Watching the siege of Homs reminds me of a scene in the movie Crash, where a young girl runs out of her house just an Iranian gunshop owner is threatening to shoot her father because he wrongly blames him for negligence that allowed vandals to break in and destroy his shop.
In the theater where I saw the movie for the first time, the audience let out a collective gasp of horror and disbelief as the man pulled the trigger just as the girl jumped into her father's arms while her mother watched helplessly from the house behind her.
That same gut-wrenching feeling of watching a tragedy unfold without the power to intervene hits me every time there is a news report of a new atrocity in Homs: the shelling of civilian homes, the continued lack of food, water, and medical supplies, and most recently, the refusal to let in humanitarian supplies.
As Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch put it in an interview on the PBS NewsHour, “This is worse [than Sarajevo], worse than Grozny, the city in Russia that was leveled by Russian forces in 1998 and 2000.”
In fact, all of those who participated in the discussion with Malinowski, including Anne-Marie Slaughter, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton, and Richard Haas, Council on Foreign Relations, agreed that the options available to respond to the situation in Homs are “incredibly painful.”
Professor Slaughter called for Turkey, Saudia Arabia, Jordan, and Qatar to help the Free Syrian Army “establish civilian protection zones as close to the border as possible” and to provide the intelligence, communication systems, and weapons to make this possible.
But Richard Haas objected that since Syria is one of the most highly militarized countries in the world, this might well make Homs the beginning stage of a protected civil war.
All agreed that it must be up to Arab nations to lead any effort against Syria, both in the case of any military action and also in the enforcement of economic sanctions.
Haas focused on the Syrian National Council as the best way to offer an alternative to the Assad government that can protect minorities who now support the regime, with the hope that Assad's supporters will find it worthwhile to turn against him. But he admitted that any diplomatic or political solution will almost certainly come too late to save the people of Homs.
Another factor, of course, is the continued opposition of Russia and China to any peace plan like the one proposed by the Arab League to the United Nations Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was uncharacteristically blunt in her assessment of these actions:
It's quite distressing to see two permanent members of the Security Council using their veto while people are being murdered – women, children, brave young men – houses are being destroyed
It is just despicable and I ask whose side are they on? They are clearly not on the side of the Syrian people.
In a situation where even Hamas has turned against the Assad regime, it seems particularly shocking that Russia and China continue to support it, even though the long term prognosis for Assad looks increasingly grim. Sooner or later he is likely to face the same fate as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, but not before blood runs through the streets of Homs, and that is no metaphor.
On her return from the Friends of Syria conference in Tunis, Hillary Clinton again expressed her frustration with the situation in Homs but tacitly admitted that United States has limited influence. Then she spelled out the few realistic options that remain:
We have to continue to consult with those who truly are friends of the Syrian people...We are doing everything we can to facilitate humanitarian aid. Secondly, we continue to ratchet up the pressure. [Syria] is an increasingly isolated regime. And third, we push for a democratic transition by working with and trying to build up the opposition so they can be an alternative.
In the movie Crash, the anticipation of the young girl's death provoked an instinctive gasp of horror that turned to overwhelming relief as the audience realized that the gun was filled with blanks rather than bullets. Homs is unlikely to have this kind of Hollywood miracle. We're at that cliffhanger moment, and whatever the Friends of Syria and the Syrian opposition can accomplish in the long term, Homs may well go down in the pages of history as another Sarajevo, another Grozny.
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