So Amb. Samantha Power, about whom I had certain qualms and certain hopes, has given a rousing speech on Syria at the Center for American Progress.

It wouldn't be my choice for a venue, but she wanted to do Washington obviously, and they invited her. CAP (think Samuel Charap)
is awful on Russia, generates pro-Putin "realist" pieces consistently,
and tends to follow the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) line on
Russia from the Soviet era, i.e. treat as vaguely "progressive" and an
ally against US capitalism.

But no matter, it's the text that's important, and the emphasis I've added tells the essence of the story:

Some have asked, given our collective war-weariness, why we cannot use
non-military tools to achieve the same end. My answer to this question
is: we have exhausted the alternatives. For more than a year, we have
pursued countless policy tools short of military force to try to
dissuade Assad from using chemical weapons. We have engaged the Syrians
directly and, at our request, the Russians, the UN, and the Iranians
sent similar messages.

But when SCUDS and other horrific weapons didn’t quell the Syrian
rebellion, Assad began using chemical weapons on a small-scale multiple
times, as the United States concluded in June.

Faced with this growing evidence of several small-scale subsequent
attacks, we redoubled our efforts. We backed the UN diplomatic process
and tried to get the parties back to the negotiating table, recognizing
that a political solution is the best way to reduce all forms of threat.
We provided more humanitarian assistance. And on chemical weapons
specifically, we assembled and went public with compelling and
frightening evidence of the regime’s use.

We worked with the UN to create a group of inspectors and then worked
for more than six months to get them access to the country, on the
logic that perhaps the presence of an investigative team in the country
might deter future attacks. Or if not, at a minimum, we thought perhaps a
shared evidentiary base could convince Russia or Iran – itself a victim
of Saddam Hussein’s monstrous chemical weapons attacks in 1987-1988 –
to cast loose a regime that was gassing its people. We expanded and
accelerated our assistance to the Syrian opposition. We supported the UN
Commission of Inquiry.

Russia, often backed by China, has blocked every relevant action in
the Security Council, even mild condemnations of the use of chemical
weapons that did not ascribe blame to any particular party. In Assad’s
cost-benefit calculus, he must have weighed the military benefits of
using this hideous weapon against the recognition that he could get away
with it because Russia would have Syria’s back in the Security Council.
And on August 21 he staged the largest chemical weapons attack in a
quarter century while UN inspectors were sitting on the other side of
town.

But despite this obvious problem — Russia! Russia! –  you get this kind of witless article in the Washington Post
which acts as if we should accept as a given that Russian motivations
are "confounding". Truly, this boggles the mind:

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has suggested the U.S. could buy
goodwill from the Russians by assuring Mr. Putin the Russian naval base
at Tartus will remain under Russian control. Mr. Putin has said Russia's
priority is the principle of nonintervention, not the Tartus facility.

"The administration has a hard time understanding how Russia defines
its own interests," said Thomas Graham, a Russia specialist who worked
in the George W. Bush White House. "It is hard to buy them off when you
are asking them to do things that in their view raise direct threats to
Russian national interests."

A senior White House official said the U.S. wants to convince the
Russian leadership it is in their interest to part ways with the Assad
regime. "What we've said to the Russians is the United States isn't
interested in removing Syria from Russian influence or acquiring Syria
as a client state of the United States," the official said.

Why
does Thomas Graham always think we should accept thuggish imperial
Russian interests as "legitimate"? Who says Russia "needs" to have a
port? You know, there are other ways you can do it in life – you can
behave nicely and trade with other countries decently, and then they are
happy to have your ships in their port, you know?

Streetwise Professor takes all this nonsense to task here.

But despite
all the very harsh realities at the UN Ambassador Power has layed out
for us, and despite the obvious witlessness of conceding anything at all
to Russia when it comes to Syria and its sponsored mass crime against
humanity, we get this, from CREDO action, the leftist "progressive"
campaign group related to the CREDO mobile phone service:

The use of chemical weapons is morally reprehensible, and it should be
punished. The International Criminal Court should immediately start war
crime tribunals and proceedings against those responsible for the use of
chemical weapons in Syria. And the U.S. can take evidence that Assad’s
regime used chemical weapons to the UN Security Council and seek a
resolution against Syria. Both acts would make it far more difficult for
Russia to continue defending the regime and open the door for
international action to broker a ceasefire — the only way we will stop
the massacre of civilians.

Yeah, let's get right on that, guys. Stop, thief! You, there, hi, I say, do stop that!

It's
as if they've just not been paying attention to what really happens at
the UN Security Council — which you can read in the news or at un.org. 
Amb. Powers has actually rounded it up very exactly. Amb. Susan Rice
used to lock horns with Churkov, the Russian ambassador, and was even
more fed up — Amb. Power is still getting her sea legs in this job, and
it will get worse.

The UNSC is proving itself completely unfit
for the job of stopping a mass crime against humanity, but even so, I
think in the coming weeks given that the US Congress will not authorize
force and Obama will not likely go around it, there has to be much more
done by Ban Ki Moon to convene states, for the less-repressed of the
elected 10 to get on Russia's case; for the West Europeans to pressure
Russia more — and hey, I think it would be a great idea for everybody
to boycott the Sochi Olympics over this — and a 100 other things.

So…CREDO is asking me to join a vigil against the war on Monday organized by moveon.org

I
often have gone to antiwar marches in the past. For example, I opposed
the Iraq war and took my young daughter to the big march in New York
city down to Washington Square back on the eve of the US invasioin. But
you know, I won't just march with anybody.

I waited for the Wrong
Rev. Sharpton and his gang to pass — no thanks. Then I waited for
International Action to pass — those Israel-haters and extremists. No
way. Various SEIC union types — never.

Finally I saw some moms
with strollers and some home-made signs like "Moms Against the War" or
something and felt I could risk falling into step with them — and also
that the skirmishes and police confrontations that always seems to
accompany the International Action type stuff might be kept in the
distance.  It's never perfect, the peace movement, like the human rights movement, it's the worse thing except for all the others.

I'm
always happy to take a look at what moveon.org has to say and even
occasionally sign some of their petitions, but in general, "Not For Us".

But…With
that sort of moronic "peace movement," and the witlessness of the
Realist hands, no wonder Amb. Power comes up with this:

It is only after the United States pursued these non-military options
without achieving the desired result of deterring chemical weapons use,
that the President concluded that a limited military strike is the only
way to prevent Assad from employing chemical weapons as if they are a
conventional weapon of war.

I haven't concluded this
myself, but by God, I do understand where she's coming from. I totally
get it about the little girls in the pink shorts. It's just that I
remember the emblematic scene of the father cradling his daughters' five tiny coffins in the
Iraq war, too.