My must read of the day is "On Syria, Obama administration is leading to failure," by the Washington Post editorial board:
The diplomatic initiative that Mr. Kerry launched offers no means to hold the regime of Bashar al-Assad accountable for these atrocities, or even to stop them. On the contrary: It may serve to prop up the Assad government by treating it as a legitimate party to negotiations about Syria’s future. Mr. Kerry insists the talks will lead to a transitional government that excludes Mr. Assad, but the Syrian delegation flatly rejects this premise, and there is no indication that its allies Russia and Iran think otherwise. […]
President Obama demonstrated last year that the credible threat of force could change the regime’s behavior. His promise of airstrikes caused Mr. Assad to surrender an arsenal of chemical weapons. Yet the president seems not to have learned the lesson of that episode. Now he makes the defeatist argument that, as he put it to David Remnick of the New Yorker, "It is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which our involvement in Syria would have led to a better outcome, short of us being willing to undertake an effort in size and scope similar to what we did in Iraq."
This is the same problem we see in talks with Iran – the administration and Secretary of State John Kerry are making an argument in support of diplomatic talks that is based on a false premise. It is not the case that this Geneva conference was the only option other than "an effort in size and scope similar to what we did in Iraq." There are choices other than simply those two extremes.
The credible threat the Post editorial board describes is one of them. We are not presenting a serious threat behind these negotiations. Instead the conference is simply making a good faith effort to talk with bad actors that ultimately have no intention of negotiating. These talks are a joke, and the Assad regime’s comments consistently show that.
Secondly, we should start calling what is happening in Syria by its true name: genocide. This regime is torturing and murdering its people, people who are largely Sunni, while the regime is Shia. They haven’t simply attacked rebel fighters; they’ve murdered innocent people, including children. We should be ashamed for doing nothing.