How long will this single vote dominate this crisis? We watch from the sidelines and have no answer, no idea. This unseemly mess, so graphic, so brutal, so endless, has reached a milestone: the official stamp of a sole voice. Does Assad have the kind of leverage to continue forever, alone? Or is this vote cast by someone else? Who's vote really counts here, Assad's or Putin's?
For years, Putin's support both on the ground and in New York has kept the regime in power. We can only speculate how the Crimean situation will affect the long-term prospects for Assad' administration but we do know Putin's plate fills. With the world's eyes averted, will Assad be left to run rampant? (OR) With Russian eyes averted, will the world be left a unique opportunity to end this? Time will tell.
President Assad fosters such cruelty and violence among the Syrian people. If he never changes his vote the world may witness a kind of depravity seldom seen in history and Syrian stories will inflate the very concept of horror. This situation once again proves we have yet to set an acceptable limit; we have yet to dig deep enough to finally say we have found our darkest corner. With all the terrible monsters, lying under the human bed (Hitler, Po Pot, Stalin...), when will our species mark the moment when one man's vote can no longer speak louder than the enumerable suffering it causes?
