The photo of Omran Daqneesh, the five-year-old boy pulled out of rubble in Aleppo in Syria, was on the front page of every newspaper in Europe. The baffled look on the face of a child just bombed by people he would never know, perfectly symbolizes the story of every child suffering under this brutal Russian bombardment, in this animalistic Syrian civil war now in its fifth year.

The last time a photo had a similar effect was when Aylan Kurdi was drowned in the Mediterranean while fleeing to Europe from Turkey with people smugglers; then, there was the little French girl with her doll murdered by a rampaging terrorist truck driver in Nice. The reactions to such horrific photos are predictable: cries for solidarity, donations to charities providing aid and anguished calls to "do something".

Photographs are an intensely powerful medium for putting across a message. Devoid of broader context and compartmentalized in a visual frame, it gives power and meaning, as well as simplifying the most complex situations in a binary of good or bad. It also changes meaning, sometimes imposing one where none exists. Perhaps most importantly, it can portray a strong emotive appeal that can cloud rationality.

Historically, visuals have long been used to rally people for a cause. Just one example, during the Indian mutiny of 1857, the power of British press was evident, as paintings of Britannia delivering retributive justice to evil Indian rebels was used to bring the entire country together at a tough time for the Raj.

This time also, Western liberals, including academics and journalists, not to mention think tanks and lobby groups has started tweeting the photo and demanding "something" be done, although what is far from clear. In a fantastic piece for the American conservative website, the Washington Free Beacon, Noah Pollak asserted that Western liberal intelligentsia suffers from a guilty conscience of incapability; knowing they are essentially doing nothing, being unwilling or unable to do so, they overcompensate with vague virtuous signaling on Twitter calling for solidarity and tweeting under hashtags.

However, realist academics and policy makers cannot rely on hashtags or appear at candlelit vigils, because real life isn't like that. And there are more considerations than simplistic narratives. If anyone shows photographs of dead children, and demands action (or inaction), that is an "Argumentum Ad Passiones", or, in common parlance, an appeal to the emotions. However, this is no substitute for policy, if we can determine what that policy should be in this situation.

The Syrian civil war, is a microcosm of a wider Middle East turmoil. This is a region ravaged by corrupt, but secular illiberal authoritarianism. Due to its unique cultural direction, the societal underground has remained deeply reactionary and conservative, not to mention uniquely sectarian due to the special forces of religion. In that situation, everything has been tried, but nothing worked, especially imposition of democracy by external actors.

We've tried intervention/nation building (Iraq), intervention/non-nation-building (Libya), and non-intervention (Syria). None of them worked, and none of them were expected to work. India didn't turn from the feudal Mughal period, and practices such as Sati (immolation by a widow on her husband's funeral pyre), to a modern state in a day; it took over 400 years. In relatively modern situation, the civil war in neighboring Lebanon took 15 years to resolve through negotiation during the 1980s. The Yugoslavian disintegration took 12 years. Syria, and Middle East in general, is barely on its fifth year of turmoil.

So, what can be done? What's the alternative policy? Is it full intervention and nation building? Is it strategic amputation, cordoning off the entire region from Libya to Yemen? Or is it calibrated and asymmetric escalation against affected areas? This then leads one to ask: in the case of full intervention, who will intervene, and why?

The West is war weary and another open-ended intervention, no matter how noble the purpose, will be a hard sell, after almost two decade of failed democracy export. It is logistical and economic impossibility as well, not to mention that the leader of Western liberal thought, the United States is relatively unthreatened by the migrant crisis or terrorism, so there is little strategic interest for it to join in stabilizing the region, where other powerful countries are vying for influence. Europe doesn't have the capability or organizational backing, and unity to launch any effort to stabilize even its own backyard in Ukraine, much less the Middle East.

Open borders for migrants, and/or "solidarity" with them, are just good activist soundbites; however, in reality they are geo-politically naive and socio-economically catastrophic.

Finally, one needs to understand, the various rebel forces are not going to win - not today, not ever. They are too divided for any serious support. The issue for the West in the Middle East is one of humanitarian concern with a dose of geopolitics; for Russia and Iran, however, it is existential. The survival of Syria's President Assad and the Shia axis for Russia involves great power pride and new-found military influence. That's exactly why Russia is bent on carving out a new geopolitical role in a region, where it lost influence after 1979, and, if that means new détente with old adversaries like Turkey and Israel, then so be it. Geopolitics makes strange bedfellows.

This war should stop. And it will only stop someday when both sides understand this is unwinnable, without either negotiation (which has thrice failed already), or a forced Balkanization. Unfortunately, that time has not yet arrived.

So, there will be more sad photographs, and more "appeals to emotion" and subsequent calls for interventions. However, intervention will just keep the fires burning.

Sumantra Maitra is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/SumantraMaitra.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors only, not necessarily those of China.org.cn

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