It's "Oh, God, not the horse," elicited to bring home the savagery of war.
Though despised by Western leaders and accused of savagery and war crimes, the Syrian autocrat would leave a dangerous power vacuum if he were ousted.
It could duck awkward questions about how and why Russia generated chaos (the shelling of parliament in 1993), savagery (the Chechen war in 1994-96) and criminality (always and everywhere) on a scale unimaginable in any western democracy.
Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Hitler supposedly said on Aug. 22, 1939, as he prepared his henchmen for the savagery of race war and the slaughter of the Jews of Europe.
"Our political and social quarrels now partake in the savagery of religious wars because they are, at bottom, religious wars," Buchanan explained.
In an atrocity without parallel for its savagery in post-war Europe, a series of co-ordinated attacks by terrorists linked to Isis kill 130 people in Paris.
And now, of course, "Revolutionary Road," the movie, repackaging what USA Today recently called "the savagery of post-war domesticity" for the Oscars.
The history of Mesopotamia was then both uniquely creative and uniquely violent and destructive; marked by invasions and devastating wars in which the great achievements of its civilisation were smashed many times, from the ruin of the Ur III dynasty through Mongols, Tartars and Seljuks, to the savagery of recent wars.
People often ask: why the savagery of Mexico's war?
"Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places who do not have to endure war's savagery will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it".
