U.S. Falls Short of Moral High Ground on Syria
By JOHN VINOCUR
July 18, 2011  
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/world/europe/19iht-politicus19.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/world/europe/19iht-politicus19.html

PARIS — In dealing with the Middle East’s political eruptions, the United States, credibly or not, has made standing on the right side of history its operative watchword. 
The White House first used the phrase in explaining how it chose — after serious in-house arguments about the relative strategic insignificance to America of the stakes involved — to provide air support to the Libyan rebellion against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. 
Since the halting Libyan intervention, at low cost and low risk to the United States, the Obama administration has found comfort in indicating that it will respond to the Arab world’s revolts against its dictators on the basis of moral imperatives. 
Last month it carried this notion to the upheaval in Syria, where, more than in Libya, the opportunities for positive change affecting the entire region are vast. 
Backing a French-British resolution condemning the Syrian regime for its brutal repression of opposition demonstrators, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/susan_e_rice/index.html?inline=nyt-per \o More articles about Susan E Rice. Susan E. Rice, reached for the moral prop: “We will be on the right side of history if and when this comes to a vote. If others are unable to, or are unwilling to, then that will be their responsibility to bear.” 
Now, with deaths in Syria reported to have risen to 1,400 over four months of clashes, there has been no U.N. condemnation, and no U.S. calling-out by name those countries blocking the measure and supplying Syria with its arms and financial wherewithal. 
With Syria’s dictatorship killing daily with impunity, Ms. Rice’s line, five weeks later, has less the look of a U.S. government acting on history’s right side than one comfortable with indignation minus consequences. 
As it turns out, the West is doing very little to transform the outrage of Syrian citizens into effective penalties against the regime of http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/bashar_al_assad/index.html?inline=nyt-per \o More articles about Bashar Al-Assad. Bashar al-Assad and its suppliers, or into active outside support for a best-case scenario — ending Damascus’s symbiotic relationship with Iran, stopping Syria’s promotion of terrorism and isolating Hezbollah in Lebanon. 
The language of moral commitment remains: President http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per \o More articles about Barack Obama Barack Obama has said the United States is “using all the diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at our disposal” to support democratic transition and “block the path of murder.” But evidence of that action — or anything resembling results — isn’t shining through. 
One of the problems seems to be how specific the administration wants to get in pushing or shaming or pointing to the Big Players lurking on its version of the wrong side of the historical street. 
From the start, Russia and China have threatened to veto any Security Council action condemning Syria. Russia is the central player because it is Syria’s prime purveyor of arms, because it regards the Assad regime as its single true partner in the Middle East and because it plans, according to officials in Moscow, to modernize its logistical base at the Syrian port of Tartus to accommodate “heavy warships after 2012.” 
An initial draft of the resolution, prepared by France and Britain, had language, I was told, that called for the exercise of “vigilance” involving arms transfers to Syria — a word vague enough for the Russians to have agreed to it last year in the latest round of U.N. sanctions against Iran. 
But this time Moscow said no. According to the account I heard, although the draft’s language was softened accordingly, the Russians made clear that the resolution — seen by its sponsors as opening a legal gate for Western action against Syria by individual countries or groups of them — has no future. 
Up until now, the Obama administration has not issued a peep. 
Rather, it was the French, through Defense Minister Gérard Longuet, who seemingly picked up on the right-side-of-history notion, and called the Russian and Chinese veto threat “indecent,” which in my dictionary means morally offensive. Mr. Longuet recommended that the international community “dry out Syria financially” because a military intervention was not feasible. 
(Problem: Iran appears to be working fast at assisting Syria’s cash and energy needs. Les Échos, the French financial newspaper, reported Friday that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, had approved $5.8 billion in assistance to Syria, as well as 290,000 barrels of oil daily, without charge to the Assad regime for the next nine months.) 
As for the Americans, moral impeccability, with the Security Council action floundering, relates in the short term to whether the United States considers the Russians and the Chinese too big to assail concerning Syria. 
As it was described to me, the Americans’ dilemma is “whether we take no for an answer” — meaning abandoning a Security Council vote — “or do we force the moral point” and make Moscow and Beijing openly responsible for the veto of the West’s proposed Syria condemnation? 
The American hesitation seems to come with the rationale that as the revolt deepens, the Russians might want to hedge their Syrian bets. But how do you not exert pressure on Moscow now when tanks and helicopters — Pieter D. Wezeman of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates Russia to be the essential source of the Syrian military’s heavy equipment — mass near a Syrian town where soldiers have defected? 
Two despairing answers: 
One, according to a European diplomat, is that the European Union, without specific U.N. cover, could never achieve the consensus necessary to call out Moscow or penalize it for providing the hardware involved in Syria’s ongoing massacres. The other is that for the Obama administration, the task of confronting Syria’s supply chain with sanctions would savage the basic Russia-is-manageable premise of the president’s so-called reset with Moscow. 
Still, under these circumstances, there’s the possibility of far greater embarrassment for the United States and its friends: no good outcome emerging from Syria, the place where an Arab dictator’s departure is most likely to signify a win for international peace and stability. 
By way of precedent, Mr. Obama did not take the risk of rushing in with U.S. backing (moral or material) for the anti-regime demonstrators being shot down in Iran’s streets in June 2009 after the mullahs blatantly nullified an election victory by the opposition. 
This time, with millions of Syrians risking their lives for months, the American president has the theoretical vocabulary in hand — but nothing else of substance, so far, to indicate where his administration’s concrete support for the right side of this history begins.