One Bullet

June 25:

Jim Hoagland’s commentary on Kofi Annan and his Syria peace mission is worth a brief remark. Hoagland defends Annan’s tactics, which he associates with the “Yemeni variant” method of getting rid of Bashir al-Assad. The key, Hoagland contends, is not persuading Assad himself, because everyone knows, Annan included, that that isn’t going to work. The key is not Assad, but Putin. According to Hoagland, Annan is waiting for the moment when even the Russians are embarrassed by the atrocities of the Syrian regime. Annan knows that his mission is providing the Russians with cover, in the hope that Putin will eventually do the right thing. As he puts it, Annan knows that he can only kill his mission once—his revolver has only one bullet. So he is saving his one shot for a time of maximum impact, which is to embarrass the Russians for making impossible the fulfillment of his dream while Secretary-General—namely, the dream of the so-called Responsibility to Protect. Hoagland approvingly quotes a European friend: “His resignation would allow the world to see clearly what Russia is doing—and what the United States is not doing—that makes them both complicit in the killing of a nation.”

The problem with this approach, assuming that Hoagland has it more or less right, is that the Russians are never going to put serious pressure on Assad to leave, because they know he won’t. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said as much in public, and while very little of what he says can be taken as truth, in this case what he said, perhaps accidentally, does actually happen to be true. Why should the Russians risk their interests in Syria on behalf of a policy they know won’t work? And therefore why should U.S. policy ever have been predicated on such a double impossibility?

I have nothing against Kofi Annan, and I don’t doubt Hoagland’s characterization of him as anything but a naif when it comes to Syria and its dictator.  But his only bullet is a blank. And I still think that in the absence of a kinetic option Annan’s diplomacy was bound to fail and, as such, has always constituted a counterproductive effort because it bought time for the regime and the opposition to blunder their way into a full-fledged bloodbath.