Not a peace envoy, that Lakhdar Brahimi. An envoy for the international system of capitalist states that is always concerned with preserving its order over justice. Syria already is a failed state run by a vicious warlord Assad. It is to enable Assad to hang on that the conflict has been spread, the millions of refugees destabilising the neighbouring countries are down to his bombs; because he cannot hang on otherwise he has dragged in foreign armies from Lebanon, Iran and Iraq; because he needs to present himself as fighting foreigners Assad's forces have engaged in provocations against the Turks. When he says that Arab rulers have supported "the war effort instead of the peace effort", he would prefer they had bullied the rebels into submitting to more torture and murder, rather than providing a fraction of the support that Russia has given to Assad. It is if Assad stays that the country will look more like Somalia, though the idea that the Syrian opposition are all Islamic radicals has obscured the fact that many of them are never going to want that.
A quick break to note the false editorialising, common to Western media, that equates the tiny efforts in support of the Syrian people with support for their oppression. In a line about events at the UN, you would assume that Western powers had been pressing for military action against Assad, rather than trying to get basic legal protections of civilians respected. "Assad's western foes have pressed for action against Syrian authorities, but Russia and China have vetoed draft resolutions against Syrian authorities."
Brahimi's comparison to Afghanistan only makes sense if you see the world divided into good states and bad non-state actors. The valid lesson I can see is that if a country needs sorting out, sending in ground troops and taking over the country is not the answer, which is why nobody has proposing that for Syria, and those who claimed we were being dragged into a war there went along with a lie.
And then, despite the evidence that only those with access to the government's stockpile of chemical weapons could have done so, accuses the rebels of one of the earlier chemical attacks. You might have thought that the government bunging chlorine bombs out of helicopters might make the denialists realise that it was Assad all along, but they'll probably carry on saying it long after Assad's henchmen appear on TV ridiculing the West's gullibility in falling for Assad's lies. If we can't be sure of anything, we can be sure that we know absolutely nothing.
It is nice to see this morning that Owen Jones is now clear on the August gas attacks, "Last year, days after the Assad regime's heinous gas attacks had killed hundreds"*, though he's still peddling nonsense about the opposition being foreign backed sectarian forces last time I looked.
*[http://www.theguardian.com/…/2014/jun/08/cia-first-tweet-to…]
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