Syria's tragedy, America's crime: The collapse of national sovereignty - Salon

Western press reports include the merest flicks at rebel rocket fire into Damascus, but even these passing mentions, always well buried, suggest there is more to what we think we understand. One of the only balanced reports in the Western press, and the best by far, was written by Robert Fisk, another noted correspondent at the Independent, and published late last week.

Things did not appear much more hopeful at the UN last week.

Late on Saturday the Security Council adopted a resolution, drafted by Sweden and Kuwait, calling for a month-long truce and safe passage for humanitarian aid and medical evacuations. This ended several days of intense negotiation. Earlier reports suggested the U.S. refused to accept amendments proposed by Russia to guarantee a halt to the rocket fire from Eastern Ghouta into Damascus. There is no such guarantee in the final resolution. Nebenzya, unsurprisingly, voted for the resolution with no apparent enthusiasm and skeptical that anything that did not restrain the militias in Ghouta would make much difference. “Utopian” was Nebenzya’s term for the final document.

Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, had earlier asserted that the Swedish–Kuwaiti resolution was drafted to shift focus from the peace process, sluggish as it may proceed, and to preserve the militias in Eastern Ghouta as a force to continue acting against Assad. Nebenzya repeated this view Saturday. Given what was omitted from the resolution, this assessment is at the very least plausible enough to deserve our consideration.

If ever we have needed a reminder of how deeply in the dark we are as to events in Syria, last week has provided it. But I draw another, larger lesson. Syria’s tragic fate has made the enforcement of international law as a commonly recognized norm an urgent need. At the same time, it underscores how far from reality it probably is to expect UN institutions to serve as the technology to get this done. Nation-states are the inventions of a previous age, but observing the conventions of sovereignty remains essential to global order. If there is success somewhere far down the road, Syria will stand as a painfully achieved mile marker — the point where the era of foreign-sponsored coups ended, the point where multipolar solutions to international conflicts became a 21st-century imperative.

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