Thanks for your help, UN

Another unhelpful thing has lumbered into the Middle Eastern void left by the lack of American leadership. It’s called the United Nations.

Admittedly this organization has very limited ability actually to do harm rather than merely to make foolish or wicked utterances. But it has done what it can, with a windy, pretentious and self-congratulatory Security Council resolution, unanimously adopted, endorsing a “peace process” in Syria that does not even pretend it will end the conflict, let alone in a way that removes the appalling dictator Bashar al-Assad. Such a resolution lends spurious moral legitimacy to the wrong people, and to the uttering of empty words in crises.

Assad is obviously hard to remove in practice. He is the vicious ruler of a country nobody wants to invade and it’s hard to talk such people out of office. And he is now being aggressively backed by Russia’s stone cold dictator Vladimir Putin. But none of these is an excuse for endorsing his remaining in power actively or by omission.

The civil war in Syria has now killed perhaps a quarter of a million people, including tens of thousands of civilians, and displaced an astounding 11 million people, about four million of whom have fled the country. And while it has now become a sectarian free-for-all in which most participants deserve to lose, the root cause is Assad’s ruthless suppression of peaceful protests against tyranny that were part of the 2011 “Arab Spring.” Like his father, Syria’s current president is a brutal supporter of state and non-state terror who lacks any sort of conscience.

The regime protests that it is fighting profoundly evil terrorist groups like ISIL. And it is true that with its back to a wall against such opponents, a democratic regime would take desperate measures, too. Our own government, like that of Britain and the United States, carpet-bombed German cities in the Second World War, not only understanding that civilians would die, but intentionally killing them to undermine morale and cripple the economy. And the only real dispute in retrospect is whether it was an efficient use of resources.

Assad is different. He is attacking his own people in response to an uprising that is in significant measure due to his own regime’s horrible repression over many decades, including mass slaughter of civilians as an intentional and unflinching instrument of political control for no better purpose than clinging to power. To end the civil war and leave him in place is not the art of the possible, smart geopolitics or weary ac- ceptance of the inevitable. It is complicity in the mess.

So is the fact that the UN resolution doesn’t envision a ceasefire with “terrorist” groups including ISIL and the al-Nusra Front (if you haven’t heard of this al- Qaida affiliate, don’t worry; there are enough serpents in this snakepit that they’re hard to keep track of ). Nor should it, one might argue, since ISIL is not just part of the problem — it’s done its best to become the core of it. On the other hand, as Moshe Dayan said, you make peace with your enemies, not with your friends. Not, perhaps, the leaders. But its legions of followers must be induced to lay down their arms, and their cause, if they are not all to be killed. And while there might be grounds for chasing both Assad and ISIL out of Syria, there are no grounds for getting rid of one and keeping the other.

U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry praised “the unprecedented degree of unity” in the Security Council and called the resolution “a milestone.” Which only underlines the extent to which the United States is not a player in the region anymore. ( In fairness, if “Canada is back,” it is not obvious in this context.) Kerry frankly acknowledged “sharp differences” with respect to the future of President Assad, even apparently returning to U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2011 insistence that the dictator must leave. But to say such things after applauding a resolution the United States voted for that set no such condition is simply further to undermine America’s dwindling credibility.

Meanwhile, UN Secretary General Ban Ki- moon, archbureaucrat and nonentity, described Syria as “in ruins” and said that “thousands of people have been forced to live on grass and weeds,” which is “outrageous.”

Indeed. He t hen called the UN resolution “a very important step on which we must build.” In short, it was more words aspiring to lead to even more words f rom people who think words can take the place of deeds or that, indeed, it is the acme of statesmanship to send still more words to reinforce previous words.

Say what you will, or won’t, about Assad. He sees past such fatuities to the hard realities of power. The UN does not, though some of its members value the smokescreen it creates for genuine, active villainy. But it does not seem that the administration in Washington does, and into that vacuum much that is harmful rushes, accompanied by much that is misleading.