I am not sure the US will end up going so far, unless they are mis-reading the news.
The Assad regime looks like it’s winning, and the US will have to face the consequences of its declaration well into the future. Such a declaration certainly wouldn’t change the political atmosphere in Syria.
Obama’s White House is being triumphalist at the moment, having, in public view, succeeded over OBL. It’s a dangerous moment, and they could be tempted to do something unwise.

Posted by: alexno | May 11 2011 11:33 utc | 4

This sort of nonsense is just for internal consumption. The primary occupation in washington is intellectual masturbation. It excites these lightweights to listen to themselves repeating the ideas current when the USA was an island, far removed from the rest of the world, enjoying a rate of economic growth unprecedented anywhere else.
In the years after the Civil War, itself a grim demonstration of the coming military age, America had a sense that it was destined to rule the world. A relatively harmless dream at the time, unless you were dark skinned, lived close by or in the Pacific, and one that nourished much in the way of ‘spreadeagle’ conjecture, like the chasrming verse of Vachel Lindsay. America feeling its oats and the old world indulged its boyish, if provincial, self assurance.
Now all is changed: the ideas are old, and thoroughly discredited, encrusted with the dried blood and dungeon filth of realpolitik and mouthed, not by a young broadshouldered farmer with straw between his teeth, but by young shysters, the jaded denizens of a knocking shop, on the borders of DisneyWorld, where those who have grown old, without growing up, use their Visa cards to be assured that they are deep thinkers and great lovers, Marlboro men with a dry cough in their throats and a rendezvous with infamy until they are completely forgotten.
Best to pay no attention.

Posted by: bevin | May 11 2011 14:42 utc | 6

Apparently there is a new definition of the word “legitimacy” with which we were previously unfamiliar (although we have heard it before, in other eras of imperial hegemony). A government is legitimate if it is approved of or installed by the Americans. Otherwise it is illegitimate and a target for punitive military expeditions. The provincial governors of the Roman Empire would have been very familiar with this kind of rhetoric.
American has over several generations become a quasi religious doctrine, related (in my mind anyway) to concepts like Divine Right and the Mandate of Heaven. Most Americans are literally unable to imagine their country behaving or being treated as one among many equally sovereign states. Their immunity from risk of invasion or conquest, their “right” to invade and conquer others at will, are such basic assumptions that the absurd bombast (and heinous criminality) issuing from the Pentagon, high military command, and political elite seems reasonable and normal to the citizenry (or maybe I should say “residents,” since they are hardly citizens in the sense of participating meaningfully in the direction of their polity).
From inside the empire — and I suspect this was true of the FSU before the fall as well — reality is a very different shape and colour, history’s narrative is told with Us at the centre of the story.
From the outside, the US is cast as the Emperor Palpatine, architect of the Death Star. But from the inside, the Yanks see themselves as Luke Skywalker, naive farmboy called by Destiny to an heroic, epic battle on the side of goodness and freedom. The pleasant buzz of self-righteousness and easy power from the end of WWII has still not worn off, though the effort of maintaining it seems to be getting a little desperate…

Posted by: DeAnander | May 11 2011 15:44 utc | 8

inner city press posted this on tuesday:

The next moves on Syria in the UN Security Council began to emerge on Tuesday. Numerous sources told Inner City Press that the move is to put into a draft resolution the type of non-binding, non-punative Council press statement as was issued on Libya on February 22.
The idea is that provision such as were contained in the subsequent Libya Resolution 1970 — sanctions and referral to the International Criminal Court — have absolutely no chance of passing the Council at this point.
Meanwhile an aspiration statement as was made on Libya, a “shot across the bow” as one diplomat put it to Inner City Press, might have a chance.
But when Inner City Press asked Chinese Permanent Representative Li Baodong about this “Western” strategy, he said “I don’t think they can do it.”
Even a Western diplomat complained to Inner City Press that with the way things have gone in Libya, Council passage of a “first step” text on Syria is unlikely for now.
Last week Inner City Press reported that the UK was moving toward introducing a resolution, which unlike the previous draft press statement could not be blocked by a single non-Permanent member like Lebanon.

Posted by: b real | May 11 2011 15:51 utc | 10

DeAnder @ 8: Bad link or no, you’ve nailed it.
MB @ 5: Yes, when you combine your post with DeAnder’s, it captures the essence of the US today. Totally managed and controlled by very few monolithic, global corporations.( last sentence my theory. )

Posted by: ben | May 11 2011 17:25 utc | 12

BTW. Reading this blog in its present incarnation inspires me to rejoice that– no matter what b says about “the empire”– Germany has been and always will be a snivelling vassal state of “empire.”
I mean, just look at it, it’s been 10 years and German NATO troops have bravely fought in northern Afghanistan, while, I guess, Eurocorps is bravely garrisoned in Geneva, Bonn, Rome, defending the eurozone from … the British.

Posted by: slothrop | May 11 2011 18:10 utc | 14

just got back from a week long trip. i engaged the driver of the airport park n ride in a conversation about syria where he is from by asking his opinion of what was going on there. he said, give it about a month and it will phase out. i asked, you mean the ‘revolution’. he said yes, most syrians supported assad. they like him.

