Is this: "Slaughter your people all that you wish. We'll make sure that the United Nations will do nothing to stop you."
Anyone who did not think that the Syrian regime would not use area weapons on its people had to be delusional. They're doing it now. They have done it before.
It is not surprising that Russia and China would back the Syrians by vetoing the UN resolution. Beyond the geopolitical reasons, such as the Russian naval base at Tartus in Syria, there are what one might call "restive populations" in both countries. Both Russia and China have shown little hesitation to use a heavy hand against their own citizens. The best way that they can preserve their own right to slaughter their own people is to ensure that other despotic nations are free to massacre their own citizens whenever it suits them to do so.
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I'd believe in your analysis more if it were the majority slaughtering the minority in Syria, as happens in China and Russia on a regular basis. But it's not. What's happening in Syria is that the Alawi, Druze, and Christian minority (approximately 20% of the population) is slaughtering those of the Sunni majority who want to take power. It'd be as if the Chechyns took power in Russia or the Tibetans took power in China and then started firing on ethnic Russians or Han to retain power -- not exactly the sort of lesson that those regimes would condone.
Their veto was about money (for their merchants), and what's happening in Lebanon is a civil war, in other words, not the simple "Regime bad, protesters good" that you seem to believe. That is why the regime has had no trouble finding troops willing to fire on protesters -- the core army units that the regime relies on have always been drawn from the Alawi, Christians, and Druze, and given the historical precedents regarding what happens to religious minorities in Syria when the Sunni majority in Syria hold power, they have every right to believe that if the Sunni take power, the Sunni are going to try to exterminate their entire religious and ethnic groups to the last man, woman, and child. It wouldn't be the first time... but it would be the first time in an independent state of Syria, because the Ottomans and then the French set up the security forces in their Syrian province as primarily minorities for exactly the reason of stopping those kinds of unseemly genocides, and once Syria became independent, that mostly-minority Army could both prevent genocide, and eventually be used to wriggle in minorities as the rulers of the state.
In other words, the only thing sanctions would have done would have made the situation more dire for civilians in Syria, because the regime is *not* going to simply collapse like in Egypt -- they have the iron-clad support of enough of the population (20%) to stay in power, though I do suspect that Assad is toast and will be either forced out or reduced to total figurehead shortly as a sop to the international community. But unless there is a Nelson Mandela amongst the Sunni with both the street cred and moral authority to make iron-clad promises of no genocides if the Sunni take power, the regime isn't going away -- the credible threat of genocide against the minorities that comprise the regime will make them fight to the last man, woman and child to keep the Sunni out of power. And thus far, I haven't heard of a Sunni Nelson Mandela... Bashir's daddy killed anybody who could be such a man, I guess.
- Badtux the Geopolitics Penguin
Err, what's happening in *SYRIA* is a civil war. But the similarity to the Lebanese Civil War is interesting here... Syria's backing for the mostly-Shiite Hizballah (and their claim that their Alawi religious minority is just a branch of Shiism) is as much about domestic politics as it is a question of tweaking Israel. In the end all politics is local. Funny, that.
- Badtux the Geopolitics Penguin
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