The West looks on

What can the United States and the European Union do to put an end to the massacre in Syria? The first painfully obvious observation is that Syria is not Libya. If Colonel Gaddafi's regime is more than holding out against the popular revolt given tepid support by the West, the state presided by the ex-ophthalmologist Bashar al-Assad is a much harder nut to crack, given that the Western powers feel incapable of going beyond verbal condemnations and economic sanctions- which have shown their ineffective nature on many occasions in the past.

Popular protest has erupted once more in Deraa, the town where the spark of revolt took flame some weeks ago; it is surfacing, though with justified fear of the brutality of repression, in the capital, Damascus, and fills the streets whenever it can in other towns.

Independent sources estimate at some 800 the civilians so far shot down by the so-called forces of public order, which on Sunday brought tanks into Homs and other smaller towns. On Saturday they did likewise in Baniyas, a coastal city which the regime considers one of the strongholds of the revolt of the Sunni majority against the Alawite regime. The Syrian regime, with its usual cynicism, reckons the number of dead at only about 150, more than half of whom it claims belonged to the security forces.

What we are looking at, says the government, is a jihadist revolt, against which it claims to stand as a defender of Western interests against Al Qaeda. Thus, amid the threats of terrorist reprisals for the recent death of Osama bin Laden, the regime apparently expects to cultivate sympathy in the West, absurd as it may seem.

The EU has announced economic sanctions. An arms embargo was already in effect, though arms are hardly in short supply in the arsenal of the Assad dynasty. And on Sunday the White House used the bluntest forms of expression, demanding of the regime that it cease repression immediately and undertake a program of reforms. But the threat of "extraordinary sanctions" has a sound of impotence about it.

What, how, when? A freeze on Syrian assets, and on those of the presidential family? Withdrawal of ambassadors? Apart from the fact that, for some years now, Washington has had no ambassador in Damascus, all of these are measures suitable for a prolonged siege, not for a prompt defenestration. And it is true that it would be senseless to propose direct action against Syria, which Western public opinion would not accept, nor the UN endorse, because Russia and China would oppose it. What the West fears most is that the fall of the regime would set off a cataclysm in the region, with the intervention of Iran and the belligerence of Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of these being allies of Syria's Baathist regime.

Nor can any useful initiatives be expected from the Arab League, packed as it is with leaders who are just as authoritarian as Assad. Thus the massacre proceeds, while the world looks on powerless.