Time is short for Russia to get on right side of history

Four months ago, Russia and China blocked a United Nations Security Council resolution aimed at ending the bloodshed in the Syrian uprising, saying that Western nations and the Arab League that supported the resolution were moving too fast.

Time has shown that peace initiatives and attempts to replace the dictatorship of Syrian President Bashar Assad with a less brutal alternative have moved far too slowly for the growing list of innocents who have died in an increasingly bloody conflict. Estimates of the dead now range from 10,000 to 13,000, with most of the blood on Assad’s hands. Although the insurgency has also become increasingly active, casualties are mounting on both sides.

One might think that last week’s massacre of more than 100 people in Houla, many of them children killed by gunmen going door to door, would be enough to inspire universal condemnation, even from Assad’s long-time supporter, Russia. But, no.

Assad took to the airwaves over the weekend to deny his government’s role in the Houla massacre and to compare himself to a surgeon, who necessarily sheds some blood in an operating room in the greater cause of saving the patient. But his metaphor breaks down because Assad isn’t working to save his nation as much as he is working to save his own skin and to preserve 40 years of a family dynasty started by his father.

Who is out of step?

Russia, meanwhile, issued a statement by its Foreign Ministry that mirrored its tone of February, that everyone else is trying to move too fast. Russia said it is awaiting the results of the investigation into the massacre at Houla and was “disturbed that some countries went ahead and cast blame.”

Based on its obstructionism, Russia already shares the blame for the bloodshed in Syria.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov this weekend that Moscow must do its part to help remove the Assad family from power. Given that Lavrov enjoyed a hero’s welcome in Damascus four months ago after Russia blocked Security Council action, Clinton must be hoping for what can only be described as an unlikely change of heart.

There is never anything simple about politics in the Middle East, and picking winners and losers is a dangerous game. Even when there is success in deposing dictators such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, the result does not necessarily comport with Western values. And, indeed, there is reason to be concerned about how religious minorities, including Christians, fare when dictators — especially those who were more concerned with order and maintaining power than ideology — finally fall.

But the longer Assad follows a course of maintaining control at any cost, the more strident the opposition becomes and the more difficult it becomes to fashion a new government that respects political, ethnic and religious minorities. Russia and China should join the effort to avert further unrest while there is still the possibility of reaching a result that everyone can live with — including Assad and his family, although they would have to do their living somewhere outside of Syria.