One of the great tragedies of the Iraq War, in my opinion, is that we as Americans are no longer as willing to acknowledge that true evil does exist in the world, and true evil can not be eliminated by diplomacy or political maneuvering. The Assad family is basically a mafia family in charge of an entire country, only with less morals. They are responsible for the fact that I’m writing to you about baseball, in English, from America: their oppression of the Syrian people is responsible for the mass emigration of a Syrian diaspora of literally millions of people over the last 40+ years, including my parents, who had no intention of permanently settling in America when they arrived for my father to perform his medical residency in 1970, and who then had no intention of ever raising their children in Syria after they returned to see what had become of the country by 1977.