Protesters carry a man believed to be a killed in Homs, in this undated still image taken from amateur video footage made available on August 2, 2011. (Photo: Reuters).
By Tony Karon, Global Spin – Time.com, Aug 3, 2011 — Interventionists" in Washington had hoped, last March, that the decision by the U.S., Britain and France to launch U.N.authorized military action in Libya represented a new Western willingness to protect civilians under threat by their own regimes. The paralysis of the same governments and the wider international community in the face of the more sustained brutality now unfolding in Syria suggests that the humanitarian interventionists dreamed in vain.
The regime of President Bashar al-Assad has chosen the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan to unleash a brutal armored assault on a city bombed to rubble by his father, President Hafez al-Assad, to suppress an earlier rebellion in 1982. More than 140 residents of the city are reported to have been killed since Saturday, bringing the total death toll for the four-month uprising close to 2,000. Five times as many have been detained. And yet, despite its escalating brutality, the crackdown clearly isn’t working.
But the U.N. Security Council, which authorized military intervention to protect Libya’s risen citizenry, finally managed Wednesday to agree on a rebuke of the "the widespread violations of human rights and the use of force against civilians by the Syrian authorities," but with no consequences for the regime.
Arab regimes long at odds with Damascus and its Iranian allies, and who blessed the intervention in Libya, have remained largely moot on the Syria crisis. Military intervention by any outside power remains highly unlikely.
The Libya experience, of course, has dimmed prospects for intervention on Syria’s behalf. . . .
