Syria's Srebrenica 
The U.N. again plays accomplice to a massacre. 

May 28, 2012
WSJ
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303807404577432561861499408.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
The United Nations Security Council on Sunday condemned Syria's government for the killing of 108 people, mostly women and children, in Houla on Friday. But the condemnation was incomplete: It should have included the Security Council itself for providing the diplomatic cover that has let the Assad government continue its killing. 
Thanks to Russia and China, the Security Council has failed to impose any serious sanctions on Syria, much less endorse action to help the opposition amid more than 6,000 deaths. That's bad enough. But in April the U.N. turned to aiding and abetting the regime with its mission to send Kofi Annan to Damascus as a special peace envoy. 
Mr. Annan, who as a former U.N. Secretary-General is perfectly trained for the role of accommodating dictators, brokered a cease-fire that he said Syria's Bashar Assad promised to obey. As was widely predicted at the time, Mr. Annan's truce succeeded only in buying time for the Assad regime to crush rebel havens in Homs and elsewhere and now to perpetrate the massacre in Houla. 
On Monday, Mr. Annan made another trip to Damascus and proclaimed himself personally shocked and horrified by the tragic incident in Houla. Nice to know. 
He also called on every individual with a gun to disarm and stop the killing, which continues the moral equivalence that equates systematic shelling of civilian neighborhoods with small-arms resistance to organized military assaults. The U.N. is every bit as complicit in the Houla murders as it was when its blue-helmet Dutch peacekeepers stood by and did nothing as the Serbs massacred thousands of Bosnians in Srebrenica in 1995.
The Obama Administration signed onto the Annan mission as an excuse not to have to organize a coalition of the willing outside the U.N. to intervene in Syria. Bill Clinton was finally shamed into going around the U.N. in Bosnia in the 1990s, but Mr. Obama's main goal seems to be to get past the election without again having to use American military force. 
In a news leak on the weekend, White House aides let it be known that their latest strategy is to coax the Russians into agreeing to help ease Mr. Assad from power while preserving the bulk of the regime. It isn't clear why the Russians would suddenly decide to throw over their last client in the Middle East. Nor it clear why a successor regime in Damascus, presumably still run by Allawites, would be any more likely to accommodate the largely Sunni opposition. 
For months, we've been told that the U.S. and the West can't intervene in Syria because it might lead to civil war, because the turmoil might spread in the region, and because we don't know who might replace Mr. Assad. Well, civil war is breaking out anyway, the mayhem is spreading to Lebanon, and the bloodier things get the more likely that Syria will descend into a chaos that empowers the most radical elements on either side. 
At least in Libya, Mr. Obama eventually led from behind. In Syria, he's following from behind a United Nations that has become an accomplice of Bashar Assad.