Diplomacy shot down as Syria is shot up

Could any other conclusion have been expected?  Dictators supporting a dictator, it’s QED.  As British ambassador Mark Lyall Grant said, the ones pushing for a UN Resolution to scold President Bashar al-Assad, for seeking to crush his citizens with wanton violence, removed all offending passages and beefed up assurances that military action would not result from it, yet this was not sufficient for Russia and China and they vetoed it, blowing a raspberry in the face of the other 13 members of the Security Council voting in favour.  Acting like petulant children, Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao now serve as apologists for child killers.  Angered by feeling duped into abstaining on a no-fly zone motion on Libya that was pursued aggressively by NATO and led to the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi, they are extracting their revenge on the West through the blood of the Syrian people.  Proxy politics of course, but curious in picking a fight that will damage their own standing with the Arab world.  They also have domestic considerations – the elites in Moscow and Beijing both fear an upheaval that will sweep them away and the winter protests throughout Russia rattled the Kremlin, before they realised general apathy would win the day.  Finally, Russia is a long-term ally of Syria and both it and China have extensive military contracts with the Ba’athist regime.

Aside from Russia, China and Iran (playing an important part in training Syrian forces loyal to the regime as Turkey does with the rebels), plus the Iranian satellites Iraq and Lebanon, the only country happy with the situation is Israel.  Disappointed on the fall of Hosni Mubarak – a man with whom they could do business - in Egypt and aghast when a Cairo mob laid siege to their embassy, I imagine Tel-Aviv is quietly happy with the chaos in Syria.  While speaking in ominous terms of the intentions of Iran, they have been silent on their relations with Damascus.  

Israeli politicians know that with Assad utterly discredited at home and abroad, then as long as he and his cronies cling to power, there will never be any international pressure in the slightest to hand back the Golan Heights and turn a forty-year cease-fire into a peace treaty.  Israel used to boast about being the only democracy in the region and claiming moral superiority as a result, yet they did not want their neighbours to emulate them, for they feared the antagonism of the Arab street would translate into parallel results at the ballot box – the cynical braggadocio has come back to haunt them and made their security – Israel’s understandable ultimate concern – more precarious.  They place no faith in the theory that democracies do not go to war having exploded it in the conflict with Hamas (who won the Palestinian elections all those years ago; Hamas successfully goaded the Israeli Defence Force into attacking after the former faced political defeat in the Occupied Territories and thus became martyrs instead of fall guys). Therefore, both sides of the Knesset will be delighted should no regime change occur in Syria, with the Alawite elite left too weak to rule and too strong to let others rule and so, in effect, neutralised.  Let Russia and China take the flak - now that is clever proxy diplomacy, with the proxies not even aware of their nature.