BLOODY SYRIA – AT 7:42 A.M. ET:  Syria is becoming an obscenity.  Secretary Clinton said yesterday that the Assad regime has killed more than 2,000 of its own citizens in recent months.  And yet the world reacts with only minor suggestions of upset.

Compare please to the international uproar that greeted a scandal in an American prison in Iraq during the Iraq War.  No one was killed.  No one was even seriously injured.  Some prisoners were humiliated and ill-treated, and the problem was exposed by our own Army and corrected.  Yet the world reaction suggested that mass genocide was taking place.  It is the double standard of the international left, as exemplified by "human rights" groups which, like the old red front groups, use grand words and market in hypocrisy.

Questions are being raised about America's own response to the Syrian massacres, given the speed with which we sent Hosni Mubarak to the showers.  From ABC News: 

The Obama administration has been reluctant to call on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down despite the regime’s increasingly bloody crackdown on protestors seeking his ouster.

U.S. officials tell ABC News that there was a debate between the White House and the State Department this week over whether to take that step. The White House wanted President Obama go beyond his May 19 statement that Assad must reform or get out of the way, while the State Department cautioned that it was worth saving that arrow in the quiver.

Pressed repeatedly this afternoon by reporters asking why the U.S. has yet to call on President Assad to step down, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton eventually said “I come from the school that actions speak louder than words.”

And we've gotten neither.

To that end she said the U.S. is trying to develop international consensus for a global response to the violence in Syria.

“We are working around the clock to try to gather up as much international support for strong actions against the Syrian regime as possible,” Clinton said.

This crisis has gone on for months.  Must be a slow clock. 

The fact is that this administration's reputation for weakness, anticipated cuts in our defense, and a generally ambivalent attitude toward foreign policy, are combining to make us the pitiful helpless giant that we used to fear we'd become decades ago. 

There's an old saying in diplomacy:  "If you say you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna."  If we claim to be interested in advancing human rights in the Mideast, it's time to combine with other nations and insist that Assad leave power, while at the same time finishing the job against Gadaffi in Libya. 

We are losing influence.  We feel it around us.  The price will be paid.

August 5, 2011