WSJ
The United Nations Security Council on Sunday condemned Syria’s government for the killing of 108 people, mostly women and children, in Houla on Friday. But the condemnation was incomplete: It should have included the Security Council itself for providing the diplomatic cover that has let the Assad government continue its killing.
Thanks to Russia and China, the Security Council has failed to impose any serious sanctions on Syria, much less endorse action to help the opposition amid more than 6,000 deaths. That’s bad enough. But in April the U.N. turned to aiding and abetting the regime with its mission to send Kofi Annan to Damascus as a special “peace” envoy.
Mr. Annan, who as a former U.N. Secretary-General is perfectly trained for the role of accommodating dictators, brokered a cease-fire that he said Syria’s Bashar Assad promised to obey. As was widely predicted at the time, Mr. Annan’s truce succeeded only in buying time for the Assad regime to crush rebel havens in Homs and elsewhere and now to perpetrate the massacre in Houla.
On Monday, Mr. Annan made another trip to Damascus and proclaimed himself “personally shocked and horrified by the tragic incident in Houla.” Nice to know.
He also called on “every individual with a gun” to disarm and stop the killing, which continues the moral equivalence that equates systematic shelling of civilian neighborhoods with small-arms resistance to organized military assaults. The U.N. is every bit as complicit in the Houla murders as it was when its blue-helmet Dutch peacekeepers stood by and did nothing as the Serbs massacred thousands of Bosnians in Srebrenica in 1995.
The Obama Administration signed onto the Annan mission as an excuse not to have to organize a coalition of the willing outside the U.N. to intervene in Syria. Bill Clinton was finally shamed into going around the U.N. in Bosnia in the 1990s, but Mr. Obama’s main goal seems to be to get past the election without again having to use American military force.
In a news leak on the weekend, White House aides let it be known that their latest strategy is to coax the Russians into agreeing to help ease Mr. Assad from power while preserving the bulk of the regime. It isn’t clear why the Russians would suddenly decide to throw over their last client in the Middle East. Nor it clear why a successor regime in Damascus, presumably still run by Allawites, would be any more likely to accommodate the largely Sunni opposition.
For months, we’ve been told that the U.S. and the West can’t intervene in Syria because it might lead to civil war, because the turmoil might spread in the region, and because we don’t know who might replace Mr. Assad. Well, civil war is breaking out anyway, the mayhem is spreading to Lebanon, and the bloodier things get the more likely that Syria will descend into a chaos that empowers the most radical elements on either side.
At least in Libya, Mr. Obama eventually led from behind. In Syria, he’s following from behind a United Nations that has become an accomplice of Bashar Assad.
It doesn’t look as if there is a ‘good guy’ faction in Syria which, if victorious, will bring about peace, democracy, good neighborliness, and tolerance of religious sects other than their own.
@ jrob:
Not only was Srebrenica a fraud, but the Syrian opposition are now consulting with the same crowd in Kosovo, the other place where Serbia has been robbed and falsely accused. The Syrian opposition (The Muslim Brotherhood) are hoping the social skills applied by the Kosovo Liberation Army in exterminating the Serbs in their homeland can be applied in Syria. They hope that they can apply NATO the same way NATO attacked the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.
Good to know the WSJ is a propaganda outlet for Bosnian jihadists.
Why does the WSJ want to use the American military on behalf of al qaeda and the muslim brotherhood?
Iran blames Israel for massacres in Syria
No surprise there.
@ jrob:
That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking all day… A report indicated that the Houla massacre was undertaken “execution style”. I don’t know anything about Syrian soldiering, but I do know – as we all do – that killing in cold blood – “execution style” – particularly women and children, are the hallmarks of batshit crazy religious fanatics. Just think of what the Ayatollas did to the children of Iran when they wanted a quick cleanup of the minefields between Iran and Iraq…
No moral principles whatsoever.
Srebrenica’s a fraud and it’s likely that Syria’s just another case of the State Department’s pet Islamists slaughtering civilians while invoking sympathy and bringing in the US to fight for Islam (as NATO).