderous deeds, like reserving the right to kill during a ceasefire.
     Stalin's suffering from signing all those execution notices came from writer's cramp.

                                                                             Vic Neptune