Huffing and Puffing

"Allowing the ruling regime in Syria to kill its people and burn them with chemical weapons in front of the entire world and without any deterrent or punishment is clear proof and evidence of the UN Security Council's inability to perform its duties and shoulder its responsibility."
Saudi Foreign Ministry

 

FILE - In this Friday, Sept. 27, 2013 file photo, the United Nations Security Council votes on a resolution that will require Syria to give up its chemical weapon, at U.N. Headquarters. Saudi Arabia is rejecting its seat on the U.N. Security Council and says the 15-member body is incapable of resolving world conflicts. The move came just hours after the kingdom was elected as one of the Council's 10 nonpermanent members. In a statement carried on Friday, Oct. 18, 2013 by the official Saudi Press Agency, the Saudi Foreign Ministry says the Council has failed in its duties toward Syria. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle, File) 

"I would like to caution you that I have received no official notification in this regard.
"We also are looking forward to working very closely in addressing many important challenges with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, particularly the Syrian war and other issues."
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon

Saudi Arabia is expressing high dudgeon over its disgruntlement respecting the kid-gloves handling of the Syrian regime after much of the international community was convinced it had conducted a chemical weapons attack on a Damascus suburb killing hundreds of children, women and men. That number, needless to say, is the tip of the iceberg, a chilling edge of far larger numbers of Syrians the regime has been responsible for killing over the past two and a half years of civil conflict.

There is reason enough to be frustrated and angered that Syria appears to be getting a free pass over the civil war that has pitted the forces of President Bashar al-Assad against a motley militia of rebels that include jihadists from across North Africa and the Middle East. It is largely a sectarian, tribal war of attrition; the Shia Alawite regime in conflict with its Sunni Syrian majority, now joined by foreign Islamist terrorists.

The world views the abhorrent slaughter by a Middle East government of its rebellious population. A government that has called in another Shia terror group in Hezbollah, with the active backing and support of an ally in Iran's Republican Guard. Terror meeting terror; factions of sectarian searing hatred for one another; all Muslims but all deploring the other as insufficiently Islamic.

A bemused international community weighs a brutal dictatorship against a deadly Islamist jihadist threat.

It is the expression of Saudi fury over the stalemate that appears to favour the Syrian regime, despite the overwhelming rejection of most Middle East states themselves exerting military authority over their own hostile minority sects and tribes that spurred the oil kingdom to decline an address to the General Assembly and to refuse to occupy its elected seat on the revolving UN Security Council.

Its anger is directed both at the United Nations as a toothless appeaser, and the United States as a feckless mediator, succumbing to the wish to forestall any further disagreements with Russia, championing Syria. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and others in the neighbourhood have been supporting the rebels, convinced that the West would do likewise. The Saudis see no problems in arming Islamist jihadis; the West shrinks from that prospect.

Saudi Arabia saw no reason to deplore the unevenness and ineffectiveness of the United Nations and its many interventions that fail, or its human rights delegations that so enjoy targeting those whose human rights records are beyond reproach but are held up to scrutiny and faulted by those whose own human rights records are deplorable. It's one of those old, infinitely repeatable situations about whose ox is being gored.

The Islamic Republic of Iran's march toward nuclear weapons, which the Saudis know to be the case, while the Iranian Ayatollahs swear otherwise, is deeply unsettling to the Saudis, as well as to their other Sunni-majority neighbours. They harbour no illusions whatever with respect to Iran's game plan, to own an arsenal of nuclear weapons as credible threats against those who would deny them domination of the region.

That the United States, the great arbiter of right and wrong, justice and injustice, threats and mollification, has seen fit to once again proffer to the Republic a kid-glove open hand, when previously the Grand Ayatollah responded with a fist of rejection, gives little comfort to Saudi Arabia, and in this instance, the Saudis share the discomfort of the State of Israel.

But the rejection of the Saudis of their proffered seat appears to be so unprecedented that the United Nations officials hardly know how to react. Their consternation at the very public and very loud denunciations by a country that has revelled in the complacent opportunities to gore other countries' oxes in the past, is itself unprecedented.

Regional disputes such as those between Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria do create quite prickly situations. Sweetness and light evades the precincts of the United Nations. Which finds it quite possible to overlook Iran's threats against Israel, but troubling to the nth degree when a regional powerhouse like Saudi Arabia simply fails to politely take a seat.