The Syrian catastrophe has not reached bottom but continues to spiral into an ever-greater disaster. Every week brings new horrors and deeper damage to Syria itself and its entire region. This week a United Nations report on the conflict abandoned any attempt at diplomatic phrasing and accused the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of “inhuman actions” and “extermination.”
As former U.S. officials Nicholas Burns and James Jeffrey wrote, “The cancer of this war has metastasized into neighboring countries and the heart of Europe. It could destabilize the Middle East for a generation.”
Only extremists gain from that. But tragically, the world’s existing system to control conflict, created to deal with the conventional wars of the 20th century, is helpless.