This Is The Middle East

Perhaps it's just as well. That China's and Russia's self-interest transcends hugely any residual sense of human rights they may harbour. Most nations are consumed, to begin with, with the state of their own security and stability and wealth. Certainly China and Russia are. Both are also involved in their own threats of instability, as China is increasingly faced with protests against government strictures in the lives of ordinary Han Chinese.

Not to mention its ongoing and increasingly volatile relations with Tibet nationalists. Who, unsurprisingly, would very much appreciate a return of their country to them. At the very least, some semblance of sovereignty. Which isn't likely seeing the influx of Han Chinese flooding the country. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Harmony remains elusive. But this is an 'internal' affair, off bounds to the international community.

As for Russia, the growing protests and the numbers of ordinary Russians coming out in support of alternative opposition political parties in the wake of Vladimir Putin's election manipulations favouring his United Russia Party, leading to his well planned and publicized entitlement to switch places with Dmitry Medvedev to once again become President for another prolonged period of time. In a country that increasingly would prefer he not do so.

So Russia's foreign minister has gone to Syria for a confab with President Bashar al-Assad to convey to him the dissatisfaction with the international community (Western alliance) with his reaction to the protests in Syria against his continued rule. The failure of the United Nations Security Council to agree unanimously on a declaration and further sanctions a special gift to Assad from Russia and China.

Arms sales, hegemony and political alliances do come in very handy in these situations. And Bashar al-Assad did not disappoint Sergei Lavrov - or perhaps he did, by issuing certain statements through his interior ministry expressing the need to suppress "armed terrorist gangs" in Homs.

"Operations to hunt down terrorist groups will continue until security and order are re-established in all neighbourhoods of Homs and its environs and until we overcome all armed persons terrorizing citizens."

We cannot, as civilized societies, allow armed persons to continue terrorizing citizens. Of course, if government troops terrorize citizens that's another matter entirely. Then, they are not citizens, even if they're young boys, but rather 'armed terrorists'. They cease becoming citizens when they become revolutionaries, for that classification of protesters are transformed into terrorists. If we equate Islamists with terrorists they have a point.

So, Turkey and the United States are prepared to come up with some kind of solution. Ironically enough, Turkey was not enthralled with the prospect of NATO's no fly zone over Libya, much less with the active collaboration militarily between NATO's military members and the Libyan rebels. While much is made of the numbers approaching 6,000 so far killed by the regime's military in Syria, those who lost their lives in Libya approached 30,000 in number.

This is the Middle East. Volatile and exceptionally unpredictable. Violence seems forever balanced at the tip of where civil society spills over into dissatisfied members of society fed up with tribal, ethnic, sectarian and political 'differences' of truly poisonous dimensions. In the Middle East, with individual countries' regimes facing dissent from their publics, it might be best to stay uninvolved.

Largely because by coming to the aid of one faction which always will have its supporters outside the country, the risk is great of alienating and offending one or another of them. In the Middle East it is true that there are no enduring loyalties, only shifting alliances of momentary practicality. One interferes at one's own risk.

With notable exceptions. Exceptions so hugely vital, that extend well beyond the precincts of the Middle East itself that they cannot, nor should they, be ignored. Syria may not be one of them. Libya has proven also not to have been one.

And Iraq is reverting to form, as do they all. It has suddenly occurred to the United States that despite the enormous investment it made there, it will reduce its diplomatic staff by half.