Mounting pressure on Assad after Syria massacre

What happened

The Obama administration and its Western allies ratcheted up the pressure on Syria’s leaders this week, expelling senior Syrian diplomats to protest the massacre by pro-regime thugs of more than 100 people—mostly women and children—in the town of Houla. Declaring the Syrian government “responsible for this slaughter,” the State Department gave the country’s top diplomat in Washington just 72 hours to leave the U.S. High-ranking Syrian envoys were also kicked out of Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Turkey, and several other countries. The expulsions came as United Nations special envoy Kofi Annan tried to salvage a crumbling U.N. peace plan, pleading with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus to honor a cease-fire between the regime and its opponents.

Assad’s government claimed that unidentified opposition “terrorists” were behind the Houla massacre, in which 108 civilians, including 49 children and 34 women, were slaughtered—the worst atrocity of the 14-month uprising. But U.N. monitors said that the attack began with a bombardment by government tanks and artillery, which killed up to 20 civilians. Pro-government paramilitaries then moved in, and went house to house, shooting and savagely hacking people to bits. One witness described seeing “women, children without heads, their brains or stomachs spilling out.” The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, warned that an international military intervention might become necessary if such “atrocities” continued.

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What the editorials said

This may have been the worst massacre in Syria yet, said The Guardian (U.K.), but it won’t be the last. The executioners are thought to have been members of the Alawite minority, a Shia offshoot to which Assad belongs, while their victims were members of the Sunni majority. Revenge attacks are likely, and if this ethnic conflict continues to escalate, “Syria will disintegrate into a Lebanese-style civil war, with shock waves throughout the region.”

Obama must start leading from the front, said The Washington Post. For two months, he hid behind the toothless U.N. plan, which allowed “the Syrian regime to go on slaughtering civilians.” Now the president is trying to persuade the regime’s longtime ally, Russia, to pressure Assad to step down. But that plan is doomed to fail, since Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has no interest in promoting democracy, and Syria is Moscow’s last remaining client state in the Middle East. Obama should stop relying on useless middlemen and order an intervention. “The longer he waits, the greater the cost—in children’s lives, among other things.”

What the columnists said

“Diplomacy has failed,” said James Traub in ForeignPolicy.com. The rebels are acquiring weapons from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Muslim Brotherhood, and civil war is inevitable. The U.S., Turkey, and Gulf states should give the rebel army the training ground, weapons, and logistical support it needs to win, as we did in Libya. If we keep “hiding behind Kofi Annan’s skirts,” foreign jihadists will hijack the uprising, and the chance “of creating an unarguably better Syria” will disappear.

It’s understandable that everyone is now saying, “We have to do something,” said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. But “intervening in Syria without the protection of an international consensus would be particularly risky.” The resulting factionalism and chaos could end up igniting regional and great-power conflicts. An international solution is still possible, said Walter Russell Mead in TheAmericanInterest.com. Obama is reportedly trying to persuade Putin to support a deal in which Assad would get “a dignified exit” from power. It just might work: With no end to the slaughters in sight, even Putin now sees the blood-stained and weakened Assad as more of a liability to Moscow than an asset.

But even if Assad falls, the bloodshed won’t stop, said Philip Gourevitch in The New Yorker. The main opposition group, the Syrian National Council, is made up of “seven infighting factions”—including Christians, Kurds, and the Muslim Brotherhood—who will likely turn on one another as soon as Assad is gone. A savage sectarian war, it seems, will be the dictator’s final gift to his country.