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Good Morning. “He may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch”. There’s no hard evidence US President Franklin Roosevelt actually said that about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasia Somoza, but the quote lives on. That same sentiment may well describe the welcome back into the Arab League summit now afforded to Syria’s President Assad. Few would pretend he’s not butchered many of his people, and seen millions more flee into exile. But, as memories of the worst of those atrocities fade from the news headlines, his political usefulness to neighbouring regimes, many of whom have themselves little moral high ground on which to stand, trumps any lingering abhorrence for his bloodthirsty crushing of dissent. Politics is not for the squeamish. There would have been no Northern Ireland settlement had leaders not been prepared to sit down and negotiate with those they believed had blood on their hands. And I do hold the Christian teaching on forgiveness at the heart of my faith, recognising that it does not always require repentance first. Yet Assad’s rehabilitation troubles me. Early in the gospels comes the story of Jesus spending forty days in the desert, fasting. Tempted by the devil, he is offered the chance to hold authority over all the kingdoms on Earth. I guess he thought about the good he could do with such worldly power: the wars and exploitation he could end; the peace and justice he could establish. And yet he resists the siren call of power without accountability, in favour of that higher authority of the God who has sent him. As he himself says, he has come to fulfil God’s law. A sharp contrast to tyrants who place themselves above the law, even such law as they may themselves have enacted. Louis the fourteenth of France, never knowingly humble, reputedly claimed, L’etat, c’est moi”. “I am the state.” That same conflation of self and nation lies, as I see it, behind many of the worst examples of dictatorship in our own times. Some, like Louis, may have been born to it. Others, begin genuinely wishing to serve their people, yet the long exercise of unchallenged power corrupts them. Nor is this confined to despots. Governments and politicians who believe their own clinging to power is so necessary as to justify the gerrymandering of boundaries, the rigging of elections, or manipulation of the media, also have serious questions to answer. Politics and morality make strange bedfellows, and justice in Assad’s Syria may be, until the tides of history turn, a lost cause. Yet my faith compels me to believe both in the struggle to rein in tyranny and abuse of power wherever it defaces the Earth, and in God’s ultimate justice. A justice even the most powerful tyrant cannot escape forever.