In the wake of allegations of Syrian of chemical weapons use, questions about Syria’s commitment to abide by the chemical weapons convention it signed onto last year, the capture of Homs by the Syrian government, and the ever-rising death toll, the United Nations’ special envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, announced his resignation on Tuesday.
The New York Times contextualized the resignation:
His departure — without a hint of who might succeed him — signaled the bleak prospects for peace in a conflict that has claimed more than 150,000 lives and shows no signs of abating as President Bashar al-Assad says he intends to serve another seven-year term after staging elections in June. Mr. Brahimi’s announcement came just two days before Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterparts from European and Arab nations are to gather in London to discuss the crisis in Syria, with no new or obvious path forward.
The Times also reported that there is growing discontent among America’s allies over the lack of a response to the carnage. The recent reports of chemical weapons usage by the Assad regime have prompted the French government to state its “regret that the Obama administration had decided against using force” last year.
The failure of the international community to stop the bloodshed has evoked comparisons to the slaughter in Rwanda twenty years ago by members of the administration. That failure has been manifest in recent news reports. The Washington Post reports today that “block after block of Homs lies devastated” after its capture by government forces.
Earlier this week, Iranian officials took credit for Assad’s recent victories. One, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, Chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, boasted, “We have won in Syria. The regime will stay. The Americans have lost it.”
Bashar Assad also has been emboldened to seek re-election in defiance of the international consensus agreed to in Geneva in 2012.
In the June 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine, Jonathan Spyer observed in Before Syria Disappears Stop and Think that one consequence on American inaction could be that “Iran will be encouraged to even more strenuously defy the West over its nuclear program, secure in the knowledge that U.S. and Western threats can be faced down.” In the March 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Brooklyn Middleton wrote Yes, We Really Can Stop the Slaughter in Syria.
[Photo: AFP news agency / YouTube ]