Turns out that decades of indignantly protesting against genocide (a trademark of some members of President Obama’s national-security inner circle) are no use when it comes to preventing mass atrocities.
At the United Nations this week, Russia was set to nix a fairly timid proposal for a Security Council resolution to punish Syrians who block humanitarian aid to areas where the three-year civil war has hit hardest.
Britain is pushing the resolution; France strongly backs it. Australia, Luxembourg and Jordan are its sponsors.
America? Not so much.
Yes, our UN ambassador, Samantha Power, supports the effort, but several diplomats tell me she’s been standoffish about pushing for a “humanitarian resolution” at this time. (Guess she doesn’t want to cross the Russians when Sochi’s spirit of peace and harmony is in full bloom.)
Yet for the residents of Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, aid is long overdue. Food has been scarce, sanitary conditions are horrifying, medical facilities lack basics. Once tree-lined streets are now rubble.
And, oh, those barrel bombs: Full of explosives, nails and other metal shards to inflict as much indiscriminate maiming and death as possible, they’re dropped regularly on rebel strongholds by Syrian planes.
That’s, perhaps, because, as Obama so often reminds us, we managed to force Syria to get rid of chemical weapons. Except, oops, only 5 percent of Syria’s chemical weapons (CW) have been taken out of the country so far, as the government deliberately slows down the process.
So as Power tweeted last week: “While #Syria stalls CW removal, 9.3M people in dire need of aid” while the “regime doing most of the obstructing.”
So what to do? (Beyond Twitter, that is.)
Good news: Some 1,000 people were evacuated from Homs in the last few days. An agreement with the UN allowed some aid workers to come in.
Bad news: The aid workers were endlessly attacked by snipers.
And government representatives are extracting “terror suspects” from the stream of people trying to leave the besieged city. All men between the ages of 15 and 55 are directed to a school, where they decide who’s a terrorist. The UN’s people can’t watch; only regime operators know what’s happening inside the school.
Meanwhile, dozens of regime opponents and civilians were massacred just north of Homs, at the village of Ma’an.
This is no way to deliver humanitarian aid.
The Obama administration has long resisted creating “humanitarian corridors” in Syria — safe areas that foreign forces would carve inside the country for civilians to escape the war.
America, in fact, won’t do anything of consequence about Syria.
French President François Hollande, visiting the White House this week, put his dwindling political prestige on the line last year when Syria crossed Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons. When Obama blinked rather than stick to his word, Hollande, whose Mirage fighter jets were ready to go, was greatly embarrassed.
“It is absolutely scandalous that we are talking for so long while the population is being starved” in Syria, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said this week.
We heard that same note of frustration a decade ago from people like Samantha Power, the talented writer, academic and journalist. In books like “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” she documented atrocities, was indignant about them and pushed for global solutions to fight them.
Now, as UN ambassador, not so much.
Oh sure, she recently became the first senior US official to visit the trouble spots in Mali, where France sent troops to end a horror-filled war. And she works behind the scenes to secure funds for a similar French operation in the Central African Republic.
So while France acts in areas where it has interests, Obama is doing his best to imitate the France of old, the one we derided with “freedom fries” for its attempts to protect Saddam Hussein.
Fine, maybe America shouldn’t be the world’s cop. And who knows, maybe, as Obama’s defenders have long argued, we have no interest in Syria. Perhaps, too, our interfering will only do harm.
But if, like Power and many others in the Obama administration, you believe that human rights and the prevention of atrocities are a cornerstone of America’s stance in the world, this administration is failing miserably.
The people of Syria will long remember who wasn’t there in their time of need.
That is, absent there on the ground. Not in the twitter universe.