The plot thickens.

Mr Kofi Annan resigned 2 days back as UN envoy to Syria because he is unable to see how to bring about a peaceful end to the fighting. The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution yesterday denouncing the violence in Syria and demanding a political transition. The resolution also deplored " the failure of the Security Council to agree on measures to ensure compliance of Syrian authorities with its decisions ". Although the resolution is not binding it is an indirect censure of Russia and China for vetoing any suggestion of sanctions against Syria. Read as a whole it is asking the Security Council ( read the US and UK who are always ready to bomb the hell out of any nation ) to get rid of Bashar al Assad by force. However, Russia and China refuse to accept any hint of sanctions against Syria having been fooled into supporting sanctions against Libya only to see that being used as an excuse to bomb 30,000 to death and Gaddafi into oblivion. Libya is now a divided country and last week a video surfaced showing rebels using his corpse as a ventriloquist's dummy inside a vehicle where one rebel was asking questions while another kept shaking his head form side to side. Saif al Islam, Gaddafi's son is a prisoner in Zintan. He is wanted by the International Criminal Court for trial but the tribe holding him want him tried inside Libya. When the ICC defense lawyer Melinda Taylor visited Saif in Zintan with 3 colleagues they were arrested on 7 June on a charge of passing encoded messages to him from his supporters. They were released on 2 July only after a personal apology by the ICC President. A new government has been elected in Libya but it is limited to Tripoli and if the tribes in Misrata and Benghazi refuse to share revenues raised from oil then a civil war is not impossible. Syria has probably reached the point of no return. Couple of days ago an unverified video showed between 20-30 men, who showed signs of having been beaten up, being executed by firing squad by the rebels who claimed that the men were members of Shabiha, the hated Assad militia. They could well have been innocent Shia men caught in the wrong place by the Sunni rebels. The rebels are being supplied by Qatar and Saudi Arabia and trained by Turkey and the US. These coountries probably calculate that a defeat for the Assad regime will take away the only friend that Iran has in the region and force it to negotiate its nuclear ambitions away. But what if elements of a Sunni regime in Syria decide to support Sunnis in Iraq against the Shia government of Nouri al Maliki? A civil war in Iraq and possibly Lebanon where the Hezbollah will lose its only supply route and become a sitting duck for Israel. Maybe that is why, fearful of its soldiers being attacked by Iranian supporters in Afghanistan, the US apologised humbly to Pakistan and is now busy packing up to run with its tail firmly between its legs. The US and UK have again created a terrible mess. Wonderful.