Supporting Syria seems unnecessary — and unwise.
by Gwynne Dyer
The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Syria has suspended its peace mission. "The observers will not be conducting patrols and will stay in their locations until further notice," said the commander of the 300-strong multinational observer force, Norwegian Major-General Robert Mood.
This decision by the observer force is fully justified: its observers were being prevented by the Syrian army from visiting massacre sites, and yet their mere presence created the false impression that the international community was "doing something." So now the international community will be under even greater pressure to "do something" else about the Syrian tragedy. That means military action against the Assad regime — but the Russians will veto that.
Russian diplomacy is not usually so clumsy. None of the western great powers will actually send troops to intervene in Syria: the Syrian army is too strong, and the sectarian and ethnic divisions in the country are far too messy.
So why don't the Russians just promise to abstain in any UN Security Council vote on military intervention? No such vote will happen anyway, and Moscow would expose the hypocrisy of the western powers that are pretending to demand action and blaming the Russians (and the Chinese) for being the obstacle.
It's stupid to bring such opprobrium on your own country when you don't have to, but both President Vladimir Putin's elective dictatorship in Russia and the Communist Party in China fear that one day they might face foreign intervention themselves. There must therefore be no legal precedent for international action against a regime that is merely murdering its own people on its own sovereign soil…
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About Gwynne Dyer
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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