Old ways fail to help Syria

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/03/2012 (5036 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Syria matters. It matters in more ways than the daily newspapers and the nightly newscasts might indicate.

The statistics are brutal enough. The Syrian government of President Bashar Assad has killed at least 8,000 people in less than a year of protests against the tyranny of the regime. The Arab Spring that swept through northern Africa and parts of the Middle East over the last year turned into bitter weather when it got to Damascus.

Eight thousand is almost certainly a low estimate of the number of Syrians who have been killed by their government — Mr. Assad does not keep count and the United Nations continues to revise its figures upwards even as it tries, with its usual futility, to negotiate a solution.

Former UN secretary general Kofi Annan was in Syria this week, attempting to coax the regime into initiating a ceasefire. Previously, the Arab League attempted the same thing. If the Arab League’s efforts could not move Mr. Assad, it is unlikely that Mr. Annan can, even if he does wear the cloaks of both organizations.

So the slaughter in Syria is likely to continue for a while. But it is not the slaughter, the death toll, that makes Syria matter. More people die in Somalia and Sudan from famine and tribal warfare every year and the world doesn’t pay much attention.

What makes Syria matter is that this fundamentally insignificant nation is becoming the bellwether for 21st century geo-politics. The last half of the 20th century was defined by the Cold War, a conflict between communism, represented by the Soviet empire and China, and the free world, represented by the United States, Western Europe and Canada.

That ideological divide no longer exists. Russia is no longer even a nominally Communist state and China is more flagrantly capitalist than the U.S. The competition now is pretty much about branding, what tattoo will a nation wear, and Syria, which has no ideology other than enriching its ruling oligarchs, sits in the middle of the Middle East, one of the world’s most vulnerable and volatile regions.

The UN is incapable of acting in Syria because Russia and China — both veto powers — have their particular interests there; it is Russian-supplied weapons that have killed 8,000 people there and Chinese money flowing through Iran helps keep Mr. Assad in his palace.

This is more than just yet another indication of the futility of the United Nations. It is a wake-up call to the world that we are in a new century, and the comfortable Cold-War rules don’t work anymore.