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speaking Orthodox became Greeks, and Catholic Lebanese/Syrians tried to become French, while other Christian Arabs helped invent Arab nationalism. The Second World War showed little respect for national self-determination, as peoples from the Baltics southward discovered, and of course the Germans paid all over again. But once the mayhem was done and the boundaries adjusted, the foundational principle of the United Nations was the sanctity of state sovereignty and boundariesno matter how illogical. This amounted to restoration of an old principle, enshrined in the messy pragmatic details of the Treaty of Wesphalia that ended Europes Thirty-Year Warthat of national sovereignty. In the context of the time, it meant that if a monarch was Catholic and persecuting his Protestant subjects, or vice versa, it was nobody elses business. Generalized and refined, that principle is now enshrined in the U.N. Charter as all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, and of course emphasized in Security Council Resolution 242 as the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force. That is why, since the arbitrary redrawings of boundaries at the end of World War II, aggressors like Indonesia in East Timor, Morocco in Western Sahara, Iraq in Kuwait, and of course Israel in Palestine have never been able to gain legal recognition of their conquests. It is why, only recently, a federal court ruled that the State Department could refuse to put Jerusalem, Israel, as the place of birth on U.S. passports for Americans who want to have their Aliyah and eat it, too. Ironically, however, while under old style international law Palestinians living in Gaza can claim protection under the Geneva Conventionseven if it does not help them muchSyrians being shelled and strafed by their own regime cannot. However, since then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan steered the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) concept through the 2005 General Assembly, international law has changed, building on the International Criminal Court and its jurisdiction. The international community can now hold governments responsible for their failure to protect their own populations and indeed hold them to account for persecuting their own citizens. The big problem with humanitarian intervention, even when called Responsibility to Protect, is that it is susceptible to expedient abuse. Hitler justified intervention in Czechoslovakia on the grounds of mistreatment of the Sudeten Germans, who had indeed been denied their right to selfdetermination in the Versailles settlement. Tony Blair invoked the plight of Iraqi civilians to justify his and George Bushs crusade against Iraq. Russia, while it voted with the rest of the world on the general principle of R2P, invokes national sovereignty to ensure that it cannot be effectively implemented, at least against its allies. As in Libya, Moscow can draw support from the ineptitude of American diplomacy, which stands selfevidently guilty of egregious hypocrisy in its dealings with, above all, the Middle East.
And the one indispensable country that could at least inspire, if not lead, such a move is hopelessly compromised by its record of partisanship in the region. But at the very least, armed with Pillays demonstrable non-partisan commitment to human rights, the Security Council should mandate International Criminal Court investigations into crimes by both sides in Syria.