Don’t look to Washington for a lead on Syria

America must avoid “being haunted by the atrocities we did not stop and the lives we did not save…”

This is what President Obama said in a stirring speech, introduced by Elie Wiesel, on Holocaust Day just over a month ago.

It reminds me of the time I interviewed Bill Clinton after the Haiti Earthquake when he told me that his biggest regret had been his failure to intervene during the Rwanda genocide.

So are we here again? Is Syria becoming the new stain of inertia on America’s conscience?

Vocal Republicans like Senator John McCain, who of course ran against Obama in 2008 and Elliot Abrahams, the neo conservative who helped draft Iraq and Afghanistan policy for President Bush, are calling for American military action.

Even Mitt Romney, the presumptive GOP nominee has now got involved, calling in a written statement for a robust American response, while being careful to define exactly what he had in mind.

And that is the point. The Houla massacre may well be the point when Europe has gone from “nothing military can be done” to “SOMETHING must be done” but America isn’t there yet.

It took years for them to reach this threshold in Bosnia, when the reports of Serbian concentration camps cleared the air for Nato airstrikes in 1996, or the 1999 Razac massacre in Kosovo paved the way for Nato intervention and crucially American boots on the ground.

In Kosovo it was Tony Blair who pushed a reluctant Bill Clinton to put his soldiers where his rhetoric was. They even had a stand up row about it in the Oval Office.

Syria is different. No British Prime Minister is pushing an American President towards military action. Call it another one of the unintended consequences of the Iraq War.

Even if London was pushing, it is doubtful that President Obama who is busy extricating himself from the military adventures he inherited from his predecessor would be listening.

The more important point is that few military planners, here or in Europe, have come up with a convincing plan that might actually work.

Regime change in Syria doesn’t just involve the removal of the Assad family. They merely sit atop a military industrial complex that has everything to lose from being marginalized.

They represent a minority, the Alawites, who are convinced that the alternative to running the country is to face extinction. They are fighting/murdering for their lives in a country where domestic politics has traditionally been a zero sum game.

Then there is Syria’s position in the nexus of the Middle East mess. Libya ran the risk of IMploding. Syria runs the risk of EXploding. Iran is already involved. So are the Saudis and Quataris through the back door.

This could easily become a proxy war between Shiites and Sunnis, or worst case scenario, between Russia and the West.

Oh, yes and this is an election year in the US and Americans don’t – yet – care about Syria. All the above are reasons why this administration is still reluctant to get involved.

As we now know President Obama prefers the clinical use of drone strikes from the shadows to all out conflict. Syria doesn’t offer that option.

So for now the best hope is that the Houla massacre might persuade Russia to twist arms in Damascus. When Moscow starts expelling Syrian diplomats this appalling story enters a new chapter. There is no sign of that happening any time soon.

Follow @mattfrei on Twitter.