For President Obama, the UN-based plan for ending the slaughter in Syria is the only game in town.
Yes, America has qualifiers and questions about the Kofi Annan plan. But those pale in comparison with the alternatives, which Obama aides regularly shoot down as “nonstarters.”
So although Annan’s six-point plan has yet to show any success, US diplomats will let it ride, praying for a better future.
Briefing the Security Council yesterday, Annan presented a mixed bag. There were some setbacks, and Damascus has failed to keep its end of the bargain. “The only promises that count are promises that are kept,” he told the council.
Nevertheless, he added, his team’s prospects are promising: “Observers not only see what’s going on, but their presence has the potential to change the political dynamics” in Syria.
Rosy predictions aside, Annan’s mission so far is a colossal failure.
The plan envisioned that violence would end 10 days ago — and there was indeed some initial abatement in the carnage. Some abatement: A hand-drawn poster in the northern town Deir Ezzor, discovered by Twitter user Nora Basha this week, read, “Only in Syria. When 30 people are killed in one day, we say, ‘That’s so little.’ ”
Now even that relative lull is over. Yesterday alone, Syrian activists say, at least 70 people were added to the death rolls, now more than 10,000.
Meanwhile, the regime has violated its every promise to Annan — including, most recently, its vow to withdraw heavy artillery and tanks from large cities.
And a 12-man UN advance team, sent to Syria to test how observing the “cease-fire” might work, displayed classic UN incompetence last week. After a few long days spent in the bloody streets, the observers took a day off for “regrouping, dealing with administration, logistics and planning,” Annan’s spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi said.
Yet the day they chose for R&R was Friday, when clashes between police and activists peak as Syrians pour out of prayers.
Our UN ambassador, Susan Rice, is emerging as the administration’s clearest voice denouncing Assad’s atrocities. She’s well aware of the Annan plan’s shortcomings.
On Saturday, after Russia proposed a plan to expand the UN contingent in Syria, Rice expressed doubts that 300 unarmed observers would fulfill the expectations of “protesters who are desperate for a protection that the monitors are not equipped or mandated to provide.”
She nonetheless voted to OK the expansion, but warned,“No one should assume that the United States will agree to renew” the mandate of the observers beyond the initial three-month deployment.
If UN history is any guide, the observer team won’t merely stay in Syria, it’ll grow. Annan’s career was spent in the UN bureaucracy, where success is measured by how many people work under you. His Syria team has grown with each failure and should continue to flourish; America will approve, because Team Obama immediately nixes every other approach.
Should we carve out safe zones to protect civilians? Nah, it would require boots on the ground (even though these need not be US troops). Establish no-fly zones? Nah, Syrian air defenses are too formidable (although Israel easily disabled them in 2007). Arm the opposition? Sorry, we don’t want to militarize the conflict further.
By default, we’re stuck with a failing plan that we’ll likely support and finance anyway. Administration foreign-policy hands who might advocate a more muscular approach are no match for Obama’s political advisers, who want no election-year complications.
Sure, there are legitimate arguments against getting too involved in Syria. But pretending that we’re doing something by pretending that Annan may succeed is no solution.
“How is it that Assad is still in power?” Elie Wiesel asked on Monday, as he introduced Obama for a speech at the Holocaust Museum; Obama insisted that Assad would fall — eventually.
Yet if US leadership remains AWOL, Assad’s likely to survive and kill for some time yet.