Posted by: annie | May 11 2011 18:23 utc | 16

A better comparison, perhaps:

Consider the following scenario. A group of Irish republican terrorists carries out a bombing raid in London. People are killed and wounded. The group escapes, first to Ireland, then to the United States, where they disappear into the sympathetic hinterland of a country where IRA leaders have in the past been welcomed at the White House. Britain cannot extradite them, because of the gross imbalance of the relevant treaty. So far, this seems plausible enough.
But now imagine that the British government, seeing the murderers escape justice, sends an aircraft carrier (always supposing we’ve still got any) to the Nova Scotia coast. From there, unannounced, two helicopters fly in under the radar to the Boston suburb where the terrorists are holed up. They carry out a daring raid, killing the (unarmed) leaders and making their escape. Westminster celebrates; Washington is furious.
What’s the difference between this and the recent events in Pakistan? Answer: American exceptionalism. America is subject to different rules to the rest of the world. By what right? Who says?

More in the essay.

Posted by: jawbone | May 11 2011 18:47 utc | 18

Of course Assad is illegitimate, he inherited his post from his father!
However, dictatorships are there for a reason, the reason usually being that people prefer them to civil war.
The US position on illegitimacy would be no problem if it was
a) consistant b) would not be used as pretext for invasion or forced business deals

Posted by: somebody | May 11 2011 19:04 utc | 20

Obama will do what he wants—with, or without us. It’s strange that he just can’t seem to get anything done against the tighty whities, though. Poor thing.
Hey, jawbone.
Drat–I was positive each finger did its correct work in typing that URL code.
That’s funny.

Posted by: just me | May 11 2011 19:23 utc | 22

Colour Revolution 101: get locals to behave in such a way to force a govt to crack down violently. Then declare that that govt has lost its legitimacy….
Lets see the Scots do the same under the instigation of a foreign power…or some american group…

Posted by: brian | May 11 2011 21:38 utc | 24

Leonor a spanish blogger is in Libya
http://leonorenlibia.blogspot.com/2011/05/terrorismo-de-otan.html
NATO TERRORISM
Last night NATO aircraft bombed Tripoli hospital burn unit.
Bombed the water companies Sirte and Misurata and then say that the Libyan government has cut off the water.
Buildings being bombed hospitals, schools, universities etc. that have nothing to do with the army and the Libyans say that for sure now say we need to go to repair the country have been destroyed because the resource base.
Two days ago when they bombed Jufrah Wahar to tell me that bombed the entire city and especially schools, universities, hospitals etc.
At the same time and in addition to destroying the country EU says it will put an office in Benghazi and tells Joseph that the UN has already changed the flag and the Libyan government.
We are facing a real coup orchestrated by the U.S., UN, EU and especially France and England in the eyes of the world who remain unmoved.
What he is doing the USA and NATO in Libya is easy to check. By this I mean that if governments are silent or supported the coup are responsible for this barbarism.

Posted by: brian | May 11 2011 21:39 utc | 26

re bevin’s #6 reference to u.s.america’s dreaming of empire after the civil war, one can go back a century, perhaps longer, and find all sorts of dreaming & scheming about a new empire destined to rule far beyond their own hemispheres
just one example, taken from richard van alstyne’s “empire and independence: the international history of the american revolution”, that ties in the timeframe

In October 1755 John Adams, age twenty, wrote a friend a letter which is a masterpiece of realist thinking. Without any wastage of words, the letter places the nation soon to be born in perspective and shows a knowledge of how the forces of history operate:

All that part of Creation that lies within our observation is liable to change. Even mighty States and Kingdoms are not exempted… Soon after the Reformation, a few people came over into this new world, for conscience sake. Perhaps this apparently trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America. It looks likely to me. For if we remove the turbulent Gallicks, our people according to the exactest computations, will in another century become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have I may say all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe will not be able to subdue us…

Posted by: b real | May 12 2011 1:37 utc | 28

the inconsistency of the US gives the values they pretend to represent a bad name. just as Napoleon did in Europe.
neither the US nor France has solved the French revolution’s triangle of freedom, equality and solidarity.
the Geneva convention is of no value any more, the protection of civilians has become a pretext for civil war. it is back to the medieval looting of cities, assassination, torture et al. of course this never really got extinct, but goes back to the Second World War, and the colonial wars before then.
Nato bombing “command centers” in Libya to “protect civilians”, but not protecting refugees at sea is a sick joke.

Posted by: somebody | May 12 2011 6:35 utc | 30

@ndahi – Please explain to me how the NYT interview with Rami Makhlouf is an indication of the legitimacy of the Syrian regime?
It is not. But the line that I quoted is:

Damascus, the capital, seemingly tranquil, and Aleppo, a key conservative bastion, has been relatively quiet ..

When the two biggest cities, which can not be controlled by security forces if a majority there does not want it, are peaceful, than the regime still has standing.
Some violent uproar in agricultural small border cities or the slums of Homs do not make a viable revolution.

Posted by: b | May 12 2011 7:11 utc | 32

Glenn Greenwald writes about American hypocrisy — prolifically, with load of links, and enough examples to make the argument many different ways.
He opens referencing an interview by “Benjamin Ferencz…a 92-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, American combat soldier during World War II, and a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials” given to the CBC in Canada. This kind of interview might appear on Democracy Now!, but not many other broadcasters in the US would invite him or anyone supporting the rule of law as applied to wars of aggression, especially since Bill Moyers is no longer on the air.
What is obvious is that as of now, the US no longer supports any of the principles spelled out in the Nuremberg trials and in international law — at least as it applies to America or its proxies.
Good piece and, really, not too long.

Posted by: jawbone | May 14 2011 13:49 utc | 34