John Kerry fiddles in Palestine as Syria burns

A time comes in the course of deadly upheavals when the world wearies and the bloodshed turns routine.

Syria's Bashar Assad bet it would unfold that way. From the beginning of this struggle, he warned his country that the foreign cavalry would not show up, that the promises of help will not materialize. The world is feckless, despots know, and all they need to do is to hunker down and wait out the initial moment of outrage.

Indeed, Bashar had the better coalition on his side. The friends of the Syrian regime — the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, the Iranians, the Russians and to some extent the sectarian Shiite government in Baghdad — enabled the dictator to hold on and reverse the course of battle.

Meanwhile, the Western democracies, the Sunni Arab states and Turkey have run out the clock on the Syrian people.

The cavalry was always on the way, just another massacre away; the weapons supplies were in the pipeline, and the commitment to break the back of the Damascus regime just around the corner.

President Obama was politically shrewd about Syria. There was no great campaign for intervention in that country's bloodshed, no "progressives" were appalled by the violence, and Republicans in the House and Senate were equally indifferent. Sure, there was Sen. John McCain, relentless and offended by the violence, insisting that the unraveling of Syria carries consequences for American security, but he was a voice in the wilderness.

The Obama administration never grappled with the reality of Syria. It looked at Syria and thought and spoke of Iraq. We were war weary, Obama said, over and over. There were sectarian terrors in Iraq, and they would be waiting for us in Syria as well. We would find no gratitude in Aleppo and Hama.

Global icons, apparently, don't do campaigns of rescue for people facing the unforgiving firepower of a brutal regime.

John Kerry now picks up where his predecessor left off. This was his second chance to get Syria right. Back during his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry had fallen for the young Syrian dictator and his glamorous wife. He took at face value the promises of reform offered by a Syrian ruler eager to break out of the isolation the Bush administration had imposed on him.

But by the appearance of things now, Kerry has nothing new to offer the Syrians. He has seen for himself the heart-breaking condition of the refugees in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, now a midsize city of unimaginable bleakness.

Kerry has made it clear that he is determined to restore the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. His choice has taken the Arabs by surprise.

In the nature of Arab officialdom, the political elite have to pay lip service to the cause of the Palestinians; they can't be less pro-Palestinian than the American diplomat. But the moral and strategic cause that holds the Arabs at the moment is the fight for Syria.

The arrival of an American chief diplomat keen to ride into the windmills of an old, stale conflict is, to them, as good a testimony as any on the erosion of U.S. power.

Deep into their third year of grief, the Syrians know better than to expect deliverance from the pre-eminent Western power. Amid the wreckage of their country, and in the forsaken refugee camps that have become home to 2 million people, they know they are on their own.

They have been schooled in the doublespeak and the evasions of those who could have aided them but chose not to do so.

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