Syria still a muddle

by By Herald StaffYesterday 0:00 AM

Only three weeks have passed since Secretary of State John Kerry made one of the most impassioned and important speeches of his career - a compelling case for holding Bashar Assad accountable for the Syrian leader's use of chemical weapons to gas his own people - the "indiscriminate slaughter" of innocents, the "moral obscenity" of gassing hundreds of children.

Today, with a strange new diplomatic agreement - brokered at the behest of Syria's patron, Russia - in place, the world has taken a small step, on paper only, toward securing and destroying Assad's chemical weapons.

So why don't we feel better?

Assad will face no global sanction for the killing of children who choked to death on the poison he unleashed, other than agreeing to the destruction of the weapons used to kill them. Civil war will rage on, Assad's runways and arms depots untouched. Syrian rebels and innocents in the line of fire may be spared a sarin-induced death, but are they much better off than they were before the Geneva deal was struck?

As for the almost comically-ambitious deal itself, it relies on Assad to provide the inventory of his weapons and where they are stored, and then to allow international inspectors "immediate and unfettered access" to all relevant sites. Call us cynics, but we anticipate more than a few speed bumps along that particular road.

And while the U.S. and Russia have agreed to seek a resolution formalizing the deal under Chapter 7 of the U.N. charter, which could authorize military force should Syria fail to comply, the deal does not spell out any specific sanctions. Russia would surely block U.N.-authorized military action in the event of noncompliance, leaving the world at the mercy of Assad's willingness to cooperate - or not.

It's worth noting that these concerns assume the United States is still willingto use military force. The severe case of foreign policy whiplash at the White House leaves that question in serious doubt. President Obama insisted over the weekend that "if diplomacy fails, the United States remains prepared to act." That sounds more like an empty threat with each passing day.